Consumer Insight is Critical

To be a successful marketer, the most important aspect to understand is consumer insight. Perhaps no one knows this better than Rohan Jain, Marketing Head-English Cluster of Channels, Sony Pictures Networks, India. He has extensive marketing experience in the Media and broadcasting as well as the telecom vertical, having worked with industry leaders such as Vi and Idea Cellular. At a Marketing Symposium at a leading University, Rohan talks about the experiences and brand stories that cultivated his love for marketing and why consumer insight is the key to a successful marketing campaign.

I think consumer insights is something that has shaped and driven whatever I have done in my career. When I was in campus at IIM Lucknow, I was an engineer like 90% of my co-batch mates, and I had a huge love for numbers. I always thought I was going to pursue my career in Finance. In fact, I took most of my electives in Finance. But I ended up becoming a marketing professional and that was by choice because during the period I was at IIM, I came across a lot of consumer insight stories which had a huge impact on me. I decided that there is nothing that defies logic than consumer insights. During my career I have done a lot of analytics on data, I have had the privilege of working for a long time with the telecom industry, I have also done product management, and most recently, I have worked in the field of brand building and communications.

Let me start talking about consumer insights with something that I grew up admiring. In 2007, it was the first year of IPL. Club cricket was an entirely new idea to the country. There was a lot of nervousness whether the concept would work or not. Sony pictures bid for the broadcasting rights of IPL amidst this uncertainty. The concern was how to make this property work. Is it just about creating a creative marketing campaign? It basically starts with a great consumer insight. So what was the consumer insight in this case? In 2007, starting a new property, a club cricket tournament which runs for 30-40 days is a risky proposition. A lot of money rides on TV viewership. Another insight is that 95% of the TVs in India come from single television households. This means that if the entire household is not watching the TV, it is very difficult for the males in the household to ensure that the TV is tuned on to a particular program for 4 hours. You are going to play this at Prime Time, when a lot of soap operas are broadcast on the TV. How then do you ensure that you get audiences to watch your program? The key idea to do this is to ensure that cricket moves away from being a male bastion sport to something which is entertaining for the whole family to watch. This is where the entire concept of ‘manoranjan ka baap’ came. As a marketer, what is the first thing that would come to your mind when you think of the IPL? Primarily the rivalry between Sachin, Sehwag, and Ganguly along with other world class players. But that audience was already captured. They were anyway going to watch. You wanted to speak to audiences who did not enjoy cricket as much because you wanted them to watch TV for four hours every day for 30-40 days. That journey started with this communication and it carried on and I think that is what has made IPL what it is today. IPL rights sold for more than Rs 3000 crore for one season in the last bidding. That’s the power of insights.

"A lot of brands journeys will tell you about consumer insights, but how do you find it? What has worked for me and what I have seen work for a lot of brands is obsession.Obsession about the consumer, brand, & the entire category"

So how do you find an insight? A lot of brands journeys will tell you about consumer insights, but how do you find it? What has worked for me and what I have seen work for a lot of brands is obsession. Obsession about the consumer, obsession about your brand, obsession about the entire category. Obsession about not just these things, but also about the consumer’s way of thinking. The deeper you look into these categories, the more the chances that you will figure out one small insight. Was it a non-intuitive insight of bringing the entire family angle to the IPL marketing? No, but the thought of doing an entire different form of communication was new. Even the product packaging was new. When we introduced Mandira Bedi as co-host, a lot of people scoffed at the idea of a glamorous lady talking about cricket instead of experts. But we were very clear that we wanted to move away from the very technical aspects of the game, and try something which would entertain the whole family.

There is no timeframe for how an insight can come. Sometimes it can take weeks, months and even years for a small insight to materialise, but then you have to figure out how to blow that small insight into working for your brand. There is a small paradox here. People say “Go very deep”, but I would say that go broad rather than deep. Let me give you an example from one of our brands Sony BBC Earth, which is an infotainment channel. We were looking for who the consumers were who would watch our channel. We met a lot of consumers. But we did not just stop at looking at what channels they watch and what content they liked, we went beyond to try and understand the entire lifespan of this consumer. What are his aspirations? What are the kind of people that he looks up to? What are the kind of people that he interacts with/ What are the kind of people that he wants to impress upon? All these insights come when you go broad.

