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Building reach is the start of all glory in marketing. Reach before you preach. Get famous before you try to persuade. Facts feed narratives that in turn get woven into stories. These stories create a reputation, and a brand is nothing but a ‘reputation of reputations’. This is taken as sine qua non across categories. When it comes to prestige and luxury, the essence holds but mutates in form. In this world, the knowing must invoke the craving not the having. It is important for luxury to remain accessible at a stretch. Those who desire desperately often never end up deserving, that’s the cruel reality. This need to belong to the ‘in crowd’ is what fuels the fire of desire.Reach many but be accessible to a few.

A velvet rope has become the very hard boundary between the in and the out crowd. The red carpet lies beyond this red rope. A ‘velvet rope’ is used literally of course, but even more so figuratively. It marks the barrier which may be only a foot or two off the ground yet it may take a lifetime or even generations to cross over.

The velvet rope is credited to George and Louise Boldt when they opened the first Waldorf hotel, later to become The Waldorf Astoria, on 33rd Street and 5th Avenue in New York City in 1894. But it was at another New York legend, Studio 54, in the year 1977 that Ian Schrager and Steve Rubell, made it a high symbol of ‘admission restricted’ as the marker of status and cool. The dance club ran for four short years, but it burned into collective memory the desire is to make it past that velvet rope and belong to the select few.

Jean-Paul Sartre’s famous, existentialist dictum ‘L’enfer c’est les autres’ – ‘Hell is other people’ can be a benchmark for successful modern ‘prestige roping’. Make no mistake, the ultimate goal for all prestige brands is maximization of revenue but being rare and scarce builds and protect a brand’s equity. Traditional mass marketing is about serving needs, prestige brand building is the business of creating desire. Their job is to keep us wanting …to stand and shine above and beyond their competition, creating an allure that goes beyond reason. The desperation should be such that the response can only be a rush to splurge and indulge.

The one major defining conflict -largely subconscious- is that between individualists and collectivists. A modern prestige powerhouse brand relieves this contradiction by only staying slightly out of reach, balancing inclusivity with exclusivity. You are never permanently in but never out forever either. Forever longing for a sense of belonging. 

How is this balance between inviting proximity and maintaining distance made possible? The brand expansion is always done top-down. The showcase targets are very aspirational to the volume targets. Immense care is taken to nurture and foster relationships with a small base of tastemakers and trendsetters. Growth is best when gradual, carrying along original fans as continuous proof of their superiority and desirability as well as advocates/evangelists to help them target and convert the broader market. 

The entire approach must preserve a sense of rarity, a feeling of exclusivity strategically controlling supply to foster demand. Underlying it all is a simple outpricing of some consumers to give the rest a feeling of being in. Broadly the quest for status via consumption is an intended outcome of prestige brand consumption. It signals that we have access, to something exciting, enriching and more fun.

Man is pulled by two contradictions the need to belong and the need to stand out. The urge for exclusivity assumes that the others will know of it. Even when exceptional, man wants recognition of the envious collective. To make bonds, connections and emotive associations is the nature of social man but all the while he craves the halo of singularity. Indeed, we are unified in our hunger for exclusivity.

The MINI brand is a great example of this act particularly since its re-launch in 2001, with the BMW group, A classic case on how to market without over-marketing. They built desirability and equity while growing at double digit rates, all the while adhering to a rule of ambiguity that folks buy into the lifestyle with the MINI, but they need a lifetime to belong. 

When it launched in the US, it deliberately limited sales to 25,000 cars of the 200,000 that were then produced annually. Of course, they wanted to conquer this most important market of all, but they wanted to build and protect their elusive-exclusive equity at the same time. A tightrope indeed, and quite a gamble, but it paid off. Playing hard to get and yet, or rather because of it, making it all the way to the top. They created a sense of scarcity and exclusivity of belonging to a certain aspirational elite of creative and cultured sophisticates. 

Evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller describes this as ‘the two audiences’ in his seminal work Spent. Advertisements for accessible luxury goods typically find themselves in magazines with broad circulation. The brand can reasonably assume that most people reading that magazine are unlikely to make a purchase, but widespread advertising serves the goal of informing wider social circles of a brand’s lofty status. Everyone knows that BMW is the “ultimate driving machine” even though less than 1% of us has ever driven one. “The advertising of luxury brands educates the general population to help elevate the status of those -and only those - who can afford their products” points out Miller. 

This broad, socially widespread, acculturation is necessary for signalling to take place. This is key for all industries, from cars, to handbags, to clothing. As Miller states, “They advertise in Vogue and GQ not so much to inform rich potential consumers that they exist, but to reassure rich potential consumers that poorer Vogue and GQ readers will recognise and respect these brands when they see them displayed by others.” 

The results are brands and products that project an aura. Luxury, especially affordable luxury, unlocks the power of symbolism by associating brands and products with certain desired attributes. Luxury brands do this through building this symbolic meaning not only in the minds of their target set, but in the broader public as well. 

For brands in the luxury sector, attributes tend to centre around wealth, status and personal style. However, with the right strategy and execution, any characteristic can be symbolised. Luxury brands may have perfected the symbolism game, but they’re not the only players. Using a similar playbook, brands in all industries can harness this creation of aspiration.

Status is an elusive concept. It spans across social interest, attraction and deference. In any species of social primate, a higher-status animal is simply one who is looked at and groomed more often by others and who is solicited more often as a friend, ally, or mate. Robin Dunbar in his book ‘Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language’ has shown that we humans use verbal grooming—talking and trading gossip—instead of physical grooming to ingratiate ourselves with higher-status individuals. Possession of brands advertise one’s status and acts as status symbol. But the awe and status are conferred unto us by other people. It dwells in the minds of observers. 

Brands that confer such exclusivity are – by design – being false. They have perfected the balancing act between keeping folks in and keeping even more folks out.

The highest order of exclusivity is, of course, that which cannot be bought.

Simply Speaking: Velvet rope - the tightrope between longing and belonging

“In modern thought, (if not in fact)

Nothing is that doesn’t act,

So that is reckoned wisdom which

Describes the scratch but not the itch.”

- Anonymous Stanza referenced in Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man when mentioning Shakespeare’s ‘Troilus and Cressida’

Our lives, careers, reputations and identities are now essentially digital constructs. We must understand this well whether it attracts or repels us. The internet is impacting our methods and capacities for concentration, attention, interpretation, assimilation etc. Our monkey brains are now distracted by a hundred lit screens and links. Social media has folded inside out from being a circle of friends to an always on performance of manicured imagery on a stage. Its cadence is faster, its content shorter. It is now enabled through learning which humans cannot match.

This is not a Luddite scare. It is a well rationalised body of knowledge. We must appreciate it to be able to use it well. As early as 2011, Nicholas Carr’s “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains”, a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize, painted a dire picture of the effect of the Internet on our mind. Since then, smartphones and cheap bandwidth has made the internet truly ubiquitous. It is the phone screen that has become the canvas of our lives. 

I have been a student and practitioner of communication. I have read many of the 20th- century media theorists and thinkers namely — Theodore Adorno, Max Horkheimer Marshall McLuhan, Umberto Eco, Walter Ong, Noam Chomsky, Neil Postman, Shoshana Zuboff. All of them foretold or saw this reality. Zuboff’s termed it ‘The Age Of Surveillance Capitalism’ in her eponymously titled book.


“We become what we behold. We shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us” said Marshall McLuhan and his axiom that “the medium is the message” is fully manifest. McLuhan’s view is that mediums matter more than content. Media is impacting its own matter. Mediums are not neutral, and content is anything but king. An oral culture is distinct from a written culture. Television turned everything into entertainment, and social media taught us to think with the crowd. Do not imagine that exceptions will make the rule.

It is the common rules that govern all creation and consumption across a medium that change people and society. Eventually the medium acquires a vice like grip over content. Switch on any news channel and keep aside the search for ideological neutrality, objectivity etc. Just see the format - the look, tone, temperament of the anchors, the graphics, the conflict, the decibel levels, the absence of depth, the sensationalism. This is true across the world, in varying degrees. Why? Simply because it is a business. The news content is assessed for return via ratings in every minute of its existence.

