When I asked a B2B client about their purpose and objective behind using social media, the response was, “I don’t have any objective, my CEO has asked me to do it”. Thankfully the client was honest enough to tell me the reality. It leaves me thinking that there might be many such B2B marketers who are doing it just for reasons like this and not because their audience is there.
Before we discuss how social media can help the B2B fraternity, it’s important to break some myths prevailing in the industry.

Myth 1: Social media is just for kids and youngsters.
Truth: Social media is going mainstream. Leading social network Facebook shows that the fastest growing segment is users above 30 years of age.
Nearly 75 percent of baby boomers use video sharing sites like YouTube multiple times a week.

Myth 2: Social media doesn’t apply to B2B.
I am often asked this question by clients “Is it really for us, isn’t it something which consumer companies should do?”
Truth: B2B Technology Marketing Community on LinkedIn conducted a survey called “Social Media in B2B Marketing” and found that marketers have significantly increased their social media presence and related activities in the last three years.
According to the report, 57 percent of B2B marketers are using some form of social media to connect consumers, create leads and tap into new sources of innovation.

Myth 3: Social media is obscure, niche content.
Truth: Social media is a trusted source for many purchase decisions and product opinions, especially in B2B. It allows deep and thorough analysis of content because of the nature of the content published on social channels, which is the very essence of any B2B decision-making. B2B decision makers spend 1 percent of the time buying; they now spend the other 99 percent researching and talking to each other.

Myth 4: Social media is not relevant to conversion.
Truth: Social media has wide and broad applicability across the entire sales funnel. The diagram below shows, how various elements of social engagement help generating the business value out of it.

Myth 5: It’s too risky to be considered as part of the digital marketing mix.
Truth: More than 56 percent of B2B marketers that have tried social media, feel that it is an effective tool for marketing.

The Opportunity: How Can Social Media Help B2B Marketers
When it comes to social media, the B2B fraternity faces some practical challenges like measurability, content creation, and ROI calculations etc.
If you look at the graph below, most of the marketers don’t have any metrics for social media. The sales funnel graphic given above in the article can be a good starting point in measuring the activities on social media.

There is a need to follow an organised approach for social media as well. Here are some steps B2B marketers can follow to leverage this huge opportunity.

1. Set Objectives
Your objective to go on social media platforms should be clear to you. What do you want to achieve will ultimately decide the fate of your efforts. Try to keep your objectives measurable. Your objectives can be:
a) Thought leadership
b) Brand awareness
c) Demand generation
d) Customer loyalty
e) Or you can choose from the graph below to suit your business needs

2. Google Your Brand
Look at top 10 results of Google, whether they are positive or negative. Examine which of them are through social channels and what do they convey.

3. Initiate Listening
There are enough social listening tools available in the market to help you do this and some of them are free of cost too. You can also start by setting up a Twitter account and listen to what people say about your product/service. You can use Google Blog search to keep an eye on bloggers’ discussions.

4. Identify Influencers
Social listening data will give you insights about the top influencers in your category. You will be able to see how many conversations they started and how many others are following them. Identify those who are experts in your industry.

5. Make Yourself Searchable
One good way to do this is to join LinkedIn. Listen to what people are asking and answering in LinkedIn.
Make your content findable and simplified through both multimedia and text. Use illustrations and images to explain complex issues. Seed explanatory videos on YouTube, share slides on Slideshare.
Social media presents a huge platform to B2B marketers to create unique business opportunities for their products, and it’s high time that they should see this as a business priority rather than anything else.

We have seen how the media landscape has evolved across the globe and how fragmentation is leading to further segmentation of already diverse audiences. I have tried to list down some elements of digital media that have now become the core pillars of any digital media initiative while planning and executing.

1. Innovation

Innovation has become the most used and abused word in digital media planning these days. Everybody wants to be innovative, and why not? The important aspect to look at with innovation is to identify the platform for doing so. The proposed idea could be a creative innovation or a media innovation and there is huge difference in both. However, they are highly interconnected.

Creative innovation as the name suggests is all about bringing new formats of creative assets, or a new technology in existing forms. One of the obvious problems in executing creative innovations is the feasibility of implementation, especially when it involves new technology. The capability of media owners in execution decides the fortune of the ‘innovation’.

