Marketing Guru

About Marketing-Guru.In

Marketing Guru — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 12:00:02 +0000

The goal of this website is to impart marketing knowledge to the people who do not have a marketing degree but are interested and want to learn about marketing. This could also be helpful to marketing students to get practical feel of marketing. This could also act as a reference for marketing professionals. However, our primary goal is to serve the needs of regular people seeking to understand marketing properly. Especially since marketing is commonly misunderstood as sales in India.

Sales Vs. Marketing Vs. Advertising

Marketing Guru — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 06:49:50 +0000

Sales is called marketing in India – This is due to little or no awareness of what marketing is. Sales and marketing means the same thing to most people in India. You will notice that a majority of Indian companies call their sales persons as marketing professionals. Till recently, with protected markets and an economy controlled by licenses, the Indian market was a seller’s market. Companies were not required to do marketing.

Only off late, due to increased competition, customer awareness, and changing buyer preferences, companies have started realizing that increased production does not translate into higher sales. Since sales has been called as marketing in India, when a real position has been created it causes much confusion.

See what professionals do or don’t do in Sales, Marketing & Advertising Jobs.

Job Functions	Sales Professionals	Marketing Professionals	Advertising Professionals
Pursue prospects to buy a company’s products or services	Yes	No	No
Personal sales targets	Yes	No	No
Direct contact with customers /have personal sales targets	Yes	No	No
Find needs/wants of customers	No	Yes	No
Build new products by adding or changing product features	No	Yes	No
Have product or segment targets & estimates size of market	No	Yes	No
Create advertisement campaigns – radio/TV/print /web	No	Yes (coordinate)	Yes (create)
Execute promotion plan & perform profitability analysis	No	Yes (design)	Yes

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Marketing Champion – Steve Jobs

Marketing Guru — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 11:53:15 +0000

Not all the successful marketers have marketing degree and similarly not all the marketing graduates are successful in marketing. One of the best examples of the clan of successful marketers without marketing degree is Steve Jobs.

Steven Paul “Steve” Jobs (born February 24, 1955) is the co-founder and CEO of Apple Inc and a Silicon Valley icon. Jobs also founded NeXT Computer Company now part of Apple Inc. and served as CEO of Pixar Animation Studios now part of Walt Disney Company. As Philip Kotler rightly said, “Marketing’s work should not be so much about selling but about creating products that don’t need selling”, Steve Jobs has just did this time and again. Jobs captivated everyone including his rivals with his elegant line of products such as the Apple, iMac, iTunes, iPod, iPhone and the new iPad. He is habituated to revolutionize the market in whatever he is interested in.

In the late 1970s, Jobs, teamed with Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, Mike Markkula and others to design, develop, and market some of the first commercially successful lines of PCs including the Apple II series and Macintosh. In the early 1980s, Jobs was among the first to vision the market potential of the GUI. However, in 1985, Jobs resigned from Apple because of internal power struggle. He was not part of the Apple Inc. until he came back in 1997, and has been serving as its CEO since then. Jobs is also a Board of Director of Walt Disney Company.

Steve Jobs – a marketing genius

Made masses to feel and enjoy the digital technology
Steve Jobs envisioned that a software program can do wonders rather than just be dry codes and instructions in PCs. His creativity brought digital technology to the reach of a commoner and introduced new experiences that were only seen in the science fiction movies. As a marketing genius, he introduced elegant products that captured consumers’ imaginations that immediately smashed the existing products. As a perfectionist, he came up with unmatched improvement in the existing products that raised the bar for rivals.

Products that don’t need selling
Once Steve Jobs said, “It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” He has done just that four times. The first is the Apple II. It is the first PC to reach the classrooms and offices, which was till then seen mostly at advanced science and technology institutions operated by techies. His Pixar Animation redefined the cartoon movies till then which was popular mostly with kids. The ‘incredible’ animation starting with ‘Toy Story’ in 1995 made the animation as an important part of the Hollywood mainstream. Four of the six animation films nominated for Academy awards have won it. Thirdly, he stunned the music industry with iPod and iTunes online store. The combo laid the blueprint for the new generation music business in the Internet era. Finally, it’s the iPhone that revolutionized the smart-phone segment with its futuristic design and technology. Apple recently released tablet PC called iPad, which is set to stir the markets of tablet PC and net books.