Marketers are essentially storytellers, and there have been some stories which have enthralled me, and this is one such story. The reason I love this story is because this is a consumer insight used by a very non-assuming person in a very non-assuming scenario in the 17th century. Those who have travelled would know that the Germans love potatoes. But the potato did not originate in Germany or even Europe for that matter. It was brought in through some colonial acquisition in the 17th century. The king believed in the nutritional and economic power of the potato. That’s why he wanted every one of his subjects to try it. He even brought in a legislation mandating farmers to cultivate it. But that did not help. So what did he do next? He announced that henceforth, the potato would be a royal vegetable, and he did not stop at that. He ensured that where potatoes were being cultivated, there were soldiers placed to guard them. What was the impact of this? People began to believe in the royal value of the vegetable. People started wanting to have it. Then people began cultivating it in greater numbers. The King ensured that for a while, the people could not get their hands on it. Then when he finally made it available for everyone, people jumped onto the vegetable. This is a great insight that people covet most what they can’t have. I love this example because it was introduced in the 17th century.

Another example is from colonial India. When the British came here, they were struggling with the snake population. They felt that there were too many snakes in their vicinity and they didn’t know how to handle this. One British officer proposed that locals should be given an incentive to bring dead snakes. This worked very well. But what he missed is that Indians are very indigenous. They thought this was a great way to earn money. They started breeding snakes and killing them. Once the British realised this, they took away the incentives. Once Indians realised that no more money was coming, they left all the snakes that they had bred. This led to a rise in the snake population. What had started off as an inconvenience for the British became an even bigger problem. What this reveals is that there is a huge cultural aspect of understanding consumer nuances.

"There is no timeframe for how an insight can come. Sometimes it can take weeks, months and even years for a small insight to materialise, but then you have to figure out how to blow that small insight into working for your brand"

You cannot apply the understandings from one culture to another as it is. Let me tell you from my own example. I was in Delhi and this was the time when 4G had just been launched. We of cource wanted more and more consumers to consume our services. One day, I was in the market and I realised that the mobile retailers know which consumers had 4G handsets. I suggested to them that whenever a consumer comes in with a 4G handset, please try to push our SIM into it. We offered Rs 50 as extra commission if the retailer gave our SIM to a 4G consumer. For the first month, I saw that our SIMs in 4G handsets had increased. At the end of 3 months, we realised that no, it isn’t our 4G user base that has increased. It turned out that retailers were crafty. What they did is that they had their own handsets. Before giving the SIM to the consumer with a 3G phone, they would put the SIM into their own 4G handsets. We figured this out and corrected it, ensuring that they won’t be able to cheat us like this. 6 months later, I got transferred to the North East. I launched 4G services there again.

One day I was in Dimapur in Nagaland. I thought I was battle hardened from my previous experiences and I knew what I must do. So from Day 1, I told retailers that I would give them incentives for selling 4G handsets, but it must be done by following a certain process to ensure that there is no cheating. I was very confident and I told my business head that this is going to be a success. But to my shock, it did not move at all. This was my first visit to Nagaland. Through my subsequent visits to the state, I realised that this a very different market when it comes to culture. The retailers here were mainly women, and their word carried a lot of weight with the local consumers. The consumers would buy what they suggested. The retailers took a lot of personal interest in recommending products to the consumers. They would use it first and ensure that it is the right thing for the consumer before recommending it. They were not hungry for additional incentives. We had to go back to the drawing board and try some other strategy. The point I am trying to make is that consumer insight is so important to understand.

What works at one time does not necessarily work at a different time. Let me give you the example of IPL. IPL doesn’t try to be out of the box in terms of marketing anymore. Over the last 15 years, it has already established itself as family entertainment. Now the focus is on getting more excitement around the property so that it doesn’t become stale. The focus changes as the culture, geography and time changes.

In conclusion, let me take you through some brand stories which have personally moved me. The first one I want to talk about is Surf excel. Before coming up with ‘Daag achhe hai’, campaign, the communication this entire category made was all about the benefits of the detergent, for exe, my shirt is whiter than yours, my clothes are more fragrant, etc. then came a long a huge bit of consumer insight. Surf asked themselves who are their consumers. The answer was housewives. What is their biggest concern? Their kids. Where do kids develop? In the outside world, where they are free to do whatever they want. How can this insight be built into the brand? When kids are uninhibited, that is when they are happy. When kids play, their clothes invariably become dirty. The stains are good. Hence ‘Daag achhe hai’, Let your kids play, Surf Excel will take care of everything else. This is a beautiful insight.

Another brand that I love for its communication is Dove. It has differentiated itself from others in its category. Other brands say “If you use our product, you will become beautiful. Dove says “You are already beautiful”. I want you to realise just how beautiful you are. Dove is a PNG brand and this is a communication strategy they have taken across the world. This is what happens when brands draw a very simple insight but then manage to convert that insight into a very powerful marketing brief. Consumer insight is a nuance of consumer behaviour. A marketing brief is the connecting point of that insight with how it can help your brand. On top of that comes the creativity, which you see in TV ads and print ads which brings alive that marketing brief into a beautiful wave which touches the emotion of the people. Marketers need to understand the job of a brand marketer. A brand marketer is someone who understands the final nuance of the consumer insights of the particular brand and category.