Media innovation is all about finding new ways of using the media space or creating a new media space altogether. We have seen how the media space has evolved, for it to be used for advertising purpose. Therefore, its very hard to differentiate ‘innovation’ from what it would have been an organic evolution of the space. For example, if you had run advertising in mobile apps five years back, we would have called it innovative, but today it’s a standard part of any mobile media plan. Creative and media services need to and are blending very fast with each other, which is essential for bringing about a true innovation.
Innovation suffers from another major bottleneck while selling the idea and that is resistance from advertisers. Digital media is always being looked at as a highly measurable media, and this measurability extends to ‘innovation’ before even executing it. Usually clients ask about the projected numbers as a result of the proposed idea, how it will achieve results that are quantifiable, what are the benchmarks, etc. First of all, if it’s an innovation, how can there be any benchmarks? Secondly, if clients have the appetite for innovation, then they should not be afraid to try it in absence of any benchmarks.
Innovation leads to impact. While we question the reasonability of clients’ doubts, another problem with executing innovations is the lack of farsightedness on agencies’ parts in the proposed idea. Advertisers always want to see some actionable results through the innovation and they are not doing it for the sake of doing it. Agencies will need to support the idea with scalability so that the overall media/marketing objectives are always in sight while ideating and execution. Most of the creative ideas fail purely because of the scalability issue. The long-term impact of the innovation on brand has to be kept in mind and should be visible as a result of the execution. It could be difficult to measure the impact in purely quantifiable terms but there are some soft parameters that can be deployed to gauge response and effect of the execution.

2. Integration

The importance of integration within digital media and with traditional media is ever increasing. With increasing media fragmentation, as it becomes harder for clients and agencies to choose an apt media, the need for integration is inevitable. The media needs to work harder and integration is a huge help to the cause. We have seen some real good examples of integrated marketing from across categories such as outdoor hoardings carrying a short code for SMS, tickers scrolling on TVCs to send SMSs or participate in online contests, print ads with QR codes to be scanned, so on and so forth. Integration remains the most favourite question of today’s marketer and agencies need to deliver what we call ‘integrated media plans’, which calls for a different kind of talent within the partner agencies and most agencies are moving towards it.

3. Investment

Investment in digital media has always been in debate and its not only about how much a brand should be investing in digital vis-à-vis other traditional media, but also about how much should be invested within digital media itself given the choices of display, SEM, mobile, and social media advertising. More choices signify more confusion in choosing the right option. While there is no exact formula of how much should be invested, there are some principles that digital can adopt from traditional media. For example, SOV (share of voice) can be translated to SOI (share of impressions) in digital media, especially SEM and display. Secondly, the ROI of digital media will always be the forefront of measurability for this medium. This has resulted in a number of metrics that can be used while buying digital media other than purely CPM or CPT viz. CPC, CPL, CPA, and now even CPF (cost per fan). We will talk more about ROI in the next section.

4. Insights

Rich customer insights have always been a very strong point for digital media both pre and post planning. It will continue to enjoy that status for years to come. No other medium can compete with digital when it comes to real consumer data. Whether it is the total number of search queries on Google about a brand as pre-planning insights or the number of repeat and late visitors on brand website post-execution kind of insights, both have equal importance. Web analytics post executions provide quite useful insights on how users behaved after interacting with the ads. Insights help the media planner to know the ROI of each media vehicle used in the digital media plan. These are also helpful in building benchmarks for future planning such as help in building a media mix of various digital media viz. display, search, mobile and social, etc. How much of what vehicle to be used can be answered if these insights are accumulated over time?

5. Involvement

Involvement from all stakeholders while planning for digital media is an absolute necessity nowadays. Digital media is more of a mindset than anything else, and this needs to be shared jointly by the creative agency, media agency, PR agency, and the advertiser. These partners can no longer work in isolation in order to execute an effective digital media initiative. I still remember those days when clients used to brief the agencies and then left everything to them for delivering an effective campaign plan.
All partners need to learn the art of complementing each other with their respective skill sets. The boundaries of responsibility and accountability are blurring, and are blurring rapidly. Lack of support by one partner might result in the failure of the entire initiative or a campaign.

6. Interactivity

Interactivity was and will continue to be the differentiator for digital media from the rest of the media, although the ‘type’ of interactivity is changing as expected. We have witnessed discussions are not only about the ‘click’ but also the ‘touch’, especially for tablets and touch phones. Marketers and agencies are preparing themselves to deliver the interactive experiences across devices such as PCs, mobiles, tablets, and now even GPS/navigation devices. Given this scenario, content needs to be device agnostic and it calls for an effective content strategy and interactivity needs to be delivered across owned, earned, and paid media.

Digital media planners and online marketers face a tough decision and this debate of buying on CPM and CPA models is not new. Do you buy online media for branding power or purely for cost efficiency? Beyond the media buy, whether you use CPA (define) or CPM (define) has strategic implications.

