Brand(y) Mix - The Heady Feeling

The guru was in full flow, errr i meant Philip Kotler's Indiatimes lecture in Mumbai recently. Talking about his much maligned 4 P concepts (that even got extended to 8 Ps by self styled marketers) , he was woeful about how marketers and brand managers were focusing only on the P of Promotions and not having a balanced 4P approach. Sad, albeit very true.

Guruji, dont was your time. There seems to be lack of powerful ideas that can break the clutter.
Same old ideas of advertising and ad-making . Over that, spending crores of obscene money in media buying and advertising Somehow i hate the ad community , not only because they are a pseudo crowd, but i think that "ideas" seem to have dried out completely. Same old wine in news bottles.

Personally, there has definitely been a big relief (according to me) in the big bad brand world. Its about Coke and Pepsi. No we are not talking about CSE's Sunita Narain raking the issue of fertilisers again and confirming the level of fertilisers in soft drinks to be decided by 2004 end.

I am talking about the complete & total withdrawal of media advertising by Coke for the last couple of months and Pepsi's decision to carry on with the old ads and also reducing the number of spots. More suprising is that it comes at a time when cricket is at its fever pitch with the Australians raring to knock the daylights out of the Indian team.

With the big bosses of both Coke and Pepsi visiting India back to back and deciding to focus more on operations rather than marketing , has brough about a lot of cheer in me. Thank heavens, someone from US has to come and tell the goofies and mickeys in Gurgaon - "Stop Advertising, Focus on Operations, distribution and financial restructuring".

To just quote some numbers...coke spent close to Rs 50 crores for advertising in the first half of this year (thats the size of a small and medium enterprise) with unofficial accumulated losses being put at almost 2000 crores. Thats the revenues of one quarter of TCS.

I strongly believe in IASP (Individualised Area Specific Promotions) rather than big budget star cast ads , shot by film makers (includes Rajiv Menon, Ashutosh Gowariker) and self proclaimed promiscuos (and proud of it) geniuses (Prahald Kakkar obviously no one else). A focused hard hitting approach makes better impact and has a stronger brand recall and better word of mouth results. Not just that, it also does not burn the pockets.

But the best part is , the number of people who will get employment is much more than in print and media advertising which only further deepens the pockets of Colvyn Harrises (the new JWT Head) and the Suhel Seths of the world. (Furthermore to irritate people , Suhel Seth is acting in films. Wonder what he would do if he really were smart)...

Lets just hope that these are positive indicators and that print and media advertising costs comes down and more "big ideas" emerge that can revolutionise selling.