In his deeply impactful book, “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” published in 1985, Postman argued that junk television is the belief system that every subject in the world is a branch of entertainment. And there is no biz like show biz. “Our politics, religion, news, athletics, education and commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much popular notice. The result is that we are a people on the verge of amusing ourselves to death.” said Postman, in an aggrieved, moralising tone.

Entertainment subsumes our expectations for everything. Viable candidates in all fields of life must be able to capture the screen. Media platforms now algorithmically obsess the world with the same narrow spectrum of topics and sameness is now ingrained.

In the recent past, be it on account of the rise of radicalism, post-truth narratives, the absence of facts or the growth of manipulation – the mood turned against Silicon Valley. Henry Kissinger, no less, wrote a book on Artificial Intelligence. Elon Musk warned of its dire consequences. But for the most part, the spotlight has been on successful billionaires, corporations and methods. It has not been on the development and direction of technology itself.

The pace of development is such that anyone armed with only facts becomes outdated soon. A generic, fact-based critique is attacked as Luddite. The furore on privacy is a bit passe. Generative AI is only accelerating the mode of compliant dullness. Where is the freedom to choose?

Social media is a show cabinet for the individual. Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist claims that the way the Instagram works is changing how teenagers think. The need for approval of how they look and what they say and what they’re doing, is forever increasing. The view of self is now constructed from online evaluation of others. Twitter compressed ideas to a finite set of alphabets. You originate but more often you join a discussion. How others react and respond decides your idea’s worth.

In 1970s for the first time, it became manifest that it’s attention not money that is our most precious commodity and a threatened resource. Economists Thomas Davenport and John Beck called it the driving force of our society and termed it ‘the attention economy’. Jenny Odell’s book - “How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy” was published in 2019. She explains how attention becomes driven by norm. You are compelled to pay attention to what others pay attention to.

Traditionally, fetching and retaining attention was the job of advertising agencies and media. Today, attention wielding is an essential life skill. In the past, the patent solution for breaking through noise was to be the loudest, flashiest, and most repetitive. Brands would pay for buying attention off a rate card. Institutions owned and gated information. Managers lived in a command-and-control organisational environment. Cut to date, and we’re all competing for one another’s attention in a downwards spiral.

We must think of this at the level of society and culture. Who we are and who we may become. The availability of technical means for self-projection and a wider community building has transformed social networks to social media. This social media turns everything we share into content. The playing field is catering to the lowest common denominator. Grand ideas for public consumption are tossed around in the same chaos as capsules of bawdy humour. The notion that our thoughts, beliefs, family, friends, feelings all feed a brand is yet not grasped and appreciated. Yet, every moment of our lives feeds the personal brand even if we do not wish it so.

This phenomenon has affected democratic politics. Governance is less critical than topicality and fame. Everything is measured in terms of likes and shares. The power a social network brings to politics is, by itself, something worthwhile. After all, fame is the basis for electoral politics. To become visible and develop a brand doesn’t not necessarily implicate skills, accomplishment, dedication to service or good governance. But the issue is that the algorithm rewards theatrics, spectacle and conflict. Performance, intelligence, institution building is secondary.

In an era of online personal brand management, distinctions between “who am I?” and “what I do for fame” fade away. Everything is temporary content. This flux invades our life, thoughts, work open to the world online.

To reduce ourselves to brands, however, is to do make us smaller than who we are.
Certainly, we will risk a typecasting of our own invention. We are not rated products. We are not popular currency. We are not a leader board. 

Think in terms of institutions, intrinsic merit, the majesty of the truth and empathy for others.

Is that only about becoming a popular brand, or can it mean more?

Shubhranshu Singh is vice president, marketing - domestic & IB, CVBU, Tata Motors. He writes Simply Speaking, a weekly column on Storyboard18. Views expressed are personal.

Simply Speaking: The incessant whirlpool of internet as brand medium

“Everything has to flow out of the identity: image, behaviour, product innovation - and not least, the internal culture”

-Adam Morgan

Marketers are taught to bring to life the brand’s benefit. To focus on ‘what a brand does’, not ‘how a brand is made’. But consumers live busy lives and product-based differentiation is an advantage that flattens very quickly.

The internal workings of a business – its culture, customs, activities, the working environment, people and even the tools it uses to create its products can have a large influence on brand identity and how it’s perceived by consumers. Therefore if channelled in the right way it can be used as a powerful form of marketing that leads to the creation of an honest brand. Moreover, nurturing external brand communications by reflecting internal workings pulls consumers in through a sense of honesty and authenticity. A manager at Pepsi is credited with having coined the term “Invertising”. It refers to onboarding employees to the brand mission. It is a competitive advantage to build and strengthen programs that make sure employees are aware of the brand promise and live it.

But beyond just building exposure and excitement inside, brands need to be fully operationalised with employees. By operationalise, I mean that employees should understand clearly that what they do impacts the brand. Invertising is a large concept to build immersive brand engagement, alignment, and integration.  

To internalize, personalize, and process brand engagement, employees need to be engaged on three levels: heads, hearts, hands and feet. 
Great brands use company culture building to educate - to help employees understand what a brand is and why it’s important. They use it to define - to explain what the brand stands for and how it is differentiated. They leverage it to activate - to help people understand their own impact on brand perceptions and therefore clarify what is expected of them. Feeling good about the organization and having a positive outlook on its future are important. 

For employees to understand, embrace, and deliver the brand, they need to know its values in their heads, feel inspired by them in their hearts, and then put them into action with their hands and feet. To win their hearts — they must be inspired by positive emotions and feel pride and identification. By hands and feet I mean active effort and provision of resources and down the line empowerment to reinforce the brand appropriately

Only when employees are full engaged with the brand will they align their behaviours and decision-making with it. Besides all levels of the workforce, other stakeholders must also be engaged and aligned. Brand stakeholders are people or groups that have an investment, share, or interest in the brand — e.g., business partners, agencies, investors/shareholders, etc. These people play a critical role in how the brand is experienced and delivered.

<blockquote>Turning employees into engaged and valuable brand ambassadors who will tell the brand story on behalf of the brand is a critical brand program.</blockquote>

Companies that leverage their brands to achieve phenomenal growth and market stature take their brands beyond marketing. They use their brand an operational tool to drive what their company delivers to its customers and how it does it.

As such, their internally targeted brand efforts are focused on integrating the brand into everything everyone does and improve execution throughout their organization. Budgets and resources are well invested inside, when spent on internal communications, ways of working and cultural activities that reinforce the brand’s identity and values. This automatically has a significant effect outside the walls of the company.

The strength of the culture means, in effect, the people in the company become influencers. Unique rituals and customs help bind the team together. A sense of group distinction is good for productivity and morale. But these activities bind the team to their common cause too.

The strength of this culture means, in effect, the people in the company become the brand ambassadors and influencers, sharing unique stories of methods and rituals with those outside. This on the ground word of mouth can be an asset, particularly for a challenger brand. 

In the Alco Bev industry, there are powerful examples of cultivating an aura at every point of customer engagement and bringing the inside out to them. Investing to turn the traditional marketing model on its head and pulling people into their world rather than pushing messages out pays rich dividends. Guinness, at its brewery at Dublin, has a wonderful experience curated for adorers who flock to pour a pint and know all about the magical brand. Sipsmith, the independent spirits company that pioneered the craft gin movement in the UK have had the doors to the distillery open to the public since launching in 2010. The bulk of their marketing budget is spent on the distillery to offer tours and tastings.The beautiful copper stills, brilliantly named and personified Prudence, Patience and Constance are visited daily by visitors from all over the world who come to understand the gin-making process as well as sample gin cocktails at the Sipsmith bar . 

‘Be human, and not a logo’ was how Oatly went about its business transforming from a dull food processing company into fearless challenger brand with a bigger purpose of shifting society towards a plant-based diet. The redirection touched every part of the business, from the vision, brand identity and design to the organizational structure, working practices and office environment. 

A brand needs support and reinforcement from its own people first and foremost and committing to creating an environment that makes their people happy and engaged is the way to do it.