Given online advertising’s measurability, both brand and response-centric marketers look at online spend in a strictly action-driven, promotional context. From this tactical perspective, they use online promotional budgets to generate leads or other actions that, like their offline equivalents, yield some branding. Yet the potential synergistic effect of smart spending can be overlooked. I have seen some small time agencies setting up “digital media shops” selling media only on CPA basis and later on realising that there is more to this entire process, and later on finding it difficult to survive as they lacked knowledge about other factors which have huge impact on brand equity.

I personally feel that a hybrid media model delivers the best results by building brand and purchase intent while selling.
CPM and CPA are complementary advertising buys that fill different needs. CPM brands, while CPA primarily drives response. CPM can also be used for direct marketing. (Remember, direct response doesn’t work for every product.)

Strategic Perspective

Consider your marketing strategy’s media aspect. How do the following apply to your offering?
- How do target customers use the Web? How does this relate to your offering? How does it fit into your overall strategy?
- What are your marketing and advertising goals? Do you need to improve branding to build purchase intent, drive immediate response, or both? How will the Internet get you where you need to be?
- How does your ad’s viewing environment reflect on and influence branding and purchase intent? Can your media buy scale? Broadly assess editorial direction, content, target audience, and other advertisers (in terms of product and quality).
- How does creative, including copy, design, format, and landing pages, relate to the target customer and your marketing strategy?


Tactical Considerations

Publishers price ad impressions based on reader quality and demographics. Marketers usually advertise online to acquire customers and immediate sales, as measured by return on investment (ROI). For advertising to be effective, it must usually drive potential customers from ad to Web site to a required action’s completion.

The difference between CPM and CPA buys depends on who bears the risk for converting an impression into an acquisition. This is basically your yield (the product of CTR and conversion rate (CR)).
When publishers sell media on a CPM basis, they know how many page views are required to fulfil their obligation. When they sell media on a CPA basis, they don’t know in advance how many page views are needed. Many factors affecting yield (e.g., landing pages and conversion processes) are beyond their control. CPA-placement sellers generally charge a premium to accept the risk of your ad yield.

CPA only deals decrease the value addition by a media agency as the game is between brand and the media owner. Agency, who understands brand more than any other third party in the entire ecosystem, is not able to play huge role because of CPA model because the role gets limited to choosing which channel is delivering lowest cost per action.

Using CPA-only deals can limit your options and potential universe, as not all publishers accept them. Choices are very limited, primarily to sites with lots of unsold inventory and low demand. Using this model alone can result in brand placements in totally irrelevant environments on web which may not be good for brand positioning and overall health of the brand.

Consider the following:
- Which sites efficiently contribute to your reach goals? Do they deliver quality customers? (If you don’t know the quality of customer derived from each combination of media placement and promotional campaign, you need a better marketing tracking system.)
- How does media context interact with your ads? Is advertising integrated with content? Does this environment help increase purchase intent? Does the content complement your product (e.g., health for health products)? Should you develop and/or test new creative approaches?
- Are the media cost effective in light of your strategic goals and key indicators? What’s your projected customer lifetime value?
- Can the campaign’s effectiveness be improved by optimising various factors, such as format, content, landing pages, and media placement, to get higher conversion rates and lower acquisition costs? Run different tests to determine which work best for your offering.

Both models have their own merits provided a media planner knows when to use what, given the context of brand, and implications of such media buys on the overall brand equity.

“Get me the best spots at lowest rates” used to be the words from a marketer to a media planner. How true are these words today? We all have an answer to this question. With increasing media and audience fragmentation, integrated media planning is the need of hour and as marketers spend more and more in diversified media, their integration takes even more importance. The role of media planning in the strategic marketing process had to transform again with changing market dynamics. The media planner today is wearing multiple hats of media planner, creative person, content planner, analytics hub, and more.

Media Planner as a Business Planner
Media planning process involves various stages and I will try to showcase a “then/now” scenario along these stages to highlight how the role has evolved.

Stage 1: Market Analysis

Media planning had always started with deep market analysis and understanding in order to form a media/marketing strategy.

Now: It has evolved over time. With increasingly new ways of media consumption, the addressable market size has increased. For instance, mobile as a medium has reached places where even TV hasn’t reached yet. This holds even truer for developing countries like India, Indonesia, etc. All this has forced marketers to think about their distribution strategy along with the marketing objectives. A media planner today is co-creating the brief for himself as against following what a brand has briefed him.
I remember one example when one of my clients, a leading mobile manufacturer, briefed me to promote its music download services by defining its target audience to be the top either cities and of certain age. When I saw music download trends, only two cities were featured in the top eight city list. The brief got changed.

