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	<title>RP Singh's Personal Blog</title>
	<link>http://brandrp.com/index.php</link>
	<description>The blog is all about Digital Marketing</description>
	<language>en</language>
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	<pubDate>Wed, 23 Nov 2011 23:31:01 +0000</pubDate>
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    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Social Media for B2B Businesses: Missed Opportunity?]]></title>
      <description><![CDATA[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 ..]]></description>
      <link>http://brandrp.com/post/index/18/Social-Media-for-B2B-Businesses-Missed-Opportunity</link>
      <pubDate>Wed, 23 Nov 2011 23:31:01 +0000</pubDate>
      <category>General</category>
      <comments>http://brandrp.com/post/index/18/Social-Media-for-B2B-Businesses-Missed-Opportunity#cmt</comments>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The 6I Principle of Digital Media ]]></title>
      <description><![CDATA[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 ..]]></description>
      <link>http://brandrp.com/post/index/17/The-6I-Principle-of-Digital-Media</link>
      <pubDate>Mon, 03 Oct 2011 05:39:32 +0000</pubDate>
      <category>General</category>
      <comments>http://brandrp.com/post/index/17/The-6I-Principle-of-Digital-Media#cmt</comments>
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    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[CPM vs. CPA! The Debate Will Never Die]]></title>
      <description><![CDATA[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 ( ..]]></description>
      <link>http://brandrp.com/post/index/16/CPM-vs-CPA-The-Debate-Will-Never-Die</link>
      <pubDate>Wed, 14 Sep 2011 22:49:04 +0000</pubDate>
      <category>General</category>
      <comments>http://brandrp.com/post/index/16/CPM-vs-CPA-The-Debate-Will-Never-Die#cmt</comments>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Media Planners Are an Endangered Species, But Don’t Save Them!]]></title>
      <description><![CDATA[“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 objective ..]]></description>
      <link>http://brandrp.com/post/index/15/Media-Planners-Are-an-Endangered-Species-But-Dont-Save-Them</link>
      <pubDate>Fri, 12 Aug 2011 05:27:04 +0000</pubDate>
      <category>General</category>
      <comments>http://brandrp.com/post/index/15/Media-Planners-Are-an-Endangered-Species-But-Dont-Save-Them#cmt</comments>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Forget Media Planning, embrace Content Planning]]></title>
      <description><![CDATA[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 &amp; capability. 

We always treat media these days as Owned, Bought &amp; Earned Media, likewise Content can be Created, Bought &amp; 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 o ..]]></description>
      <link>http://brandrp.com/post/index/14/Forget-Media-Planning-embrace-Content-Planning</link>
      <pubDate>Mon, 18 Jul 2011 08:38:28 +0000</pubDate>
      <category>General</category>
      <comments>http://brandrp.com/post/index/14/Forget-Media-Planning-embrace-Content-Planning#cmt</comments>
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      <title><![CDATA[The more you talk about price, more the customer evaluates you on price! ]]></title>
      <description><![CDATA[This is in continuation of the &quot;Pricing vs Branding&quot; 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?]]></description>
      <link>http://brandrp.com/post/index/11/The-more-you-talk-about-price-more-the-customer-evaluates-you-on-price</link>
      <pubDate>Tue, 15 Jul 2008 05:54:56 +0000</pubDate>
      <category>General</category>
      <comments>http://brandrp.com/post/index/11/The-more-you-talk-about-price-more-the-customer-evaluates-you-on-price#cmt</comments>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Sensory Branding ]]></title>
      <description><![CDATA[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, &quot;You've got mail.&quot;
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 on ..]]></description>
      <link>http://brandrp.com/post/index/10/Sensory-Branding</link>
      <pubDate>Tue, 15 Jul 2008 05:54:03 +0000</pubDate>
      <category>General</category>
      <comments>http://brandrp.com/post/index/10/Sensory-Branding#cmt</comments>
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    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Brand Activation: Bringing Your Brand To Life ]]></title>
      <description><![CDATA[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. Thats 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. Dont 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 b ..]]></description>
      <link>http://brandrp.com/post/index/9/Brand-Activation-Bringing-Your-Brand-To-Life</link>
      <pubDate>Tue, 15 Jul 2008 05:53:24 +0000</pubDate>
      <category>General</category>
      <comments>http://brandrp.com/post/index/9/Brand-Activation-Bringing-Your-Brand-To-Life#cmt</comments>
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      <title><![CDATA[Integrating Corporate Strategy &amp; Brand Management ]]></title>
      <description><![CDATA[
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 &amp; 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 oppos ..]]></description>
      <link>http://brandrp.com/post/index/8/Integrating-Corporate-Strategy--Brand-Management</link>
      <pubDate>Tue, 15 Jul 2008 05:52:49 +0000</pubDate>
      <category>General</category>
      <comments>http://brandrp.com/post/index/8/Integrating-Corporate-Strategy--Brand-Management#cmt</comments>
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      <title><![CDATA[Is your brand vulnerable to price reductions? Read on.]]></title>
      <description><![CDATA[India has always been a price sensitive market. People succumb to price falls. Most of the customers 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 todays 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 &quot;price factor&quot; 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 &quot;emotional cushion&quot; 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 &quot;strong brand preference&quot; which in turn will generate sales.
&quot;TVS Gold&quot; keyboards brand is the second example of a brand which has fought price wars with its &quot;quality&quot; 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 pri ..]]></description>
      <link>http://brandrp.com/post/index/7/Is-your-brand-vulnerable-to-price-reductions-Read-on</link>
      <pubDate>Tue, 15 Jul 2008 05:51:51 +0000</pubDate>
      <category>General</category>
      <comments>http://brandrp.com/post/index/7/Is-your-brand-vulnerable-to-price-reductions-Read-on#cmt</comments>
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