<blockquote>For employees to understand, embrace, and deliver the brand, they need to know its values in their heads, feel inspired by them in their hearts, and then put them into action with their hands and feet.</blockquote>

Investing inside the company by creating beautiful or interesting brand worlds within which to work, or by the creation of brand-led customs and rituals brings a number of benefits. It helps to attract and retain talent and binds the work culture to the brand's identity and bigger purpose in the world. Turning employees into engaged and valuable brand ambassadors who will tell the brand story on behalf of the brand is a critical brand program.

The high mark is that there be no gap between the business reality and the brand perception. Everything communicates. Even the details. Even your physical space is media that communicates. At Tata Motors I have leveraged influencer marketing effectively to drive brand awareness and build consumer trust by inviting the world inside. I defined core brand propositions to build an influencer advocacy program that has reached 50 million viewers in less than a calendar year purely organically.

Through ‘We Make Better’ we showcased the manufacturing and engineering prowess of Tata Motors CV and our focus on quality, safety and innovation. We then built a theme on ‘We Connect Better’ bringing alive a focus on the customers’ purchase journey at dealerships with the intent on delivering the best possible purchase experience. Likewise ‘We Service Better’ on services and ‘We Offer Better’ highlighting the gamut of offerings ranging from app-based offerings like Fleet Edge and e-Dukaan to customer care programs like Sampoorna Seva and Fleet Care. 

To kick things off, Tata Motors opened its factory and manufacturing plant gates for the very first time to influencers who were given a first-hand opportunity to experience everything from the manufacturing assembly lines, state-of-the art machinery, engineering research labs and interact with senior management and most importantly feel our timeless Tata heritage and ‘people first’ philosophy.
 
When Sipsmith leveraged invertising it reflected a sense of craft. It helped to position the brand as something more authentic and artisanal. Opening their doors to people for viewings and tastings has helped to further pull people into the brand, giving them an experience that would be hard to match with traditional advertising methods. Reach is one thing and immersive experience is quite another.

Many companies allow a gap between the brand perception on the outside and the business reality inside. This hypocrisy, no matter how deep it sits in the value chain will be perceptible to consumes in due course. When the brand is not a serious commitment, it shows up. When a brand doesn’t just portray an image but evidently, demonstrably lives and breathes it, that is a foundation for greatness.

Shubhranshu Singh is vice president, marketing - domestic & IB, CVBU, Tata Motors. He writes Simply Speaking, a weekly column on Storyboard18. Views expressed are personal.

Simply Speaking: Brands are born inside

“The universe is made of stories, not of atoms." 
-Muriel Rukeyser

In the book Sapiens, Yuval Harari makes one of his key points – “There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws, and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings. Whether or not something is true doesn’t impact whether you believe it.” 

We know that belief systems are created through common acknowledgment and common imagination. Money is money because we all accept it as such. Dan Loeb,in his Q1 2022 letter, said "to be an investor is to live constantly at the intersection of story and uncertainty." 

Amazon has been the largest value creation story of recent times. Research on the performance of successful VC-backed tech companies in the 1990s shows that they raised less than $50 million before showing a return to investors. By comparison, Amazon raised $2.1 billion in investors’ money before the company broke even.

This happened because Jeff Bezos made risk an essential part of the growth storytelling. Amazon was about lower cost, greater selection, and faster delivery. Per his narrative, these massive investments in consumer benefits that would stand the test of time. This, in fact, did turn out to be true. 

Bezos qualifies risk into two types: 

1) Risk you can’t walk back from. The risk is existential, make or break, defining the future of the company

2) Risk you can walk away from. Fail early and get out.

Jeff Bezos wrote in Amazon’s first annual letter, in 1997, “Given a 10 percent chance of a hundred times payout, you should take that bet every time.” He also wrote “Failure and invention are inseparable twins. To invent you have to experiment, and if you know in advance that it’s going to work, it’s not an experiment.”

Humans have high risk consciousness but low risk assessment capability. The human mind does not appreciate probability instinctually. Therefore, risk is beaten by belief. Shared stories create belief.

<blockquote>Risk perception can depart from objective hazard evaluation because of evolutionary fears such as heights, confinement, predation and poisoning.</blockquote>

On a broad basis, we can define 3 categories for risk –

Where risk is Primary factor - nuclear energy, mining, metallurgy, intensive industrial processes, dealing with emergencies.

Where risk is intentional but secondary - gambling, speculative financial products or thrill seeking adventure.

Where risk is neither primary not intentional but exceptional aberrations are the proof points by which risk concern might arise - personal products and food and consequential, dietary, hygiene or handling issues.

Pioneering work was done by Raymond Augustine Bauer. His initial proposition was that "Consumer behaviour involves risk in the sense that any action of a consumer will produce consequences which he cannot anticipate with anything approximating certainty, and some of which at least are likely to be unpleasant”. 

He introduced the concept of perceived risk to the marketing literature and gave two possible definitions of risks where marketing management is concerned. First is adverse outcome and second its likely probability of occurrence. 

Bauer defined five main types of perceived risks. These are time, social, physical, financial, and functional.

Donald F. Cox Risk Taking and Information Handling in Consume Behavior in 1967 extended work in this area. Later Kahneman and Tversky’s loss aversion was propounded in 1974,  Thaler’s mental accounting in 1985. These brought together economics, psychology, anthropology, sociology and ergonomics – to get a better understanding of relationships between risk and marketing. 

Risk Psychology complements marketing in defining risk attitudes and shaping risk perception via communication. Perceived risk attitudes are a useful complement of the positioning statement. Brand communication ought to be framed accounting for psychological biases in a context of decision under uncertainty.

Decision theory has inspired marketing. In this setting, risk is seen as an objective characteristic of a given situation, although assessing this risk may vary by individual. 

Kahneman and Tversky’s prospect theory is also well known in consumer research and has inspired some works by economists and psychologists at the interface with marketing such as loss aversion and status quo biases. Thaler has exported insights from risk economics and psychology toward Marketing, especially with the concept of mental accounting. 

<blockquote>When products are perceived to be risky, consumers show higher levels of involvement.</blockquote>

Psychologists have suggested that there was an ecological ground in the way people interpreted their environment: Simon’s bounded rationality, Gigerenzer’s frugal heuristics and adaptive toolbox paved the way for a convergence of – bounded rationality, the feeling of risks and the role of the emotions- leading to the rise of a new approach of decision-making under uncertainty. 

More recently neuroeconomics has proposed concepts that could be more systematically exploited to the benefit of Marketing and could certainly enlighten the way people perceive and act according to their risk profile and to product’s potential threats. The key import to marketing is the understanding of risk as a feeling.

Behavioural economics and nudges – try to identify and to exploit the mental biases influencing our decision-making process. Nudge marketers investigate how those gentle messages addressed to free individuals could be applied to consumers of goods and services The relatively new discipline of Neuroeconomics can help in designing those communications by focusing on how behaviour may be impacted by descriptions and pictures. 

Yet behavioural approaches fail to provide ultimate explanations of Homo economicus choices. It can explain what the bias is. It can explain how the bias operates. But it is unable to explain the ’reason why’ of the observed biases. 

Risk perception can depart from objective hazard evaluation because of evolutionary fears such as heights, confinement, predation and poisoning.

What I see changes what I know. What I know changes what I see. Relationships between product involvement and risk perception are supposed to be two ways. Mainly, when products are perceived to be risky, consumers show higher levels of involvement.

However, it can also be assumed that, in various circumstances, involvement might affect risk perception. For instance, a closer and deeper search at product information could change risk perception; deeper concern for purchases could provoke a higher sensitivity and less tolerance to perceived risks.

Factor mapping – a graphical representation of products, brands, individuals’ coordinates or ‘positions’ according to descriptive and predictive dimensions. Most often two dimensions are used to describe attitudes and behaviour. Distances between positionings truly correspond to differences in attitudes. Recent approaches of marketing strategical maps take into account both consumer’s heterogeneity by way of segmentation and competitive positioning of brands. As such, positioning becomes segment specific. Product positioning is a crucial component of competitive marketing strategy. Typically, the position of a product, product line, brand or company is displayed relative to their competitors. For instance, firms wishing to sell brands within a specific product category may consider the image of that category and the firm’s own image. Usually, quantitative perceptual maps are produced when respondents rate the similarity between several dimensions within that category using a paired comparison procedure. Implications are for a firm to select a specific dimension for their brand. Perceptual maps usually reveal that most markets are not homogeneous, and that they can be segmented into smaller homogeneous groups. 