Stage 2: Goal Setting
After a market analysis, there is market-product and goal-setting approach, which is most likely determined by market segmentation and sets of measurable marketing objectives. Traditionally, the objectives were soft parameters like total eye balls, brand health, brand equity, mind share etc.
Now: Digital media, because of its measurable nature, has helped brands to set hard targets for themselves. Visits to a website, increase in number of search queries, repeat visitors were among the new goals that were introduced. Digital media has pushed traditional media further to work harder in terms of being measurable. Today, we even see these parameters taking shape in cost per acquisition, cost per acquired fan, cost per referral, cost per virtual check-in, and more.

Stage 3: Budgeting
This planning stage focuses on the marketing program, which specifies the budget and activities of marketing mix components. It was very simple with only a handful of media choices: TV, press, radio.
Now: Deriving an optimum media mix and allocating budgets accordingly is something which is on top of the media planner’s wish list. Digital itself is a very fragmented media. Choosing from mobile, display, search, social – and how much of each – has been the biggest headache of media planners now. With integrated planning, digital extends itself to other traditional media making it even more challenging for the media planner to decide.

Stage 4: Implementation and Control
It concentrates on turning planning into action and then collecting results and comparing them with previous goals. This allows success or failure to be quantifiable, from which future directions or avoidances can be recommended.

Now: Marketers expect a media planner to be deeply involved in execution of the plan especially when it comes to digital media. As metrics have become more measurable, it has been slightly easier for brands to take “right” corrective steps. ROI comparison has become stringent as a result.
Media Planner as Creative Resource

Gone are the days when “creativity” in message delivery was an ad agency’s responsibility. The lines are blurring and are blurring very rapidly. Today, the “how” part of execution gets equal or even more importance than “what” of a creative message to the audience. I have seen how media agencies have been able to influence a creative design and messaging. Digital media is forcing creative and media people to join hands and work more closely with the brand as against it used to be. Many agencies today, have their own in house creative team which is a clear sign of how quickly the responsibilities are overlapping.

Media Planner as Content Planner
Consumers’ need of good content has always been there and will always be there. With increasing ways of consuming media, the need to provide appropriate content in relevant vehicles is an area where everyone is struggling right now. Media planners, today, are expected to play that role of content creator or content planner. Given the fact that media agencies are closer to content owners than anyone else in the entire ecosystem, they can play and are playing a very important role in sourcing the right content for the brands.

Media Planner as Analytics Hub
Today’s media planner is more of a repository of rich consumer and market data and insights. These insights are not only about demographics which used to be the case a while ago. Today it’s more about their lifestyle, how they behave across different media vehicles, which vehicle is the most efficient in reaching a particular type of target audience etc. With increasing availability of insights through digital media vehicles, it is getting important and unavoidable for media planners to play the role of analytics resource for the brand.

Contact RP @ brandrp@gmail.com

Media planning as a function has been there for ages now, and with increasing media fragmentation it is getting difficult to find audience within limited resources. Newer and newer media platforms are emerging and marketers are increasingly losing control over these platforms as most of them are being now controlled by consumers themselves. Thanks to social spaces like Social Networking platforms, Blogs, UGC Video platforms, Discussion forums so on and so forth. One thing which has not changed is “consumers’ need for good content” irrespective of platforms. And that is the primary reason for this huge fragmentation which we are all experiencing. Consumers are finding relevant content elsewhere and they are not sticking anymore to traditional ways of consuming content.

From marketer’s perspective, it will get even more difficult to create content for all possible media channels, it has always been. I feel that everybody in digital domain needs to think about content in a different way. Historically, content has always been a responsibility of creative agencies or now-a-days Digital content agencies. The content was always thought about to be created by brand itself through its agency partners, It needs to change and needs to change quickly to survive in the game. Let me give you a perspective on how content can be everybody’s responsibility & capability.

We always treat media these days as Owned, Bought & Earned Media, likewise Content can be Created, Bought & Borrowed. Let’s understand this in some more detail

Created Content
This encompasses traditional ways of branded content created by agencies for any brand. It includes TVCs, PR Articles, Radio Jingles, Branded videos etc. The brand has full control on the content and messaging which goes to audience at large. The end users have no scope of participation in brand created content and is normally broadcasted to them through various media. If the brand is global, lot of content made for other countries can be re-purposed to suit other local markets, especially when some global celebrities are involved.