Destructive innovation
Industry experts attribute the success of Apply to the job done by Steve Jobs who has no parallel in the technology innovation. Jobs is termed as a master marketer with more than 30 years of experience of creating stylish products with great design that works. Jobs lured Disney to takeover Pixar and made agreements with music companies and Hollywood studios to create the market for iTunes music store that already sold more than 8 billion songs online. Apple leads the industry in technology innovation also with Mac PCs and software. Apple is also leading the digital music revolution, by already selling more than 240 million iPods and entered the smart phone market introducing iPhone.

One should remember that none of the products’ idea or concept is completely invented by them. There is animation existing before Pixar, there were mp3 players before iPod and similar case with the other products. All the products and service ideas already existed in the market. Nevertheless, what Steve Jobs did is, visualizing the future of certain capable products and services in the next 5 to 6 years and introduce a completely new way of interaction with technology to the customers. It’ll be more appropriate if we call it destructive imagination or creativity rather than innovation.

Steve Jobs’ Best Quotes

It comes from saying no to 1,000 things to make sure we don’t get on the wrong track or try to do too much.
A lot of companies have chosen to downsize, and maybe that was the right thing for them. We chose a different path. Our belief was that if we kept putting great products in front of customers, they would continue to open their wallets.
Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected.
Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.
Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.
To turn really interesting ideas and fledgling technologies into a company that can continue to innovate for years, it requires a lot of disciplines.
You can’t just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new.
It’s not the consumers’ job to know what they want.

Simple Way to Write Promotional Material

Marketing Guru — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 06:08:29 +0000

In almost all job positions you are required to write something positive about a product, idea, method, or a project. This is typically very challenging for most people. In such situations, a simple model called FABing is helpful in creating good promotional material in short time. Typically you will have only few seconds to convince the reader about how this project or product can solve their problems or get success.

It is essential to know about all the features, advantages, and benefits while writing any promotional material. But, it is important to know what are exactly Features, Advantages, and Benefits:
Features: The features describe about the components or characteristics of the product, project, or method that has to be promoted.
Advantages: Advantages indicate what the features can do. Advantages demonstrate how the feature can help the person. They are more persuasive than features.
Benefits: Benefits are most important aspect in FAB and plays a key role in promoting any idea or product or project. Benefits actually describe how the product or idea can meet the core requirements and solve the problems being faced by people.

A person knowing about the features can have advantage and reap benefits from it. Let us see how to use FAB to write promotional material.

Features: While listing down the features, it should be noted that they have to be clear, concise, and precise. Features should give clear picture to the readers about the characteristics of the product or idea or services offered by the company.

For example, a milk product may have features like 20% protein, pasteurized, high fat level, contains vitamin and mineral supplements etc.

Advantages: Advantages indicate what the features can do compared to other similar products or services. It is a slight progression in terms of information that features offer. Mentioning advantages in a clear manner will help readers perceive about project or idea easily. Advantages that are important for readers should be mentioned specifically as they grab the attention of readers/listeners. Mentioning about specific advantages about product or idea can give competitive advantage and makes the idea or product more appealing. Advantages provide information on superiority of the product compared to alternatives.

For example, the advantages of milk product can be that it meets recommended protein requirement, meets high energy requirements, easy to digest, rich protein and minerals source, no need to boil etc.

Benefits: The aim of mentioning benefits is to solve the problems, difficulties, and meet specific requirement of the reader. The benefits indicate how the features having particular advantage will help to address or solve problems and meet the needs of the reader. The benefits include points that indicate what the features mean for reader. Benefits immediately highlight the selling points that are of relevance to the readers. They give a personal touch to the reader. The customers mostly look for features that benefit them. More the benefits provided by the product; more are the chances of influencing the reader to approve the product or purchase it. The features and advantages take the product or services one step closer to purchase but it’s the benefits which actually sells the product or idea.

For Example, the benefits of the milk product might be that it helps in giving high performance, ensure good health of children, helps to develop immunity, no contamination etc.