Experiments in behavioural economics have proven consumers are sensitive to framing. Although they should react the same way no matter how the message is formulated, it happens that people tend to make distinct judgments when exposed to alternate but equivalent ways of describing a promise. Can you imagine Marketing, romance, star power, financial bets or indeed politics without this reality?

Shubhranshu Singh is vice president, marketing - domestic & IB, CVBU, Tata Motors. He writes Simply Speaking, a weekly column on Storyboard18. Views expressed are personal.

Simply Speaking: Buy or Bye Bye?

There’s a joke about an old man in Finland who used to get up every morning at 5 a.m. and spray a chemical all around his village. When asked what he was sprinkling, he told passers-by that it was elephant repellent. Whenever folks challenged him and pointed out that there are no elephants around, the old man would smugly smile and say “Well then, the spray is working.” 

Business actions can work on such presumptions. Marketing ,when double bound by process logic and metrics based evaluation, can lapse to such self-deluding beliefs.

Bill Bernbach said “I warn you against believing that advertising is a science. Rules are what the artist breaks. The memorable never emerged from a formula.”

Bernbach’s agency DDB made iconic brand campaigns establishing brands like Avis car hire and Volkswagen. For Levy’s Rye Bread it created a campaign in which a variety of ethnic faces – from a Native American chief to an Afro-Caribbean to a Chinese American – all announced: ‘You don’t have to be Jewish to eat Levy’s.’ 

For Avis, the cut through insight was ‘We try harder’, and for the Volkswagen Beetle the headline ‘Think small’. These were major counter-intuitive directions. In the case of the Beetle, it encouraged the American car buyer – traditionally preoccupied with size and power – to purchase this oddly shaped German car on the basis of its low fuel consumption. All this was much ahead of its time.

A related area of marketing delusion ripe for challenging is the concept of the unattached, unconcerned prospect. How is the ‘target’ qualified?

When marketing pundits talk about ‘loyalists’, or ‘the passives’ or ‘detractors’ they are referring to merely a collection of individuals into range based groups.

Leaving diehard loyalists aside, there is much eagerness to engage with the middle uncommitted. The recruits all lie in this middle mass is the belief.

It is not true. There is no single, consistent characterisation of any of these terms. Buyers can be consumers of your product, of your cause, of your story, or all three 

The world of brands has big contradictions. There are big divides here and that’s why both Real Madrid and Barcelona are successful. 

The marketplace is also full of harmony. It comes from like-minded people , whose word of mouth can further a cause with their commitment. And that’s why both Real Madrid and Barcelona are successful. Think of any category and you will find this contradiction alive. 

It is fair to accept that if you mean something to everybody you are unlikely mean everything to somebody. Polarity is natural in brandscapes. Any and everyone is not a customer or buyer. Those who matter most should be attended to, on priority. Like everywhere, the 80/20 rule holds. Lavish attention on the 20 percent, understand why they love you, and grow the tribe.
 
The required steps are simple. Find out what matters most to potential consumers: how you can solve their problems and provide emotional satisfaction through your brand.
 
Segmentation only makes the specific more pertinent. Tailor the messenger to the drilled-down segmented recipient without changing core brand values, attributes, and identity based on every market segment. To convey the same essence in myriad ways is brand genius.

Language always gives us clues. The English language has many words to convey various types of humour - wit , humour, facetiousness, drollery, funniness, wittiness, piquancy, quickness; jocularity, waggishness.

Its forms have descriptions like badinage, persiflage, repartee, quip, wisecrack, sarcasm; irony, satire, burlesque, parody, caricature, travesty, witticism , bon mot, jest, jocosity, joke, pun, wordplay, play on words, spoonerism, double entendre; raillery, banter, joshing; buffoonery, playfulness

Accordingly persons may be characterised as humourist, lampoonist, parodist, jokester, joker, comic, comedian, farceur, droll fellow, funny person, wag, reparteeist, banterer, wisecrack, punster, zany, madcap, mummer, mimer, mimic.

Since both brand context and relevance are fluid, strong brands solve problems that matter. They do it fast, consistently but rich in variety and meaningfulness.

Brand equity accrues over time and is the result of marketing communication, and experiences associated with a brand name. The mantra is connectivity, consistency, and transparency.

The term ‘target group’ is highly misplaced. Which group ? On what basis are they qualified as ‘targets’ ?

Brands talk to the rejectors and the ‘passives’ in the same way they talk to their core. The idea is to activate the brand’s worldview in the brains of such folks. It is believed that via mirroring of messages, brands gain traction.

The worst mistake a brand can make is to move sharply one way or another on the rationale that that's where the majority ‘in market’ consumers are. 

Understanding whom you are talking to and why is crucial before you begin to articulate what it is they have to say and how best to say it. Why is it a challenge? Firstly, because brands want to activate their core base while reaching new intenders at the same time; second, they must do so without puffery, hyperbole, false claims, distortion or pretention.

The urge to posture emerges from certain well-established myths about uncommitted consumers. It is important to see things with real eyes. Put to rest the notion of the uncommitted buyer. She doesn't exist. There are only people lined up from fandom to boredom. People know even if they don’t care. Relying on the consumer’s ignorance is a false strategy.

Duality is a natural situation in our existence. We have different views on various subjects and our judgements and notions exist side by side, constructing various areas of experience. I may be financially risk averse but adventure seeking in recreation. I may be conservative in matters of religious observance but socially progressive. I may support a tight regulation of the market but bat for unhindered civil liberties.

Consumption is an experience. It does not need to subscribe to one ideology.

Understanding this opens meaningful ways for brands to communicate with non-core consumers / prospects on basis of shared values. 

That is the high road to greatness

Shubhranshu Singh is vice president, marketing - domestic & IB, CVBU, Tata Motors. He writes Simply Speaking, a weekly column on Storyboard18. Views expressed are personal.

Simply Speaking: What is Viral is not always Vital

What you know changes what you see, what you see changes what you know

Who is saying it matters as much as what is being said. Perhaps it matters even more. Credibility and argument have the same relation as a hammer and a nail. A heavy hammer will drive even a blunt nail into the wall. Likewise, strong credibility will make a weak argument more acceptable.

Credibility is a foundation that is in two parts: sincerity and competence. The more sincere you are as a brand, business, or service, the more opportunities you get. This leads to development of competence and expertise. Perhaps an overstatement but “No publicity is bad publicity” has some grounding. Being famous aids being persuasive. Scale requires both reach and acceptance.

All brand-to-consumer communication is deliberate and motivated. Still, it is consumed and even sought after. The logical and risk-averse consumers always seek more details. Factfulness is persuasive but it loses relevance quickly. For cynics and sceptics, your sincerity and track record come into play. 

All persuasive campaigns need repetition. When the earliest converts are those who are unemotional, analytical and objective, then those who follow later feel secure and confident to join the later majority. Framing is about mental structures and stencils which we apply to derive meaning. To change a perspective is reframing. Reframing is a triumph of marketing.The structure of framing often decides the response. The simplest is problem-solution, ‘cause and effect’. Even those who are unaware of a problem, once exposed to it, will pay heed to the solution being offered. 

Persuasion is the heart of marketing. But being persuasive is not simply about advertising action. Being persuasive requires effective communication, but even more so, it requires an understanding of the consumer. That understanding translates to insight. The insight is the core of the storytelling. With valid insights and engaging content, you can vie for attention.

Persuasion is fortified with evidence - information, referendum, validation, certification, statistics, testimonials - all enhance acceptance. Emphasizing the benefits is another technique for framing. What they gain motivates people less than the fear of opportunity loss. “Hurry - offer valid till stocks last” can work wonders.