Bought Content
Marketers who find it difficult to create content they can go for this option of buying Content from appropriate & relevant sources e.g. a cosmetics brand can buy content from a beauty & lifestyle portal and use it on brand’s own websites, microsite etc. This bought content helps the brand to expand its social presence too, if disseminated properly through relevant social channels. Many advertisers are paying bloggers also to create content for them in their web spaces.

Borrowed Content
In social platforms, users are already discussing about the brands irrespective of advertising campaigns. Whenever there is a new product, new TV campaign is introduced to an audience; it generates conversations in the blogosphere. The positive comments can easily be linked back to brand’s social platforms like Facebook page, Youtube channel etc. This is what I refer as Borrowed content. This requires efficient social listening by the brand so that only useful content can be taken back to brand.
How Content Planning helps in Digital Marketing?
Content should be intrinsic to your digital strategy. Going forward, you can’t afford to have a digital strategy without content being an integral part of it. It’s not “how important is content in a digital marketing strategy?” rather one should ask “how important is content strategy in digital marketing?”

Let me try to list some clear benefits of having a good content strategy in place –

• Content increases Search Engine ranking for the brand’s web presence. The efforts of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) are far more successful and effective when the brand’s content well distributed across web spaces. The brand becomes “searchable” by the users as a result of good content strategy.

• An efficient content strategy helps in reducing Search Engine Marketing costs to a great extent as brands starts to appear more often in the organic listing of search engines.

• A good content strategy helps the brand in being device agnostic. With increasing web access from mobile devices and tablets, marketers are finding it difficult to distribute content across devices. Whenever a brand develops content, it should be developed keeping in mind its visibility & suitability across smart phones, feature phones, tablets etc.

Contact: rpsonline@gmail.com

This is in continuation of the "Pricing vs Branding" discussion we had some time back. When we talk about brands getting effected by Price wars. I gave it some more thought and found that its the marketers who create these boundaries or so called parameters to rank a brand in his consideration set, which triggers a different evaluation criteria in the minds of customers and that is Price. The moment we talk about price being competitve it dissolves all emotional connects which a Brand Team has created spending some good years on it. Do you agree?

Sensory Branding: It Makes (Five) Senses
Most marketing plans appeal to only two senses: sight and hearing. How come almost all marketing and brand building concentrate on two senses when we know appealing to all five is likely to double brand awareness and strengthen the impression a brand leaves on its audience?
Several surveys document our olfactory sense as probably the most impressionable and responsive of the five senses. Smells invoke memories and appeal directly to feelings without first being filtered and analyzed by the brain, which is how the remaining four senses are processed. We all recognize and are emotionally stimulated by, say, the scent of freshly cut grass or the perfume of roses, smell of rain hitting the dust.
Let's not forget hearing and touch. Sound evokes memory and emotion. A hit song from your youth brings back the excitement and anxiety of your teens. AOL stepped up to the plate by using a voice familiar to many young Web users. Brittney fans discovered they can hear their idol not only when experiencing CDs and videos but also when launching AOL. Brittney lets you know, "You've got mail."
Touch? One major reason online clothes shopping never took off is -- you guessed it -- people couldn't touch the product. Amazon avoided this problem because people don't attach so much importance to the feel of a book as they do to its content. Clothes, on the other hand, must be felt and tried on for size, color, texture, and so on. Physical proximity to product is elemental to purchase decisions. Shopping behavior depends on it.
The only example of integrated sensory marketing I'm aware of comes from Singapore Airlines. The airline has demonstrated an understanding of the psychological importance of the senses in establishing and maintaining customer impressions. By appealing to all senses (music, fragrance, manner, and demeanor mingle in the cabin to evoke the airline's image), the airline has created a branded flying experience.
So how can one appeal to all five senses on the Internet? Well, you can't get them all. But you can optimize the tools available to you, one of the most neglected being sound. Why do you reckon you hear that familiar sound of fizzing Coke being poured into an ice-filled glass when you visit the Coca-Cola website. Meaningful sound is a cheap but very effective way of appealing to another of your visitor's senses and of powerfully enhancing your brand's message.
Opportunity is beckoning for our marketers. They should not miss the bus.