The FAB statement simplifies the process of writing promotional material.

So whenever you have to create a promotional material, just relax! You now know how to handle it. List all the features of the product. Think how the product is advantageous (better) than others. Then finally figure out who are the people who will buy the product. Once you know that then explain the benefits of the product in solving a problem or fulfilling a desire. That’s it. It is that simple.

Even Small Brands Make it Large in Consumer Superbrands

Marketing Guru — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 13:58:23 +0000

Do you think that small brands have low customer loyalty and lower proportion of purchases compared to large brands? Then you are mistaken. There are many small brands that made a huge positive impact on consumer’s life. This can be simply explained by analyzing the ‘Superbrands’.

‘Superbrands’ is an organization that publishes brand-focused books and publications on regular intervals. They list the brands that have maintained highest standards of product integrity. Getting into the list of ‘Consumer Superbrands’ is considered as a prestigious symbol of exceptional achievement and credibility by many brands. It is like winning Oscar in business. They are selected by consumers and industry experts.

Till now, Superbrands India released 3 editions of Consumer Superbrands. First edition of Consumer Superbrands had 101 brands and was released in 2004. The second and third editions listed 91 brands each and were released in 2007 and 2009 respectively.

Small brands make their presence felt
In the three editions it released, there were some big foreign brands which are most recognized in the world such as Cadbury (04 & 07), Castrol (07 & 09), American Express (04), Johnson’s (04), HSBC (07 & 09), Louis Philippe (04 & 09), etc.

Surprisingly, brands from small companies also made their way into the prestigious Superbrands list, including Boroline (04, 07 & 09), Everest spices (04, 07 & 09), BILT (07 & 09), Kajaria (07 &09), Kohinoor (07 & 09), Prestige (07 & 09), Nirma (04, 07 & 09), Catch (07) etc.

Some regional brands like Anandabazar Patrika (04) from West Bengal, Malayala Manorama (04 & 07) from Kerala etc. also established themselves as Superbrands. Not all Superbrands winners are big size. There are several small companies proving without doubt that you need to add value to customers and not build large companies to earn customer good will.

Useful Quotes on Marketing (for understanding it accurately)

Marketing Guru — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 07:05:22 +0000

Marketing is the distinguishing, the unique function of the business. A business is set part from all other human organizations by the fact that it markets a product or a service. Neither church, nor army, nor school, nor state does that. Any organization that fulfills itself through marketing a product or service is a business. Any organization in which marketing is either absent or incidental is not a business and should never be run as if it were one.

Essential Marketing Skills – Listening to Customers

Marketing Guru — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 06:20:54 +0000

Listening to customers

Let’s start with a basic but key criterion. They have to be comfortable spending time with and listening to consumers. A fundamental starting point for any great marketer is: get out of your office and spend time in the places and spaces where your consumers experience the product, no matter how senior or ‘important’ you consider yourself.

-Do you have six-pack to be a great marketer? By Mark Ritson

Visit the places where your customers experience your products/services
Listen to the feedback, reviews and experiences on the products/services from a diverse group of customers. Avoid third parties as much as possible while you are in contact with the customers. Try to be as close as possible while your customers are using the product.
Observe the usage –why-where-when-how
Keep your eyes wide open when your customers using the product. You may come across some simple ideas to improve your product that have a great impact and design new products. Note each and every aspect such as why your customers are using your product (in some cases the usage may not reflect the actual purpose of the product), where they are using the product often, when they are using i.e. at what time, location etc, and finally how they are using. Always look for the strange patterns in the customer usage or experience.
Ask questions and listen to answers from the horse’s mouth
Try to listen unbiased and objectively what the customers meant while they give the feedback rather than just what you heard or perceived. Avoid structured customer feedback environments as much as possible as this may influence and hamper the quality of the opinions of the customers.
Spend time with the customers
Listening and understanding a customer is not a one time or a yearly programme. It is a constant and continuous process. Often the executives decrease the time spent on to listening to customers as they grew in their position and influence the business decisions.
Act on the feedback
Don’t make listening to customers a namesake activity. Not valuing the information gained from the customers is a symptom of change aversion for the improvement. Make sure that the result of the action taken based on the feedback serve the purpose.