<blockquote>Framing can be unilateral and proactive. You can hypothesize about your rival/competitor and then rebut their argument and advance your own.</blockquote>

Prioritize that benefit which is most desired. Claim it as strongly as you can. Claim to be unique. This is a tactic, but action words can make a big impact - free, quick, easy, proven, guaranteed, certified, crucial, important, statutory, by law - these words open the doors of the mind. With analogies, metaphors, and stories help the messaging become accepted and rewarded with attention. It also simplifies the complex. It can provoke emotion and overcome distraction, diffidence or apprehension. When emotion takes over, the mind is subservient to the heart. Persuasive framing colours its argument via contrast, extrapolation, hyperbole and using triggers. Researchers have identified six essential psychological triggers. Most famously, they were outlined by Professor Robert. B. Cialdini and by Kathleen K. Reardon of the University of Southern California, Marshall School of Business. These triggers are liking, reciprocity, social proof, consistency, scarcity and authority. 

With that understanding, now let us take a look at Framing : To present arguments in its favour, a brand has to frame its proposition - ‘Who am I?’ and ‘Why buy me?’ - in such a manner that it maintains control, enhances desirability, ensures consistency and strengthens relationships.

Framing is opportunistic. It is fluid. If you know your audience - you will frame persuasively. That’s why opinion polls matter too much to politicians. Moods, self- image, valves and incidents generate biases in the collective conscience.

Framing can be unilateral and proactive. You can hypothesize about your rival/competitor and then rebut their argument and advance your own. Complexity cuts effectiveness. Keep it simple, keep it repetitive, keep it likeable.

When complexity needs to be communicated, the task becomes difficult. Our languages didn’t evolve to explain large-scale complexity. When ‘N’ number of outputs get generated from ‘X’ number of inputs, we struggle to explain the interactions. We also find it difficult to explain probabilistic outcomes. We like simply deterministic cases; any multivariate weighted causation befuddles us.

Therefore, responsible marketers must broadcast the generics and engage for the specifics. They must voice the obvious and then introduce the “not so obvious”. They must take the direct route to indirectness.

Frames are not carried in the mind actively. They are unconscious. They are played out spontaneously, reflexively. Negation is easier to handle. What something is not conveys a finality. But what something is opens further possibilities. We enter the realm of dimensions. 

<blockquote>Marketers will think people vote for candidates based on the candidates’ positions on issues. Actually, it is seen that people vote for values rather than issues. Communicating values mattered more than specific policies.</blockquote>

What we infer depends on what we perceive.

Finally let us look at the most difficult task, namely that of ‘Reframing’.

Reframing / Repositioning is not easy or simple. It is not a matter of finding some magic words. Frames are ideas, not slogans. Reframing is more a matter of accessing what we and like-minded consumers already believe unconsciously, making it conscious, and repeating it till it is attached to us as a brand. It doesn’t happen overnight. It is an ongoing process. It requires repetition and focus and dedication.

George Lakoff, Director of the Center for the Neural Mind & Society at the University of California at Berkeley and retired Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics in his book ‘Don't Think of an Elephant!: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate’ says “[Reframing] is about bringing to consciousness the deepest of our beliefs and our modes of understanding. It is about learning to express what we really believe in a way that will allow those who share our beliefs to understand what they most deeply believe and to act on those beliefs. Reframing without a system of communication accomplishes nothing. “ 

To achieve repositioning requires a communication system. Honesty and integrity; not spin and hyperbole. Those who prefer other brands are also very similar to all others. They are people who understand the world differently and have a different view of what is right for them.

Facts matter enormously, but to be meaningful they must be framed in terms of their importance. If the facts don’t fit the frames in the brain, the frames in the brain stay and the facts are ignored or challenged or belittled.

Marketers will think people vote for candidates based on the candidates’ positions on issues. Actually, it is seen that people vote for values rather than issues. Communicating values mattered more than specific policies. Likewise, a brand’s values matter more than products and services. The values are enduring, the rest keeps changing. 

Brilliant campaigns communicate values and use facts symbolically. 
That’s the recipe - values, connection, authenticity, and trust 

Shubhranshu Singh is vice president, marketing - domestic & IB, CVBU, Tata Motors. He writes Simply Speaking, a weekly column on Storyboard18. Views expressed are personal.

Art of Framing in marketing: What you know changes what you see, what you see changes what you know

"The two most important functions of a business are innovation and marketing" - Peter Drucker


A new sun has risen in the world of tech innovations. ChatGPT has the potential to change the world in many ways, impacting jobs and transforming industries. Its ability to understand and generate human language could be used to improve the capabilities of a wide range of AI-powered systems, including virtual assistants, chatbots, and other types of natural language interfaces. This could make it easier for businesses to interact with customers and for individuals to access information.


In different fields such as customer service, content creation, search, information retrieval and education, ChatGPT is set to transform the world. While it’s important to note that the model is still new and that there are ethical and societal implications that need to be considered, the potential benefits of ChatGPT are hard to ignore. Google, Meta, Amazon, several start-ups are taking on this ‘open AI + Microsoft’ combine. It is not going to be an uncontested road ahead. Is this change truly shape shifting and immutable? Is it merely evolution with more fizz? What lessons can be learned from brand building of innovations?


It is a proven fact that great ideas die in labs and proving grounds because a viable means to commercialise them does not emerge. When the lucky few do make it to the marketplace, getting awareness and due consideration is a steep hill to climb. Then there is the need to be able to present a product with due context. It is like looking into a mirror. Too close and you can’t see the full picture and too far away, you cannot see clearly enough. In a similar way, market immersion needs to be optimised and done iteratively. Innovations driven by a new technology, typically follow a multi phased marketing process. As soon as a new technology emerges, it is initially used by experts and technology enthusiasts. As it begins to spread, new companies most open to innovation in marketing come into the market. At this time the majority adoption has also occurred. The earlier technology now begins to be commonly used. A stage is again set for innovation. This cycle repeats itself with shorter and shorter time frames.

 

Three ‘laws’ can explain this new world. The first is the 'Moore’s Law' of exponential growth and ever lower costs of computer power. The second is ‘Metcalfe’s Law’ about the value of networks, which grows disproportionally to accretion in size, and the third ‘Gilder’s Law’ is that the total bandwidth of communication systems triples every twelve months.

 

The business model of the mechanical age (and the first phases of the electronic age) was based on the creation of efficiency through economies of scale in production and economies of scope in distribution. In the Internet age, markets have been addressed in a state of fragmentation into various segments and niches. Customer networks emerged and its members influenced each other’s choices reciprocally. Traditional one-way communication—inform, persuade, and convince to buy - has been replaced with nuanced approaches where consumers themselves decide the main influencer.

 



<blockquote>Innovations are evaluated differently now than before. People are better informed, interact faster, and act faster. As the customer network gains weight, its influence on the reputation of the brand needs to be reconsidered periodically because effectiveness can decrease when buyers belong to new generations.</blockquote>



In my opinion, the growth of artificial intelligence-driven algorithms and predictive analytics have heightened the need for more expertise and ‘true to domain’ marketing rather than lessen it. Marketing is deliberately cramped in most ‘routine’ decision making. Sales metrics are often used to evaluate brand building. The reverse is often ignored. In other words, brand health surge, a lead variable, may get ignored when compared to a surging sales performance which may well be on the back of promotions and tactics that in fact damage the brand. The search, content, and loyalty campaigns that get called marketing are mostly only shallow tactics. True brand magic is up the value chain - in ideas, insights, product origination or indeed, creating markets. Any cheaper alternative can be found for boring copy or visual rendition. You hardly need ChatGPT.

Understanding people’s fundamental needs and drivers, identifying customers, and developing the entire go-to-market and usage ecosystem decide the success of innovations, especially breakthrough ones. Marketers need to be included in development discussions upstream in the innovation development process. Besides clearly defining who to sell the new offering to and how to sell it, such involvement helps in the following ways:

Exploration of consumer needs and framing of insights - Marketing must probe deeper than the consumer has thought about the need. It must dive into the subconscious. Unstated needs are the best sources of value creating innovations.

Creation of product or service appeal based on relevance and context - The context is about the cultural, social, and psychological levers that elevate an innovation to an instant or enduring hit.