Brand Activation
Marketing, as we know, is all about waging war against competitive forces to win market share. For this purpose, marketers create warriors which win the perceptual battle for them, and these warriors are called BRANDS. Brands have proved their worth by earning premiums, decimating competitions and even beating time factors (as many brands are still leader as they were a century ago). Owing to this, marketers have stepped up their efforts to build their brands. They are building their marketing programs around their brands.
Today, marketplace is replete with competition. Opening up of economy has led to the entry of foreign brands into the marketplace. These brands are also adding to the chorus. Advertising has always been seen as main weapon to build brands by the brand managers. Excessive reliance on this form of communication has resulted in �over communication�. Ad clutter has been increasing gradually and the future shows no sign of relief. Not only has this, advertising also lost its credibility if we compare it to what it used to be decade back. Reasons are many: More knowledgeable customer, comparative advertising, internet etc.
Therefore, marketers are exploring new ways of supporting their brand. One such method is called Brand Activation. Brand activation can be defined as marketing process of bringing a brand to life through creating brand experience.
Next question now is what to activate? Generally, the core features or brand values of a brand are used for activation. That�s what every brand manager strives to achieve i.e. communicating their brand values to their target customers. But a word of caution here: select only one or two features or brand values to activate. Don�t try to communicate each and every detail of your brand. One has to appreciate the fact that branding is based on the concept of singularity.
This concept assumes a greater significance in case of services which are intangible in nature. Let me take example for both products and services to explain brand activation.
B.A. In Products:
Consider a hypothetical shaver brand �X�. Further assume that there are six other brands in this category. All brands are touting themselves as provider of smooth shave in their respective ads. But you are the smoothest one but how do you make your T.A believe of the same. B.A comes handy in case scenario.
Create such a platform, where you can meet your T.A and give them free shave so that the can feel the �smoothness�. Allow them to interact with your brands as much as possible. You can do so with the help of road shows and exhibitions etc. Once you have done that, customers will be able to validate your claim. Also, they will relate to your ads.
B.A in Services:
It�s the people in services which actually activate your brand. Consider the case of insurance company which claims to be most caring company. But the problem is that every company is saying that. The company (lets say) which reaches the place of accident, will be considered as most caring.
Benefits of Brand Activation:
1. You can convey your positioning using brand activation.
2. It supports your ad claim if used carefully.
3. Distortion is minimum in this case.
4. It increases your brand salience.
5. Helps in revitalizing a brand. Horlicks is doing it through its campaign which is trying to change its image from fuddy-duddy to an exciting brand among children. Their Wiz-Kid competition across the country is the perfect example of brand activation.
6. Brand activation can elicit customer insights as people interact with the brand.
Limitations of Brand Activation:
1. Lack of initiative on part of brand managers is the major concern.
2. Lack of measurement matrices or indices is the limiting factor.
At the end, I would like to say that brand activation should not be confused with the below the line activities. Brand Activation is seen as a tool to build brands through interaction with its target people whereas below the line activities, most of the times, are sales oriented.

ALL companies emphasize the importance of marketing in general and branding in particular. The truth is that in many boardrooms, marketing continues to remain on the sidelines. The reason is that the orientation of the top-level management is not towards marketing & branding. What matters the most is the terms like, turnover, Market Cap, market share, etc. I am not denying the fact that these are very important issues to be taken care of. These things have a direct impact that is visible to the naked eye. But the brand is a strategic asset that creates an impact that is not visible to all. You need to have an approach that is totally different.

In the past, branding remained isolated from corporate strategy. Good branding meant a well-designed logo, a clever ad campaign or a large ad budget with glitzy commercials during television broadcasts of the Olympics, cricket tournaments or popular soap operas. But today, management of the brand is far more encircling, extending to customer service, packaging and quality, customer experience, and other areas that go well beyond the purview of advertising.
In today's business environment, the traditional approach to brand management needs a total reorientation. Brands must be viewed as strategic assets. Brand management must be integrated into corporate strategy. A strategic approach to brand management, among other things, calls for top management involvement, cross-functional approach, building trust and discharging social responsibility.
The top managements of many companies today are realizing they must personally get involved in brand management. This not only ensures that brand management gets the kind of quality attention it deserves but also facilitates a cross-functional approach.
Let us take an example of Dell, which has revolutionized PC marketing with its direct model. Dell has built its brand around the consumer by attaching greater importance to customer service and better pricing and value, as opposed to advertising. Its superb supply chain management, and customer service support this model. That is why despite spending only a fraction of what competitors splurge on advertising, the Dell brand is so strong and inspires the confidence of customers.
HDFC has created brand awareness through word of mouth with little advertising. The strength of the HDFC brand has facilitated the entry into new areas without diluting the equity of the parent brand.
Let us take the example of Kingfisher. It has always been associated with fun, living life to the fullest & good times. The associations were so strong that kingfisher has been able to successfully extend from the category of beer to airlines. Full credit to Vijay Mallya � the Chairman of UB Group. He has a lifestyle that is reflected in the brand Kingfisher. The point here is that the Top league of a Company has to get so involved with their brand that it should reflect.
The importance of brands has increased in the past decade. The challenges they face and the environment in which they operate have also become more complex. Under these circumstances, a strategic approach to brand management has become imperative. The top management needs to be involved in brand management in a more direct way than ever before.

