Do you think Marketing is an art ? Think Again !!

 Marketing is a term that is most often misunderstood. When ne thinks of marketing one imagines a sales executive dressed in prim and proper formal attire with a necktie, or a lady dressed in a formal sari with a sling bag on her shoulder, going door to door trying to sell a product.  Sometimes marketing is misunderstood to mean advertising.  However Marketing is not just selling, not just advertising, but it is a whole aspect which starts when a of products or service is being conceptualised, includes market research, identifying the potential customer segment to target, promoting a product/service that might still not have been launched in the market, promoting and selling the finished entity and then keeping the customers engaged so that more word-of-mouth selling, up-selling or cross-selling can be done.  Therefore, as long as there is a product or service this phase, called marketing, in the life of a product, never ceases.  While a few aspects of marketing like selecting a packaging, making an appealing sales pitch or an advertisement that has an easy recall may be some sort of creative art, but overall Marketing is a science. 

In this article, we will try to address more details on the topics we touched upon and more, and try to establish how it is more a Science than an Art.

 The basics of Marketing

An example to understand the most common constituents of marketing, is as follows :

Paint a sign saying the circus is coming: Advertising.

Harness the circus sign to an elephant and march him to a school: Customer Targeting & Promotion.

The elephant walks over a school’s flower bed? Publicity

You get the school principal to laugh and pat the elephant? Public relations.

Your planning of this elephant’s walk is marketing.

It’s the Digital Age

Over the ages, people used to use their 5 senses to look, smell, touch, taste and feel the product.  Therefore, a marketer would generally showcase their wares in a shop shelf or on the curb-side. 

In the age of mass production through machines when each unit of a product became consistently repeatable in weight, size, color, texture, shape, smell etc (think of soaps or perfumes) smart marketers started packaging them in fancy wrappers with pictures of attractive men and women, and to differentiate their product sometimes the wrapper would carry pictures of the ingredients like clove, lime, honey, splashing milk etc. 

With a little more modernization, humanity needed services like laundry, cleaning, security, loans etc., and therefore people would need to recall the provider of a certain service through their logos and emblems and also through their print and movie advertisements.  The recall value could be created by the presence of a celebrity or a movie star or through a catchy slogan or even by the colors of the ad that will become identifiable with the brand.  T

hen came Software products – which didn’t even have a shape, color, weight or any such physical attributes except that they came packaged inside a cassette, floppy, CD etc and again the physical aspects of the brand colors, slogans and the look and feel of the package was the advertisement. 

But it didn’t stop there … and then with computers becoming more pervasive, we started having websites and apps and also certain websites or apps (which came to be known as digital yellow pages or advertisers) became the tools to promote.  Various other components of website design like visual / picture links and banners overlaying a website also became tools to direct the customer to another web page which would promote a product or service.   

Then arrived the Search engines like yahoo, askJeeves or Google who would also give out results for a search word and therefore an astute company could make sure that people searching for some keywords would find their company’s product pages before any competitors’ product.

It still didn’t stop there, and here came another type of websites and apps which got christened as “Social Media’, because they allowed people with barely an access to a website (and no other knowledge of computer technology) to be able to have a voice, create content and create opinions and therefore people could easily become a channel of word-of-mouth publicity which is the most convincing type of advertising. 

This is, therefore, the story of marketing and advertising up to the present age of Digital Marketing and future has even more surprises in store with each electronic equipment now developing the power to communicate and create networks of things called “Internet of Things”.  Hence Digital Marketing is a subject that will grow even further, and it can still be a huge subject of innovation and disruption as well  

Stages Of an Impactful Marketing

Marketing is about knowing your customer well, about knowing their pain points, their desires, their needs.  Various methods and frameworks have been defined to create new products and services like Design thinking and JTBD (Job-To-Be-Done).  But however good your product, you should be able to let your customer know that it exists and it may be useful for them.  Therefore marketing is mainly about communication. 

Good communication happens when you have good content, you can get the attention of your audience, you can gain their trust and therefore they lend you their ears and their minds.  Therefore in marketing there is a term called CATT -  Content, Attention, Trust and Transaction.  

In marketing the foremost content is the product or service but also the contextual messaging about its usefulness can help even a mediocre product to be lapped up by the consumers while a poor messaging can have even the most innovative thing to be a ‘flop’.  Content in today’s world can be disseminated though so many mediums – print, electronic media, word-of-mouth, and through internet as we saw in the previous section too.

Using the right medium is, therefore, vital to gain the attention of the intended audience or the target customer.  One of the best example of using a right medium is of Saregama company’s marketing of their music device Caravan.  You might not see any ad of this product in the internet or social media but in print or traditional electronic media like Radio and TV the ad is ore visible. The reason is that this product is targetted for the older generation of Indians who might not be as computer savvy.