One out of the three golden Dell rules emphasis on customer feedback- Always listen to the customer.

Dell Computer was the first company to build and operate itself around the customer feedback. “Our attitude is diametrically opposed to the engineering-driven thinking of ‘Let’s invent something and then go push it onto customers who might be willing to buy it.’ Instead, I founded the company with the intention of creating products and services based on a keen sense of the customer’s input and the customer’s needs. I spend about 40% of my time with customers”, says Michael Dell

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How Understanding Customers’ Buying Behavior Helps Businesses

Marketing Guru — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 10:32:24 +0000

Customer today is influenced by a number of aspects that are factored into his buying decisions. This changes the way he behaves in certain situations, often determining whether he purchases the product or not. Subtle variations in his buying decisions can play a big role in the success or failure of a business. This article discusses about how customers’ buying behavior influences his/her purchase decision and how businesses can make use of it to increase their sales.

Importance of customer buying behavior
Studying customer behavior helps you in understanding how customers think, how they are influenced, who influences them and what motivates their purchase. Purchase is the end result in the process of customer’s decision-making. By knowing the buying behavior of a customer, businesses can get more sales out of their products or services.

Understanding customer buying behavior – what does it do to your business?

Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower – Steve Jobs

Innovate. It gives you an opportunity to be the first in the industry to identify changes in buyer’s decision making process. This provides you with a platform to come up with products or services that suit customer’s preferences more, taking them closer to the purchase. Studying customers’ buying behavior helps you in tracking the varying customer preferences, giving you a scope to innovate accordingly. Understanding customer buying behavior is important for any business as it helps in figuring out the changing needs of customers and targeting their products or services in a better way.

How to track customer buying behavior?
You can track customers’ behavior by asking them a series of questions in the form of an interview. Questions could be about various aspects like when they buy, how often they buy, in what quantities they buy, where they prefer to buy from, whose advice they choose before buying, etc. This will help you in understanding the efforts you have to take to motivate customers to purchase your products.

Going through the customers purchase records in the store can provide you with information regarding their purchase patterns. This leads to identifying the products or services that will be immediately popular and will sell well.

Being alert to the pain points or the inconveniences faced by the customers while shopping for your products proves useful. It gives you an opportunity to redesign your processes and strategies to make purchasing process simple, easy and customer friendly.

What influences CBB?
Social factors like culture, family, reference groups, opinion leader etc. play a key role in impacting purchasing decisions. Other factors like age, occupation, income levels, personality traits of individuals, degree of awareness of products and services among customers also influence customer buying behavior.

The extent of complexity involved in the purchase motivates the customer either to choose the product himself or approach his social circle for advice. For example, a customer purchasing a car tries to get as much information as possible about the various models, price, availability etc. from all sources before making a purchase. But the same customer would not gather as much information before hand when purchasing groceries.

Businesses must also keep in mind the Government policies, seasonal changes etc., which form the external factors that alter the buying patterns of a customer. For example, a sudden increase in the price of gasoline may result in an increased purchase of certain types of automobiles and vice versa.

Customer preferences do not remain same all the time. Products or services must be suited to the current needs of customers that may have changed from the past. Understanding customers’ buying behavior helps in designing products, processes, communications, advertisements, strategies that make it easy for customer to purchase the product or service from you.

Most Preferred Consumer Brands in India

Marketing Guru — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 14:00:08 +0000

Do you want to recognize and use the most preferred consumer brands in India? Then check out the ‘Consumer Superbrands’. Consumer Superbrands is a list of exclusive group of brands in India that have been voted as ‘the best’ for their image and perception by the consumers. Since its inception in India, Superbrands has released 3 editions of consumer superbrands. It released its first edition in 2004 with 101 Consumer Superbrands, second and third in 2007 and 2009 respectively with 91 brands each.