Walking in consumer shoes – Done via customer research and insight development, it bleeds into communications framing and marketing must ensure genuine consumer utility is obvious.

Thinking of entire ecosystems - Innovations today rely on several partners and involves others outside organisational boundaries directly and indirectly. Going solo may often be detrimental to rapid brand establishment.

The recent past has several examples – Blackberry, Electronic diary, Pager, Segway, Walkman, iPod, 3D printing, Blockchain, and Augmented Reality/Virtual Reality that succeeded, rose and then wasted the original scale of promise that was visualised or surrendered it to the next innovation or got cannibalised by offerings from their own companies.

Every great brand has a distinct tone. It acquires a linkage to the brand throughout its development. No matter how the brand evolves or changes the tone doesn’t change.

 
Such a tone is a brand metaphor. I recently concluded two sequential campaigns at Tata Motors. The campaigns are intended to showcase our state-of-the-art trucks, innovations, enhanced facets and features, digitalisation, profitability, fuel efficiency, safety, superior technology, connectivity, driver productivity and cabin comfort through entertaining, slice of life commercials. This storytelling is a first ever attempt to present deeply technical enablement via everyday incidents. The campaign builds on the positioning Tata Trucks, Desh Ke Trucks. Only Tata has the stature to claim this in India.


Gerald Zaltman, in his book How Customers Think, discussed the example of Chevy trucks being ‘like a rock’. When American consumers made a connection between the idea of a Chevy truck and the idea of a rock, they attributed reliability and ruggedness. The phrase “like a rock” came from Bob Seger’s iconic song and for that reason also acquired a sensibility of its own.

 

The Zaltman prescription may not be to contrive a metaphorical must have but to appreciate what that does. Metaphors serve as abstractions and cue a larger mental network of associations. This is exactly what brands ought to do as well.

 

Think of it as the following parts:

 

● Representational facets - How is it to be marketed – new, evolving or disruptive?

● Essential value drivers - what builds irresistible value? What sustains it?

● Touchpoints in consumer lives – central / peripheral?

● Differentiation - How are you different from competitors?

● Be Good to Do Well - How are you as a global citizen?

 

Universal metaphors make sense across countries, cultures, languages, and dialects. By creating meaning, early adopters drop a bridge across the river they themselves have crossed at full flood so that the wider group of people can follow. The bigger the innovation, the bigger the risk of failure. Because consumer facing marketing can reduce those risks, it matters as much as innovation — perhaps even more.

 

Shubhranshu Singh is vice president, marketing - domestic & IB, CVBU, Tata Motors. He writes Simply Speaking, a weekly column on Storyboard18. Views expressed are personal.

Ask ChatGPT, how to build great brands from buzzy innovations

Silicon Valley is in a frenzied rush to find, fund, nurture and advance “generative” A.I., technologies that can generate text, images and other media in response to short prompts. Microsoft invested $10 billion in OpenAI, the San Francisco start-up which has made ChatGPT. It is noteworthy that the surge in AI funding comes at a time when funding for other start-ups has dried up, in a dismal market for tech investing. This is not surprising since it brings forth a technology that is spontaneously capable of handling any task an average person could do. This is unchartered territory. It will be - socially, emotionally and economically - a first in human history. 

After the invention of the digital computer, it was abundantly clear that it could perform functions that could in some sense be called “intelligent.” In 1936, the great English mathematician Alan Matheson Turing showed that it was possible to build a machine that would, for specific practical purposes, behave like a problem-solving human being. Turing claimed that he would call a machine “intelligent” if, through typed messages, it could exchange thoughts with a human being—that is, hold up its end of a conversation. In the early days of MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Joseph Weizenbaum wrote a program called ELIZA, which showed how easy it was to meet Turing’s test for intelligence. 

PitchBook, which tracks private investment data has reported that Anthropic, a San Francisco artificial intelligence start-up, is close to raising roughly $300 million in new funding. It values Anthropic at roughly $5 billion as reported by The New York Times. The startup, which was founded in 2021, previously raised $704 million, valuing it at $4 billion.

Other funding deals in the works include Character.AI which lets people talk to chatbots that impersonate celebrities, Replika, another chatbot company, and You.com, which is rolling out similar technology into a new kind of search engine.

The reason why generative A.I. is the hottest interest area today is because these technologies are poised to remake everything from online search engines like Google Search to work tools across industries. These corporate research labs are running an epic race for AI supremacy. This will decide how we live and use computers and who will commercially dominate the coming new era. 

Anthropic was founded by a group of people that included several researchers who left OpenAI. Most of its early funding came from the tarnished cryptocurrency entrepreneur Sam Bankman-Fried and his colleagues at FTX. 

Microsoft had already invested more than $3 billion in OpenAI, and the new deal is a clear indication of the importance of OpenAI’s technology to its future competition with other big tech companies like Google, Meta and Apple.

<blockquote>More than a million people tested the chatbot within five days of its launch, using it to answer trivia questions, explain ideas and generate everything from poetry to term papers. This is the steepest commercial scale launch of any online tech till date.</blockquote>

With Microsoft’s deep pockets and OpenAI’s cutting-edge artificial intelligence, the companies hope to remain at the forefront of generative artificial intelligence —after its ChatGPT became the symbol of a new and more powerful wave of A.I.

The cruel irony is that this deal follows Microsoft’s announcement last week that it had begun laying off employees as part of an effort to cull 10,000 positions related to what it called “changes to our hardware portfolio”. Satya Nadella has bet big on artificial intelligence, which he called “the next major wave of computing.”

OpenAI’s stated mission was to build artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I., a machine that can do anything the human brain can do. When OpenAI announced its initial deal with Microsoft in 2019, Satya Nadella described it as the kind of lofty goal that a company like Microsoft should pursue, comparing A.G.I. to the company’s efforts to build a quantum computer.

OpenAI was created in 2015 by small group of entrepreneurs and artificial intelligence researchers, including Sam Altman, head of the start-up builder Y Combinator; Elon Musk, the billionaire chief executive of the electric carmaker Tesla; and Ilya Sutskever, a living legend of a researcher. 

They founded the lab as a nonprofit organization. But after Mr. Musk left the venture in 2018, Mr. Altman remade OpenAI as a for-profit company so it could raise the money needed for its research. A year later, Microsoft became a funder and investor. It paid for the enormous amounts of computing power needed to build the kind of generative A.I. technologies OpenAI is known for. As of now, the company is valued at around $29 billion.

In 2020, OpenAI built a milestone A.I. system, GPT-3, which could generate text on its own, including tweets, blog posts, news articles and even computer code. Last year, it unveiled DALL-E, which lets anyone generate photorealistic images simply by describing what he or she wants to see.

Based on the same technology as GPT-3, ChatGPT showed the general public just how powerful this kind of technology could be. More than a million people tested the chatbot within five days of its launch, using it to answer trivia questions, explain ideas and generate everything from poetry to term papers. This is the steepest commercial scale launch of any online tech till date. 

<blockquote>Companies like Google and OpenAI can push the technology forward at a faster rate than others. But their latest technologies have been reproduced and widely distributed. They cannot prevent people from using these systems to spread misinformation.</blockquote>

Microsoft has already incorporated GPT-3, DALL-E and other OpenAI technologies into its products. Most notably, GitHub, a popular online service for programmers owned by Microsoft, offers Copilot, a tool that can automatically generate snippets of computer code. Microsoft expanded availability of several OpenAI services to customers of its Azure cloud computing offering and said ChatGPT would be coming soon.

Sundar Pichai, the chief executive of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, recently declared a “code red,” accelerating plans and jump-starting A.I. development. 

OpenAI is among the many companies, academic labs and independent researchers working to build more advanced chatbots. These systems cannot exactly chat like a human, but they often seem to. They can also retrieve and repackage information with a speed that humans never could. They can be thought of as digital assistants — like Siri or Alexa — that are better at understanding what you are looking for and giving it to you. Many experts believe these new chatbots are poised to reinvent or even replace internet search engines like Google and Bing.

