Marketing splurge Narrated by Balaji Pasumarthy

To get the most from marketing requires lot of thinking and right approach. The best way to select visibility options would be to select media which reach your customer or be present where your customer is likely to visit. New unconventional marketing methods could be used if it appeals to the target customers. It might involve risk but still it is worth trying.

"When spending on Marketing, creativity and smart thinking is a must."

"Let's go all out and paint the town red. That's the best way to launch the product." "Sales were low because we did not have enough advertisements."

Sounds familiar? The typical reaction to marketing spend is we need more. More presence in the mainstream dailies, hoardings across town and TV spots. Ask a media advisor for a marketing plan for a new product and the typical method is to focus on advertisements in the main line dailies. No wonder the marketing spend more often than not, is a bombshell.

Rajesh Jain, of the India World fame once shared with me his disdain for advertising, and how ineffective if not unreliable it is. He personally refrains from using advertising, and instead tries to find unconventional ways to reach out to his market. He says, for advertising to be effective you need to have repeated inserts, and that can be very costly. Rajesh Jain's view point is on one extreme end of a spectrum, the other end being the die hard ‘established media' loyalists who do not want to waver from the conventional media and methods.

The answer can be found by looking a little more closely at how your customers behave.

I have always noticed that when I learn a new word I keep bumping across it in newspapers, conversations, novels, etc. The word was always in vogue but my awareness of it enhances the chances of noticing it. The eye sees what it wants to see. Therefore, to make me see something that I am not aware of one needs to really shout out loud, and if one were using a main line daily, well nothing short of a full page advertisement might do the trick. Now that's a lot of money. The flip side of this is that if I am aware of something my eye immediately catches it, as I flip through the news paper, or as I drive past billboards.

For someone launching a new product, the key is to first create interest and plant the name and concept firmly into the consumers' mind. Broadly speaking there could be two approaches, create a need to experience the product or announce it in a manner that he does not miss it.

Product or service experience could be created through road shows, seminars, exhibitions, one to one meetings, etc.

Loud announcements could be created by taking big space in mainstream dailies. This sure would cost a lot. A more cost effective way could be to focus on more targeted media, like industry journals, industry segments, specific demographics, etc. For instance, if one were to launch a youth focused product one could well use the newsletters kept in coffee cafes and cyber cafes. If one were to target the business decision makers in Bangalore one could use Businessgyan. Sending in direct mailers is a great way, though it can prove very expensive if large numbers are involved.

The best way to select visibility options would be to select media which reach your customer or be present where your customer is likely to visit. Events targeted at focused customer groups are a great place to be visible in.

The other important place to be in is where the customer is likely to seek information. Yellow pages and product directories make sense if the product category is an established one.

Rajesh Jain currently is a big fan of Blogs found on the internet, he claims that this is a great way to reach out to people. He does spend a lot of time on it. For instance, he posts something new every day. That requires a lot of dedication.

Harish Bijoor once in an interview with Businessgyan narrated how they had once put a marketing message on eggs and created a sensation. How for Tata Coffee they had made the largest coffee cup in the world, the publicity that followed for this was well worth it.

Of course dealing with unconventional methods has its own risks. The most important one being what if someone in your organization questions your wisdom. The adage "No CIO got fired for buying an IBM machine" works here as well. n

The narrator is the Chief Catalyst of businessgyan, his areas of interest are business strategy and innovation.

From - ABINASH BERA