Ajita Shashidhar

ADVERTISING HAS ALWAYS BEEN ABOUT building a brand and making it visible, about making it “top of the mind ” Companies spend  crores as they jostle for space in the consumers mind (think Pepsi and Coke). But since the slowdown set in, many of the have begun questioning these huge spends. What’s the point in spending so much on building a brand, they ask, if it doesn’t translate into sales

On the ground? And so, while they haven’t exactly abandoned visibility-driven communication, they’ve been actively trying to engage consumers directly in an effort to drive the top line.

                        Just how effective and different the two approaches-visibility-driven and sales driven advertising –are can be gauged from two recent Godrej  campaigns. During this year’s Indian Premier League (IPL),the company ran a campaign called Godrej Aerospace, to highlight the fact that it manufactures rocket equipment .Godrej was hoping for a rub-off from its association with this hi-tech field. It wanted to influence the way people thought of the technology that goes into its consumer appliances and advanced security systems.

                        The Aerospace  campaign did achieve its visibility objectives When its efficacy was measured after the IPL, the brand’s awareness and value scores were found to have jumped dramatically. “ there was huge growth in word-of-mouth spread,” says Ashutosh Tiwari, Executive Directors, Marketing, Godrej Industries. However, the campaign didn’t help notch up too many actual sales. “Volume purchases didn’t go up,” admits Tiwari.

                        A few months later, Godrej launched an advertiser-funded show (AFS),called Khelo Jeeto Jiyo, on star Plus. The show was a commercial success, literally. “Khelo Jeeto Jiyo  helped us clock sales worth Rs 4 ccrore,” says Tiwari proudly. So ,why did the AFS work? Since it was a Godrej-funded game show, contenders had to purchase a Godrej product to participate in the show (45 couples were finally chosen to take part in the show through a lucky dip). The frenzy to get selected resulted in thousands flocking to stores to buy Godrej products. And the company made a killing.

                        “ We even tracked who has purchased what,” says Tiwari. Appliances and FMCG accounted for 35% each of sales, while furniture notched up the remaining 30%. The company was thus able to measure sales and get a clear picture on its return on investment (RoI),as far as its advertising was concerned.

                        To day, the Godrej group has put in place a tool to measure brand impact. “ This tool measures intangibles such as consumer awareness, brand visibility and affinity, as well as tangibles like volume and range purchases, both in absolute terms and relative to competition,” he says. These parameters are measured across brand and categories every quarter.And, importantly, the tool also measures the efficacy of ad campaigns in terms of sales, by recording each consumer’s feed-back on how and where he or she heard of the product.

                        “If you have the numbers to prove your success, you can build long-term benefits for your brand,” says Unni Krishnan, Country Manager of Brand Finance, a brand valuation company. “ Unfortunately, nine out of 10 marketers have no mechanism to communicate numbers, even though 15-20% of a company’s investments are going into marketing and advertising”.

                        Measuring Rol on advertising and marketing spends has become very crucial to day.

URED SPENDS

The slowdown is making some companies verify how much their ads are translating into sales.

Amit Dey, CEO of Axis APM, a personal media service company, agrees with Krishnan. “Marketers never talk cost or measurability, they only talk about brand-building and visibility.”

New Approach

But the slowdown is beginning to change all that. “Earlier, the emphasis was on how a brand is built and what it stands for. The current situation has forced marketers to focus on the kind of sales numbers a particular activity has translated into,” Observes Brian Almeida, MD, Direxions Global Solutions (a marketing solutions company).

Take the case of watchmaker Titan. The company has been Working hard to measure whether its advertising and marketing campaigns are translating into sales. “we thought it was important to find out whether we were spending too much, and whether we were spending it the right way,” says Suparna Mitra, Global Marketing Head Titan.

One of the best measurement points for Titan is its exclusive showrooms, which generate more than 50% of thye company’s revenues, “Our showrooms give us granular data on what is sold, the price points which sell better, and so on.” This is complemented with quantitative tracking initiatives after the launch of each and every campaign. According to Mitra, this helps the company to co-relate an advertising campaign with sales. It is even able to track which media platform works better for each of its brands.

As an example, Mitra cites Titan Raga for which the company ran print and TV Promotions. “The TV commercials got us Higher brand awareness scores…. But it was the product-centric print Campaign that actually triggered the store walk-ins and consequent retail off take.”  Mitra says the specific watch models showcased in the print and outdoor campaigns were in huge demand and ran out of stock. “ This can be attributed directly to the print and outdoor campaign. Even our media tracking studies showed this skew.”And so, during the recent festive season, the company decided to be more active on print than on TV. Though the results of the print campaign’s efficacy aren’t in yet, Mitra is confident it worked brilliantly.