LaMDA is what artificial intelligence researchers call a neural network, a mathematical system loosely modelled on the network of neurons in the brain. This is the same technology that translates between French and English on services like Google Translate and identifies pedestrians as self-driving cars navigate city streets.

A neural network learns skills by analysing data. By pinpointing patterns in thousands of photos, for example, it can learn to recognize a particular object in a photo. GPT stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer, a language model 

Five years ago, researchers at Google and labs like OpenAI started designing neural networks that analysed enormous amounts of digital text, including books, Wikipedia articles, news stories and online chat logs. Scientists call them “large language models.” Identifying billions of distinct patterns in the way people connect words, numbers and symbols, these systems learned to generate text on their own.

Their ability to generate language surprised many researchers in the field, including many of the researchers who built them. The technology could mimic what people had written and combine disparate concepts.

With ChatGPT, OpenAI has worked to refine the technology. It does not do free-flowing conversation as well as Google’s LaMDA. It was designed to operate more like Siri, Alexa and other digital assistants. Like LaMDA, ChatGPT was trained on a sea of digital text culled from the internet.

But even these mammoth corporations do not control the fate of these technologies. Systems like ChatGPT, LaMDA and Galactica are based on ideas, research papers and computer code that have circulated freely for years. Companies like Google and OpenAI can push the technology forward at a faster rate than others. But their latest technologies have been reproduced and widely distributed. They cannot prevent people from using these systems to spread misinformation. 

Stability AI is doing a large pooling of startups, not for profit groups and universities. However, rapid commercialisation will probably be done by Microsoft and Google (Alphabet). As things stand, the AI battle is Microsoft vs. Alphabet. 

The computer is the archetypal, unrivalled machine of the modern era. It claims sovereignty over the whole range of human experience, and now supports its claim by showing that it “thinks” better than we can. In enthusiasm for artificial intelligence, Marvin Minsky has been quoted as saying that the thinking power of silicon “brains” will be so formidable that “If we are lucky, they will keep us as pets.” 

Think harder or prepare for a kennel.

Shubhranshu Singh is vice president, marketing - domestic & IB, CVBU, Tata Motors. He writes Simply Speaking, a weekly column on Storyboard18. Views expressed are personal.

ChatGPT, Microsoft vs Alphabet, Big Tech - what you really need to know about the battle for AI supremacy

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less travelled by,

And that has made all the difference.”

Robert Frost

Great brands often earn synonymy with their category, pricing power and wide acceptance and deep penetration. But, to my mind, there is another, higher order test. Great brands don’t chase trends. They often ignore them. But they do set trends for lesser, non-strategic brands to follow. 

Mediocre marketers are avid trend-followers. It is a trap. Great brands are great if they have the stature to challenge trends. The truly great brands build and advance genuine cultural movements. This is not possible till there is true self knowledge and a depth of understanding within marketing ranks. Rarely will careerism weld with a calling. It is possible to buck the trend and take a counterintuitive approach only if you truly understand what your business definition is and explore that scope fully. It means rising above product myopia.

Following a trend is taking the easy road and going with the herd. If everyone’s doing it, how wrong can it be? Besides, who wants to expose their company to getting left behind, to being excluded from the next big thing? Being ‘on trend’ is likely to be the simplest and most direct way for any business to raise short-term revenue.

The seductive logic is that riding a wave of a fashionable trend will make people notice a brand and talk about it. Reebok rode the aerobics dance trend through the early 1980s and launched a first exercise shoe designed for women. The hit status of that product led to Reebok’s $68 million IPO, one of the most successful public offerings made in 1985. 

But one swallow does not a summer make. ‘Sameness’ is the kiss of death. When you set the trend benchmark you are a “more or less” copycat. Your brand logic becomes “I am the same as X but cheaper” or “I am same as Y but (amplify benefit claim)”.

This “same but different” position is a dangerous place to be. Not only does it relegate your brand to subordinate status compared to the brand used as your reference point, but it also tells customers that your brand possesses only comparative value, rather than having its own inherent value. Your value proposition becomes “just as good as Brand X.”

<blockquote>‘Sameness’ is the kiss of death. When you set the trend benchmark you are a “more or less” copycat. Your brand logic becomes “I am the same as X but cheaper” or “I am same as Y but (amplify benefit claim)”.</blockquote>

Instead of copying trends, brands must do things that highlight the uniqueness of their brand and customer experience. Rather than mindlessly jumping on the trend juggernaut, a brand must be managed to develop long-term relationships with customers. The brand equity that isn’t ownable is ephemeral. Aping trends is wannabe. It is not what great brands do.

True innovation is risky. Its proof of success must be publicised and commercialised. Segway was much celebrated at its debut, but it could not ‘land and expand’ on the basis of sheer utility. Trend riding is easier but there is a lack of context and “copy all” execution of a strategy. Trends come and go quickly. Related products and personalities may become popular overnight but lack the majesty of originality. Plus given the super saturation that is the norm now, the collective consciousness drops the trendy shiny objects as fast as they adopt them. A rapid life cycle can wreak havoc on efforts to build a sustainable brand image.

Coco Chanel said “style is forever”. A brand must build products and services that are consistent with their internal culture. When Hot Topic opened its first store in 1987, its edgy styles were a hit among teens bored with preppy Tommy Hilfiger and similar conservative brands. But then as the punk look faded from popularity in the early 90s, so did Hot Topic’s performance. Liquid Death as a brand is elevating canned sparkling water to a lifestyle statement. It sends you your horoscope as an engagement gratification and its stated motto is to ‘murder your thirst’. Well, it is a distinctive if not exactly distinguished approach.

Brands must originate with authenticity and a full injection of personality. A culture of novelty seeking kills true innovation. If you’re seeking inspiration by drawing on the same narrow range of artifacts as everyone else, you’re going to end up with products and solutions that everyone else already has. The results will be marginal, and the status quo will prevail. Tall brands must stand out. A distinctive brand makes deliberate hardworking choices.

Great brands, in fact, challenge established trends.

<blockquote>Trends come and go quickly. The collective consciousness drops the trendy shiny objects as fast as they adopt them. A rapid life cycle can wreak havoc on efforts to build a sustainable brand image.</blockquote>

In 1993, Steve Ells, a trained chef and graduate of the Culinary Institute of America, came to Boulder, Colorado—and opened the first in a chain of Chipotle Mexican Grills. Its food was produced fast and inexpensively, but the quality and the flavour weren’t compromised in the way that typical fast food fare is. 

There are now more than 3000 Chipotle locations across America within 30 years of birth. It employs more than 100,000 people. Chipotle created “fast casual,” which offers a more upscale dining environment and food quality, along with higher prices, but in the familiar, convenient limited-service format of fast food. An interesting fact is that much of Chipotle’s early growth had been financed by a large investment from McDonald’s Corporation, but it never succumbed to taking a prescription.

The TED conference was a much celebrated, successful annual affair in Long Beach, California. But it lacked frequency and exposure and was seen as a
show window for intellectualism. It was seen as an exclusive, elitist format, in which limited numbers of people are invited to attend at ticket prices starting at $6,000. What had been conceived as an effort to discover and discuss “ideas worth spreading” was in danger of looking like a profit machine for popular elites.

First, videos of TED talks were put on its website for free access to the public. That led to an even more radical idea: to have mini-TED conferences, called TEDx, all over the world, run by volunteer groups who apply for a licence from the TED organisation but otherwise operate independently. It never looked back. 

The managers of great brands don’t operate in a reactive mode, waiting to jump on the next bandwagon. They take note of bandwagons, and then, without jumping aboard, question what all those bandwagons might suggest about the future. They identify powerful ideas on the horizon and discover ways to advance them, which is very different from following trends. That’s the secret to growth. I imagine that’s what Google must be telling itself with the buzz around chatGPT

Starbucks, for instance, has been about more than coffee from its inception. The brand gained traction in its early years by designing shops as anchors of community life, as a “third place” outside home and work. CEO Howard Schultz saw an opportunity to respond to the phenomenon of increasing isolation in American society by introducing Italian coffeehouse culture and the casual social interaction it fosters. 

