Category: Marketing

Marketing

Don’t Just Create Content, Create Curiosity

Nothing has had more impact on the amount of content being created than the advent and growth of social media. There has been a growing consensus that every single brand is now a media by itself. Every brand is continuing to generate content at a speed at which their consumers are not even able to consume the content. The shelf life of any content is reducing drastically and for most of the content it is just a couple of hours from the time it was created or promoted. This has led to a slew of promotion of content, across media, which […]

Customer Engagement, Marketing

Are Twitter Contests the Next Big thing in Customer Engagement?

In the last 2 weeks, I have seen a flurry of twitter contests being run by various brands, including news channels (ABP News), Software Marketers, Film studios, Fashion brands, TV stations, Online retailers, Comedy shows and a lot more. The common themes in all these contests were: –       You are enticed to participate in the competition via the possibility to win a gift coupon or some sort of prize –       You are required to follow the brand’s twitter ID. –       You are required to answer a set of questions and retweet the questions to your followers In my opinion, the […]

Marketing

Was Mahatma Gandhi the Ultimate Marketer?

As India celebrates its independence day, we remember the leaders and the hundreds of thousands of martyrs who laid their lives for the country. As I look upon the history and Gandhiji’ s actions, I can’t but think of him as the ultimate marketer. The job of every marketer is to move people to action. That is exactly what he did, he moved people across the nation to action. So, I think there are some lessons that every marketer can learn from Gandhiji. Know whom you want to move: There were three sets of people – The British, The Indian […]

Marketing, Sales

How (Not) to Demo

Last week I attended a conference, where during the keynote, a cool new product was introduced and someone asked to show a demo of the product. The presenter lost the audience in two minutes flat, not due to the product not being cool, but due to the way the demo was run. I learnt the following from the demo about the art of running demos. I learnt that Talking and showing features and functions does not work anymore. Context is the key ingredient. Ensure that the demo is visible to everyone in the audience. In this case, the people sitting […]

Marketing

Advertising, Big Data and Persuasion

Advertising as we know it is changing. There are two kinds of advertising that we see now: Intrusive: This is the kind that is targeted at a customer in a moment of truth (about to buy a product/service) and will try to convince this person to buy your product/service rather than from your competitors. Persuasive: This is the kind that will create new brand associations, market categories or product positioning. As marketers and advertisers, we need to understand and decide, based on our goals, which kind of advertising is more suited to achieve our objectives. The intrusive advertisement will leverage […]