Rebranding ‘Marketing’ - Building the Trinity Ecosystem

Consumer journeys have evolved; nothing can be farther from the truth and in so many ways this statement has also become a cliché over the years. But what hides behind, merits a bit unfurling, which entails understanding how consumers are becoming independent information gatherer, forming their own opinion about the brands, brands are not seen as trustworthy allies in disseminating fair and transparent information, consumers well trained to see through advertising and advocacy; customer and supply chain barriers for entry going down as ecosystem collaborates and supports each other. These conundrums have now brought a fundamental challenge in marketing approach where we need to shift our traditional marketing model to a trinity ecosystem where experience is at the heart of each level, i.e., product, brand, and consumer. Let me elaborate:

· Product Experience: Tangible, functional delivery of the brand’s promise through discernible and visible product benefit

· Brand Experience: Totality of all sensations, emotions, feelings, thoughts, and actions that a customer experiences when evoked by a brand

· Consumer Experience: Customer’s perceptions and related feelings caused by the one-off and cumulative effect of interactions with a supplier’s employees, systems, channels, or products

This will mean that our perspective on mass marketing will dramatically change and we will need to look at things completely differently. This will mean that we will need a complete transformation and, in many cases, almost dramatically take a 180 degree turn to learn new skills will be built while we lay the foundation of some mission critical enablers.

Critical Marketing Skillset Shifts:

1. Design Thinking over Mix Validation: The typical FMCG consumer research and insight generation model entails a rewind of the historical data, look at the knowledge gaps to drive divergent thinking and then look for evidence for convergence. This needs to shift now and needs to be anchored in understanding customer's needs, rapid prototyping, and generating creative ideas—that will transform the way we develop products, services, processes, and organizations. While business thinking is a critical prerequisite, one needs to empathise, define the problem, ideate, prototype, and test to remain nimble yet steadfast in the new world.

2. Growth Hacking over Growth Scouting: Move from finding segmental opportunities and plugging portfolio gaps to rapidly test ideas that can improve the customer journey, replicate and scale the ideas that work, and finally modify or abandon the ones that don't before investing a lot of resources to scale fast.

3. Hyper personalisation over Mass standardisation: Henry Ford once said, “You can have any colour you want as long as it’s black”; we have come a long way from there and now ~81% of the colours are white, black, silver and gray, there are multiple hues that fill up the tail[1]. While one can debate whether it would be segment of one or n+1 or n+2 so and so forth, the point is that we need to make sure that the product or service is designed to the point that balances consumer’s personalisation needs vs the right value creation model for the business and the brand.

4. Customer Experience over Customer Service: While designing our brands we must keep customer experience at the centre where we need to ensure that every interaction of the customer, from navigating the website to talking to receiving the product/service they bought from us, is seamless and frictionless. In fact, we need ensure that we eliminate the need for customer service as that tends to address problems or concerns which would be a deterrent to the holistic perception of building experience of our business or brand.

5. Behavioural Science over Purchase Behaviour Norms: Typical FMCG relies significantly on the historical purchase behaviour and leverages those data to predict future behaviour. This assumes a very linear approach but, the human cognitive process is much more dynamic and are impacted by many other external stimuli. The marketer of the future needs to marry internal and external data to have strong understanding of the behavioural interactions and business impact on the brands.

Mission Critical Enablers:

1. Sustainability at the Centre: Societal challenges have raised expectations about marketers as people look for brands to deliver on functionality while also better future and drive societal challenges, address climate crisis and be more socially inclusive. As we build new skillsets, we need to make sure that every action has sustainability at its core.

2. The Artist vs the Operator: Typical mass marketing runs on the theme of ‘efficiency-based effectiveness’ and hence classically shrewd operators excel. But the future will tilt in favour of the artist that can paint the big picture and is ambidextrous with all the consumer facing levers to ensure brilliant execution.

3. Data, Tech and Analytics: While being an artist, marketers need the ability to work comfortably with data and leverage tech to get the best analytics out. This would mean balance understanding of small and big data to ensure that every decision is data led and machine augmented.

As a long-trained mass marketer I am concerned; concerned that it is taking me out of my comfort zone to a space that is constantly changing. The reality is that days of static marketing challenge and skills are waning, and the future will see constant evolution and change. Those that acknowledge and evolve will survive, those falters will get mauled by the ecosystem. The choice is ours. Our consumers have already made theirs.  

[1] https://www.axalta.com/content/dam/New%20Axalta%20Corporate%20Website/Documents/Brochures/axalta-2020-global-automotive-color-popularity-report.pdf