<blockquote>The managers of great brands don’t operate in a reactive mode, waiting to jump on the next bandwagon. They take note of bandwagons, and then, without jumping aboard, question what all those bandwagons might suggest about the future. </blockquote>

Zumba Fitness represents several cultural movements including Latin culture, social networking, globalization, weight consciousness, solo entrepreneurship, etc. It touches millions of people every week - a self- reinforcing loop of cultural relevance has produced remarkable results on critical dimensions. 

Is your brand distinctly different from competitive offerings? Do your target customers perceive the difference and think it’s important? Is there experiential consistency and is your brand expressed and delivered consistently across all touchpoints—not just in advertising and marketing communications, but across every point between the company and the outside world?.

Apple is the most valuable enterprise on the planet but you could put Apple’s entire product portfolio together on your desk. It has built value through immense focus and brand identity. Each facet of the brand experience inspires people through both tangible and intangible means. Most Apple users feel a part of a community that is elevating for them. 

Amul for decades has owned topicality by putting its statement on outdoor hoardings, always finding a delightful connection with the news of the week, endearingly brought to life by the round-eyed muppet in an utterly-butterly, pithy manner. If you made it on an Amul hoarding, you made a dent on the nation’s collective consciousness.

A brand can become more than a business— a force of change. It became part of a movement. Movements represent forces that shape the way people interact with others and with brands. Movements are also ways people interact with the companies they work for and the jobs they do. When Tata Motors launched the Ace Mini Truck in 2005, it was creating a future for millions of driver entrepreneurs besides revolutionising last mile cargo mobility in India. We recently did it all over again, with the launch of the Ace EV.

<blockquote>Great brands identify powerful ideas on the horizon and discover ways to advance them</blockquote>

The goal is to understand the role of your brand in people’s lives and in broader culture and then anticipate how it’s likely to change and how you want it to change. The more clearly you can see your brand’s external cultural relevance, the better you are able to align it with your internal culture and with the emotional connection to your customers. 

Ultimately you do need to be able to modify, reposition, or rebrand your existing offerings but on your own terms. Great brands create trends for others to follow. 

By challenging trends and starting movements of their own, great brands give their customers more opportunities to engage with them. By connecting internal culture to broader cultural movements, great brands create futures in which they thrive and grow.

Great brands know that you must be everything to someone, and not merely something to everyone. 

Shubhranshu Singh is vice president, marketing - domestic & IB, CVBU, Tata Motors. He writes Simply Speaking, a weekly column on Storyboard18. Views expressed are personal.

Simply Speaking: Aping trends is wannabe. It is not what great brands do

“Business has only two functions - marketing and innovation.” - Peter Drucker

 
It is no coincidence that many of the biggest brands are also some of the business world's biggest innovators. As a pioneer of a new product category, a brand becomes more than a badge representing a money-making operation. It becomes a storied institution that gains a legacy and the rightful claim of having changed the nature of everyday life.


Of course, innovation is not for the faint-hearted. Human beings are conservative creatures. They like what they know. When something new comes along - be it the automobile or K-pop or the internet

- people get anxious at first. Psychologists have decoded that change subconsciously indicates to us that that time is moving on and therefore reminds us of our own mortality. We don't want to die, so we are resistant to change. It therefore makes sense that the younger we are the more we are willing to try something new, because death tends to be far from our minds.

 
It takes a brave company to take the long view, as very few radically new products are an instant success. People appreciate innovations in hindsight, rarely as they happen. 

 
Success happens slowly, through word of mouth or media endorsement, but, once the market has started to accept the idea, the innovator becomes the spokesperson for the category invented. In some cases - such as Google, Hoover and Xerox - the brand becomes so associated with its innovation that its name becomes synonymous.

 
Innovation is a high-stakes game. Researching and promoting a new product or service costs a lot of money and can lead to spectacular failure. That said, when brand innovators make it, they make it big. 




<blockquote>The trick is not to bury innovation centric information in what some call creativity.</blockquote>



 
Scott Bedbury, Nike’s Head of Marketing at the time when Wieden+Kennedy came up with the ‘Just Do It’ campaign wrote a book called ‘A New Brand World’ where he claims that most product obsessed campaigns amount to nothing more than an “example of corporate navel-gazing”. It is only when people link unrelated concepts and product innovations that true magic results. The Nike campaign was about values not about sneakers. They were declaring their brand ethos not selling product virtues. The campaign itself ran for 10 years. It made its way into everyday language. ‘Just Do It’ - whether ending a bad relationship or deciding to climb mount Everest became a mantra for life.

 
This brings us to another vast but under explored area of brand building. The abstractions, associations and indirectness of building something unique. Innovations are always hard to market in the right frame of reference with due context. Our biases predispose us to a standard way. What’s out of line is considered deviant, not inspiring. But often, great brands emerge from whacky and unintended connections. 

 
Samuel Colt developed the revolving bullet chamber for the eponymous revolver because he was a midshipman and saw how a ship’s wheel could be spun or locked with a clutch. 

 
A Swiss engineer created Velcro inspired by the clinging burrs that stuck to his trousers when he went to the mountains for trekking. 

 
Marketers must ‘make the new familiar and the familiar new’


But, how to do this in a deep, impactful and self sustaining manner ? Use of a Metaphorical sensibility is one proven way. The use of Metaphor aids relatability and mental placement. The automobile, for instance, was initially described as "a horseless carriage”, the motorcycle as a “bicycle with a motor." The snowboard was simply "a skateboard for the snow." In 1999 Research in Motion's BlackBerry 850 was sold as a pager that could also receive and send emails. The initial adopters all got it.


The failure of the Segway shows how much harder it is to devise a compelling narrative without reference to context. Developed by superstar inventor Dean Kame, it was hyped as the next big thing, and was financed by hundreds of millions in venture capital. Magazine covers declared the end of mobility as we knew it and the close of the era of the automobile. Hardly anyone uses it today. The Segway was not analogous with anything at all. People couldn't relate to it. A horseless carriage is easier to sell than the Segway.

 
One of the most iconic luxury products in the world was born of a chance encounter. In 1984, the British actor Jane Birkin happened to be sitting on a flight next to Jean-Louis Dumas, then CEO of the French luxury brand Hermès. Accidentally, the contents of Birkin’s modest straw bag spilled out as she hoisted it into the overhead locker. When introduced , she told Dumas that she couldn’t find a leather bag she liked anywhere, and that Hermès should make one with straps. Thus, the Birkin bag was born. To this day, it is a symbol of luxury. 

 
Consider handbags and totes. A simple cloth bag will carry basic essentials as well as any bag. And yet consumers reliably spend thousands of dollars for handbags from high-end brands to the tune of nearly $10bn a year in the United States alone. Luxury brands are unique in the sheer power of symbolic meaning relative to their products. Sure, the products are carefully crafted and well designed, but we’d be kidding ourselves to think the products are valued for their functional use.

 
So how is this achieved? For a product or brand to provide this level of value it’s not enough simply to come up with a fancy-looking item and expect the process to magically unfold. There must be shared, conventional meaning within the broader consumer culture. Only then can the product serve as a symbol for this meaning and communicate this message. This is important: social signalling is predicated on shared meaning.




<blockquote>If people think you have an important message to convey, they will generally make it their business to grasp it. Make it easy, entertaining and engaging.</blockquote>



 
Rosser Reeves railed against "puffery" and ineffectual advertising - “the best taste ever," "incredibly smooth, and so on. While such bits of fluff were not up to Reeves's standards, at least they made the attempt to sell. Puffery has, today, been replaced with vagueness “Advancing technology”, “People drive us", "'Expanding possibilities." These slogans make it hard to tell what companies stand for. One argument for such ads is the belief that advertising has lost its effectiveness in an age of overcommunication and cynicism, hence the mix of boring, bizarre and banal. 

 
If people think you have an important message to convey, they will generally make it their business to grasp it. Make it easy, entertaining and engaging.


The trick is not to bury innovation centric information in what some call creativity. Look at the world as it exists, pick up referenceable elements to create meaning for the innovations you bring to market. 


Shubhranshu Singh is vice president, marketing - domestic & IB, CVBU, Tata Motors. He writes Simply Speaking, a weekly column on Storyboard18. Views expressed are personal.

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