“The Titan Raga Collection has been completely sold out,” she observes smugly.

The company has gone slow on television advertising even on its sub-brands, focusing instead on other media. During the IPL, for instance, Titan ran an Internet and direct-mail campaign, called  ‘Titan Of the Day’. The contest had daily winners, who were given Titan Octane watches. A few lucky winners got a chance to dine with actor Aamir Khan, who is the brand ambassador of Titan.

The contest, claims Ajoy Chawla, V.P, Titan & Retail, Titan Industries, helped the company directly engage with 150,000 Titan customers. “Traffic to our website increased five times over the same period last year,” he says. “We invested around Rs 50 lakh and reached millions, which is far more than the actual reach of a mass-media campaign”.Instead of focusing only on product and retail innovations, the economic slowdown, says Chawla, forced Titan to become “smart spenders,”

Going forward the company plans to hike its below- the-line (BTL) AND new media spends from 10% to 25%of its total advertising budget of Rs 100 crore.

“Non-mass media are much more measurable and personal.” Says Chawla. Apart from the Titan of the Day Contest, Chawla’s team also organized a ‘Paint a Dream Contest’ at its stores, associating with schools in various cities. “ We didn’t spend too much onb this contest, but the kind of footfalls we received and the connect we made with consumers was awesome.”

Getting Personal

Advertisers across industries have started embracing BTL promotions and non-mass media in a big way. Even the Rs.3,000 crore jewellery company Gitanjali gems is making its promotional activity more focused. The company has four leading brands-Nakshatra, Asmi, D’damas and Gili and spends about Rs500crore a year to market them .with the likes of Aishwarya Rai, Kareena Kapoor and Katrina Kaif as brand ambassadors, that hefty outlay is understandable. However, a recent brand valuation exercise found that while its advertising has had an impact, Gitanjali needed to get closer to the customer.

“ Earlier, we were out there to get business, now, our focus is on building a relationship with customers through our brand,” says Mehul choksi, MD Gitanjali Gems.

During the festive season, the company ran as SMS Campaign , called ‘Call Kareena’. Customers would get a message that said: ‘Call Kareena.’ If they called the number provided, they would get to meet Bolly-wood actress Kareena Kapoor at a Gitanjali store, and also avail discounts.

The SMS campaign apart from being a nice way of getting the consumer closer to the brand, also helped Gitanjali track exactly how many responses it received and how many of the text messages actually resulted in sales.

“In future, we will be investing in more such campaigns,” asserts Choksi. The company  plans to increase shopfloor advertising, BTL activities and digital marketing spend to 30% of its total advertising budget of Rs 500 crore from the current allocation of 10%.

Lloyd Mathias also finds the digital medium an amazing platform to connect with consumers directly –at a fourth of the cost of a mass-media campaign. The Tata Teleservices Chief Marketing Officer says the company has used the medium extensively to promote its Internet data card, Photon, through social networking sites such as LinkedIn and Facebook. “ Our digital spends are currently barely 5% of our total advertising spend (Rs300 crore),

but we are looking to increase this substantially in future,” says Mathias.

Rival Vodafone Essar uses a mix-and-match strategy, “ Our campaign sre built around objectives as diverse as driving imagery on one end driving sales of a  local bonus card on the others,” says Kumar Ramanathan, the company’s Chief Marketing Officer. “Brand image-oriented campaigns will be mass-media centric. On the other hand, many local sales-driving campaigns could run through a direct SMS to our customers.”

The real winner in all this has been non-mass media. The slowdown saw many companies jumping to the digital bandwag on (read Helping The Twain Meet, November14,2009). And that’s why the Rs 1000 crore digital marketing industry has grown by 70% over the last year.

“The slowdown forced advertisers to realize what the medium has to offer” says V Ramani, Vice-Chairman of digital marketing company Ignite. He believes that henceforth, marketers will not take the risk of investing in platforms that don’t give them clear-cut measurability.

Godrej’s Tiwari sums up the change in approach among marketers: “ROI measurement of marketing and advertising spends has become crucial.” Does that mean we won’t see Pepsi and Coke saturating the media with their ads? No, because brands will always need to be visible. However, marketers will begin to be wiser about their ad spends.And if that means viewers no longer have to suffer boring commercials on television today, who’s complaining?.