But until a product manufacturer has the trust of the people they may not be able to sell it. A case in point is the Tata Nano, which despite the hype and an economical price lost on an emotional factor as well as on a trust factor.  It was touted as the “world’s cheapest car’ and that meant that as a status symbol in an Indian household this car was actually a symbol of poor ‘status’, and then its low power attributes further created distrust   can it really carry a family, it wont be able to run if you switch on the AC, it wont be able to climb hilly terrains etc.  

And if the first 3 of the CATT – Content, Attention and Trust are achieved then the Transaction happens.  Maruti wins in India because its content ie the cars are made for Indian conditions, have economical cost of ownership because of their widespread availability of mechanics and parts, it has now been tried by at east 3 generations and hence almost all models of Maruti get sold easily without the company needing to make too much ad spend.  On the other hand the other Maruti brand called Nexa suffers because it is targeted at a higher end segment which has more trustworthy brands like Honda, Toyota and Hyundai etc

This further establishes the notion that it is all very scientific and methodical.

Digital Marketing is a Complex field but ignore it at your peril  

While we have seen that the medium of marketing may not always be digital but in today’s world there are very  rare products or services that can not or should not be promoted on the internet.  Afterall almost everybody in today’s world tries to search the cheapest available option of the product of their choice by gong to a search engine.  Hence one needs to at least be able to come in the attention of Search engines like Google.  Which means that for websites SEO (search engine optimisation) is very important, and to be ranked above their competitors keyword research, correctly targeted paid promotions on Google or FB etc. is equally important.  In the process if one can also collect first party data, by people giving their email or phone number while showing an interest in a prospective product, then one can do a lot of personalised promotions using email marketing.  Through Social Media people can be attracted to buy a product if their social circle, friends and family give a word-of-mouth endorsement to something and hence Social Media Marketing in today’s time becomes really important. In this process people can also be attracted to make money also through affiliate marketing and earning commissions on endorsements they do and it becomes a case of network marketing.   There is thus a vicious cycle of various types of digital marketing tools and methods, SEO, SEM, Social Media marketing, Affiliate marketing, First Party data capture and Email Marketing etc.   A good marketing plan in the modern world should have a high %age of the budget allocated to these digital methods besides print and TV media etc.  Another modern use of Social Media has been of showcasing the environmental and the societal concern of a company though simple video and audio messages, and that creates the ‘trust’ of communities and families in a particular brand, which in turns evokes attention from more people of that ‘tribe’ and lots of sales happen for that brand,  without even promoting a product in particular.     

While there is some art in devising the right mix of these strategy and method but the methods themselves are very scientific, and if one goes deeper all of them also need a lot of data accumulation, analysis and acting upon.  The field of data science is therefore a key weapon in the field of modern day advertising and marketing.  Data science is used from the stage of market research, segmentation, target customer selection and finding the right ‘niche’ to target.  Then it is used for figuring the nuances of the various customer needs – what feature would be competitive and which feature will create that differentiation or the “wow” factor.  Later Data Science goes in finding the right keywords and messaging for promotion, and then figuring what is working or not working and learning a a lot of feedback about the product and possible improvements (or the next product or version of an existing one)

A word about Branding

We saw how trust is an important factor in marketing.  Brands are a face of trust i.e. when something starts getting recognised through its name, logo, emblem, colors or tagline, then it is implicit that it has gained some trust in itself.  Large Corporates also showcase their CSR, enviornment-al and societal value-addition to build trust and an emotional connect with customers who feel safer trying this brand’s products because this company may be doing something good for our surroundings or touching human lives somewhere in the world. 

Although the trend of Personal Branding caught on late in India, but in the early 1990s Amitabh Bachchan was perhaps the first to start marketing himself as a brand. Later a filmstars, cricketers, comedy artists, you-tubers etc became their own brand. The trend continued in professional world where certain doctors, lawyers, marketing gurus and digital marketers etc are personal brands.  Their name sells better than organised corporate entities.  The field of Digital Marketing is a sure shot way of promoting a personal brand mainly by effective use of a combination of SEM and Social Media marketing.  A person who wants to create their personal brand has to choose the right niche for themselves first.  But after that it is a process of slowly building trust through targeted paid SEM as well as Social media promotions. 

In Conclusion

We have seen so many aspects of marketing where it is clear that there is some creativity and art required to create a lasting recall for something that you want to promote but there are a lot of scientific methods that are needed at each stage of MarketingIt has become quite a long article, and therefore more on this subject in subsequent posts….. please follow / subscribe to my blog.