India has always been a price sensitive market. People succumb to price falls. Most of the customer�s are price conscious rather than brand conscious. This is not to say that customers in India are not brand conscious at all but significant portion of India is still price sensitive.
In today�s marketplace, competition is being fought on price grounds. One company reduces price of its brand and others follow the suit. This is how brands are caught in vicious price reduction spiral. This very logic goes against the concept of brands which are known to earn premiums.
So the big question which remains is how to make brands less susceptible to price reduction, if not impervious? I have been thinking over this issue for quiet a while now.
I think marketers have been playing this "price factor" at a very high pitch. They need to play it down. Otherwise customers will get used to it and will expect your brand to bring down its price. Any price increase may lead to rejection of your brand as your brand is seen as �discounted brand�. In such a situation it becomes difficult to bring the brand out of price ceiling and also becomes difficult to maintain its leadership (if your brand is leader).
Therefore marketers should consider creating an "emotional cushion" around your brand. Airtel is the one of the best examples one can give. It enjoys brand leadership in its respective category. Airtel has been least affected by price reductions. None of ads that they air, contains any price element. Ads are aired with an intention of creating "strong brand preference" which in turn will generate sales.
"TVS Gold" keyboards brand is the second example of a brand which has fought price wars with its "quality" feature. TVS gold still commands a premium price where you can get two keyboards with the price of TVS Gold keyboard. TVS Gold enjoys strong brand preference. Brand has never given way to price reduction thanks to its consistent quality.
In the end, I would like to say that price reductions are not bad if they are done with a strategic intent. Price reductions can work in short run but in long run brands are bound to loose.

Will the sports car driven by James Bond entice movie-goers to consider test driving that car? Are television viewers more likely to purchase snack products they see their favorite programme? Would a song blaring in the background of computer game lead gamers to purchase the artist�s CD? Marketers hope, with these product placement promotions, the answer to these questions is yes! And many are counting on product placement promotions to boost sales and build positive brand awareness.

Product placement is a marketing practice designed to intentionally insert products into the content of entertainment programs, such as movies and television programs. In most cases the placement is subtle so as not to divert significant attention from the main content of the program or media outlet.

Placement can take several forms:
visual imagery in which the product appears within the entertainment program
actual product use by an actor/actress in the program
dialogue spoken by an actor that contains product information

Product placement opportunities have existed in movies for over 50 years but did not evolve significantly until the 1970s when tobacco companies recognized the advantages of this promotional approach. In recent years, marketers have become more aggressive in identifying outlets for product placements, especially in television programs.
From BMWs showing up in James Bond movies to Nokia mobiles prominently displayed in the Indian Idol 2, product placement is an effective and often indirect way to build brand awareness. However, product placement is no longer limited to movies and television. Electronic games, such as EA Sports Madden Football, are wildly popular and are often on par with television for attracting the entertainment attention of many teens and young adults, in particular.
A few examples of product placement in Indian scenario are:
Peas-Pass brand in Yadkin
Coke in Tail
Marti Swift in Bunty Aur Babli
Hero Honda in Koi Mil Gaya
Bru in Saathiya
Calvin Klein in Salaam Namaste


Type of movie selected is going to affect the awareness level of your brand. So selection of movie is an important decision for effective product placement. Reach and Frequency are also attached to selection of movie. One must see in how much cities a movie is going to shown. Maximum number of cities means maximum number of exposure to your brand. But this is not enough. Now the question is how we increase the frequency of exposures. For that one must select a movie which has high probability of being a hit. It will ensure that same people come to see the movie again which in turn will increase the frequency.
Marketers must ensure that their brands get due attention in the movie but not at the cost of diverting audience�s attention to their brand. It means that brands should be weaved into the story in such a way that audience get the feeling that brand is not being advertised rather it�s being used for a purpose in the movie by actors. Always remember that people have come to see the movie not an ad of your brand.


Placement Tests New Territory


For many of today�s gamers, their gaming system includes not only the game player attached to a television but also includes connections to an advanced audio system. Game developers take advantage of this enhanced gaming environment by populating their software with numerous songs from genres aimed at younger players. Most songs are up-tempo tunes that help create an atmosphere of excitement while players battle on the screen. After playing a game for many weeks, the gamer may be exposed to a song well over 100 times. In fact, avid gamers will hear the song much more when playing video games then they will through local radio outlets. The result is that many new artists benefit from this intense exposure.