Brands listed in all 3 editions
23 consumer brands appeared in all the three editions indicating their outstanding consumer trust in their specific industry. Some of them include ACC Cement, Apollo Hospitals, Aquaguard, Archies, Ashok Leyland, Bata, Blue Dart, Boroline, Everest, Goodknight, Jaguar, Kitply, LIC, Nirma, Luxor etc.

The three time winners list not only includes the premium brands like Reid & Taylor, but also low cost brands like Nirma, Hero Cycles, Everest, Boroline etc. It also lists Public Sector Undertakings (PSU) like Servo and state government led departments like Kerala Tourism.

Two time winners
From the three editions, 49 brands appeared in two editions, which include Airtel (2004 & 2007), Anchor (07 & 09), Cinthol (04 & 09), Crompton Greaves (07 & 09), Dainik Jagran (07 & 09), Exide (04 & 07), Hindware 07 & 09), Kurlon (07 & 09), Pillsbury (07 & 09), Saridon (04 & 07), State Bank of India (04 & 07), Tata salt & tea (04 & 09), The Economic Times (04 & 07) etc.

One time winners
Some of the brands that made into the Consumer Superbrands list are Aaj Tak (07), Band-Aid (09), Bank of Baroda (04), Britannia (04), Cello (09), Close Up (04), Dabur Vatika (07), Dhara (09), Fair & Lovely (04), Fujifilm (09), Godrej expert hair dye (04), Hero Honda (04), Indane (09), India Today (04), Levi’s (04), LG home appliances (07), Lifebouy (04), Lux (07), Mahindra Tractors (09), Maruti Suzuki (04), Milton (07), Moov (04), Nycil (04), Phillips (04), Rin (04), Samsung (04), Sunsilk (04), Surf (04), Tata Sky (09), Titan (04), Wheel (04), Zandu Balm (04) etc.

Note: For complete list of 3 editions, please go to Superbrands website.

Differences Between Web Browsing and Research

Marketing Guru — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 04:36:42 +0000

Today Internet is one of the major sources of information. You can find information on almost any topic you desire on Internet. It is a huge database of useful information. It is a major repository of scholarly journals, news, books, magazines and other general information.

Two common user approaches for information access on the Internet are browsing and research. Though both are used to get the information they are very different. Specifically, the purpose, quality, time taken, strategies involved, and skill required to get the required information are very different for browsing and research.

Purpose and focus
Browsing through Internet is usually more for the purposes of entertainment and general interest. Browsing is for time pass. You stop when you get bored. Browsers work without any intent to get credible information. Browsers have tendency to get off track by the information presented on the Internet. With browsing you start somewhere and end at a totally different place. Where as, research is more for professional uses. Researchers are intent-driven and will be looking for some specific information by setting objectives. They define their objectives clearly. The objectives will be like bulls eye, which help them to stay focused on their goal.

Strategy
Browsing is generally unstructured form of searching for information. It involves navigation through information collection. It does not have any specific task to get the required information. Where as, research uses a series of queries to retrieve credible information from the Internet. Research follows a series of instructions to search, find and obtain the data.

Skill
Web research is not easy and requires considerable skills such as active mindset, vigorous hard work and patience, which are not necessary for browsing. Apart from these, a good knowledge of how the search engine works, different kinds of search operators and using the right keywords are very much essential to find and capture the relevant, latest and credible information. Search operators act as commands to the search engine to gain more specific outputs. The most commonly used search operators are the Boolean operators such as ‘AND’ ‘OR’ and ‘-‘ functions.

Time taken
Browsing doesn’t have any time limits. Due to its unstructured form, browsing the web may take more time or sometimes may not provide the desired information, even if it is readily available. Where as research is time bounded, where timelines are set clearly. Researchers usually work heads down and focus on what they are looking for, where to find the credible information and how to find the information. They know what is found till now and what exactly is to be found. They regularly narrow down their choices to get the desired information quickly.

Documentation
One of the main differences between the two is unlike net surfers, researchers save the data they have collected for further analysis. Later, when they are offline they analyze the collected data, draw the conclusions and document or present the information in simple terms, which is easy to understand.

Casually surfing for information on the Internet is not efficient in finding useful information. Where as research is more thorough and involves a lot of hard work and skill, for the same reasons, information will be of good quality.