On the down side, it leaves a space for Ambush Marketing, which your competitors can take advantage of. One can�t quantify return on investment as there are no measurement indices. Lack of professional people in this field is another concern for marketers. Despite all this, product placement can offer several benefits to a brand. It is a comparatively cheaper medium where one can put one�s money in. I think product placement will form an integral part of IMC plan in near future.

There was a time when marketers used to reach maximum number of their customers with a single medium. Life was very easy for brand planners, media planner and other concerned people. Reach and Frequency were never a cause of concern for marketers. But today the scenario has changed. Media has got fragmented, thanks to globalization. The world has become a global village. For example, number of channels has increased drastically today. With fragmentation of media, audience has got fragmented too. Not only has it become difficult to reach maximum number of people but it has also become difficult to reach your "Exact Target Audience".
Media fragmentation has posed some serious issues in front of Mass Brands. With fragmentation, the number of people which they can reach with one channel has come down. Now they to rely on more number of channels to reach the same number of people which they used to reach with one channel. This increases the media budget. Spill over cost has also increased in case of mass brands.
As media has become more expensive.
Fragmentation has come as bliss for niche brands. Niche brands can now select their media which pertains to their TG with minimum spill over.
Media Planning has become more cumbersome today. With plethora of channels to choose from, selecting a channel which will yield maximum return is the most difficult job today. It involves huge efforts on part of media agencies. That�s why media planning is specialized field. It also emphasizes the need to not to club media agency with an ad agency.
For example, Thums Up brand can get maximum mileage from AXN channel than from DD-1 because the kind of audience which this branding is catering to has more probability of watching AXN than DD-1. It signifies the importance of studying the brand, its audience and channel�s audience well.
You can have best of creative ad with you but without the selection of proper media, it�s a creative waste.
At the end, I would like to say that I foresee mass brands resorting to brand consolidation and niche brands resorting to brand proliferation.

Each year, a large number of business owners rely on Internet marketing to get their new business up and running or to keep their existing business going strong. Are you interested in becoming one of those business owners? If so, congratulations; it is difficult and sometimes even impossible to run a successful business without marketing. That is why it is important that you give your business all of the marketing attention that it needs and deserves.

When it comes to Internet marketing, you will find that any marketing is better than no marketing at all. Despite this, you may want to focus most of your time on innovative Internet marketing ideas. Innovative Internet marketing ideas are ideas that are fairly new. One of the few downsides to using innovative Internet marketing ideas is that since most have yet to be proven, because they are relatively new, you may not know if they are really worth or your time or your money. That is why there are a number of important factors that you should take into consideration, especially if you are planning on marketing your business while on a budget.

If you are interested in marketing your business, but while on a budget, you can still do so. The only difference is that you will have a little bit more research to do than most others, namely business owners who have an unlimited marketing or advertising budget. As previously mentioned, innovative Internet marketing ideas are ideas that are relatively new. That means that they have likely not been proved effective yet. Despite wanting to wait until they are effective, you shouldn�t. The good thing about using innovative Internet marketing strategies is that because they are new, the chances of your competition using those same strategies are slim. In a way, using innovative Internet marketing strategies gives you an edge over your competition.

Although you can get the upper hand, by using innovate Internet marketing ideas, you may find that not all ideas turned out the way that you wanted them to. That is why you are advised to be cautious when looking to implement new, innovative interenet marketing ideas, especially if those ideas are costly. As previously mentioned, you are advised to give new Internet marketing ideas a try, even if they have yet to be proven. Before implementing those ideas, it may be a good idea to examine the costs associated with doing so. Although business is all about taking risks, you may not want to take a risk that you cannot afford to take. There are a number of different, affordable, Internet marketing strategies that you can use, that are guaranteed to produce the results that you are looking for.

If you would still like to have your business benefit from innovative Internet marketing ideas, but you are unsure what to do, you may want to think about hiring the services of a professional. In most cases, you will find that these professionals are referred to as Internet marketing specialists. An Internet marketing specialist is an individual who can brainstorm marketing ideas and execute them, without you having to do any of the work. What is nice about most Internet marketing specialists is that they tend to charge a flat-rate fee for their services. This means that you can get a whole Internet marketing package, which includes new and old ideas, for a reasonable fee. In addition to the fees being reasonable, you may find that the results are even better; that is because professional Internet marketing specialists are good at what they do.

Whether you choose to develop and implement your own innovative Internet marketing strategies or you rely on a professional to do it for you, your business should be able to get the marketing that it needs and deserves to have. What is nice is that you can also do it while on a budget; which is a great way to make sure that your business is a profitable one.

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