Why Marketing? Because I Lurrve It.
I’ve always had a love for marketing. It grew from a sense of glamour and excitement when a teenage, impressionable I used to listen to my 20-something cousins, employed in advertising agencies like HTA (now JWT) and O&M (now Ogilvy), used to talk breathlessly about ads, about strategies, about campaigns, about accounts and creatives, about media and planning.
OK, maybe not media planning. No, that was never glamorous.
But I heard about Freddy Birdy and the Polo (“The mint with the hole”) ads, about Alyque Padamsee and his legend, about the Amul campaigns and Bharat Dabholkar. I learnt, in those times of the domination of print, to find out which agency did the campaign by checking out the fine print at the bottom of the ad. In my mid-teens, I knew which agencies worked with which brands (HTA did Pepsi, I remember).
I also remember hearings stories about advertising and positioning, and how it affected brands and how the world came to see them. I heard about how BMW tried to sell their cars to nouveau riche Arab sheikhs during the 70s oil crisis and how Mercedes didn’t; BMW then became known as a car for nouveau riche, Merc for the upper class old money. I heard about how the popular (though apocryphal) story of Santa Claus came from Coke’s campaigns.
Advertising (not marketing, didn’t know of that yet) was a magical realm, a world of ideas and creativity, of cool copy and stunning visuals, about reading between lines, subtle (and sometimes unsubtle) humour, about the power of minimalism and the strength of visuals. It was populated by intellectual giants and quirky freaks, people outside the pale of what a south Indian boy growing up in a lower middle-class, academically-inclined household could aspire to become. I stood on the shoulders of giants. And a new world opened up for me.
As I was finishing my graduation in print journalism in Delhi, I had to pick a media-related topic for my final semester project. I chose Coke vs Pepsi: The Advertising Wars. From what I had gleaned from listening in on conversations among my cousins and their friends, I had a good idea of how this had unfolded. For more details, in those pre-internet days, I dug deep into books and reports to understand how these two companies, selling practically indistinguishable products, had made their marks in people’s minds separately and distinctly.
The project report was, to toot my own horn, a masterpiece of chicanery; the story was perfect, but I wanted to write it in the style of a news story (I was interning at a news channel at the time), so it required various quotes (soundbytes) from people involved. I knew none. So I made them up. Interspersing the story were quotes from people like Robert Goizueta (once president of Coke) and the India head of HTA. My guide for the project, business editor of the news channel I interned at, thought the world of the it, telling me that the story was exactly right, though the quotes, and the bibliography (I made up 15 book titles), was a sham.
I got 49 on 50 for the project.
This love affair for marketing continued into my working life as I got into the audio-visual content medium. I made a ton of corporate AVs and other below-the-line films for a variety of brands in my early- to mid-twenties, and made a ton of money from them too. As I worked in television, I got to know the concept of AFPs (advertiser funded programming), title sponsors and the like.
Eventually I drifted into the digital medium and specialised in branded content, creating videos for the likes of Airtel, Google, Ford, Titan and Lenovo. I started understanding the marketing landscape, how it operated, how it affected people. I started to comprehend the new digital consumer and her appreciation (or lack thereof) of marketing directed towards her.
Briefly, a few years ago, I also worked as the Creative Director at a small ad agency. Didn’t work out, but I did tilt at that windmill.
Because, in the end, marketing is about people, isn’t it? It’s about their wants, their needs, their dreams and aspirations, their triggers and inspirations. To be able to sell something to someone, you need to know who they are, what makes them tick, what drives them and what they see themselves as, collectively and individually. To be able to market something, you need to know people.
Now, in the middle of my productive years, I decided to learn about marketing properly. It helped that I worked at an online education platform. And when the company allowed employees to take up any of the programmes it offered, I jumped at the chance to solidify my understanding of marketing, to get my head around the technical bits that were the cogs and wheels within the edifice.
This, then, is my blog. It is a personal enterprise more than anything else. As I go through each concept, through each session, I will be writing down the gist of what I learned. Purely because, if I have to put down what I learnt in a clear concise and comprehensible manner, I need to understand whatever I’m writing about.
And maybe, inspire someone else with the dreams of marketing.
OK, maybe not media planning. No, that was never glamorous.
But I heard about Freddy Birdy and the Polo (“The mint with the hole”) ads, about Alyque Padamsee and his legend, about the Amul campaigns and Bharat Dabholkar. I learnt, in those times of the domination of print, to find out which agency did the campaign by checking out the fine print at the bottom of the ad. In my mid-teens, I knew which agencies worked with which brands (HTA did Pepsi, I remember).
I also remember hearings stories about advertising and positioning, and how it affected brands and how the world came to see them. I heard about how BMW tried to sell their cars to nouveau riche Arab sheikhs during the 70s oil crisis and how Mercedes didn’t; BMW then became known as a car for nouveau riche, Merc for the upper class old money. I heard about how the popular (though apocryphal) story of Santa Claus came from Coke’s campaigns.
Advertising (not marketing, didn’t know of that yet) was a magical realm, a world of ideas and creativity, of cool copy and stunning visuals, about reading between lines, subtle (and sometimes unsubtle) humour, about the power of minimalism and the strength of visuals. It was populated by intellectual giants and quirky freaks, people outside the pale of what a south Indian boy growing up in a lower middle-class, academically-inclined household could aspire to become. I stood on the shoulders of giants. And a new world opened up for me.
As I was finishing my graduation in print journalism in Delhi, I had to pick a media-related topic for my final semester project. I chose Coke vs Pepsi: The Advertising Wars. From what I had gleaned from listening in on conversations among my cousins and their friends, I had a good idea of how this had unfolded. For more details, in those pre-internet days, I dug deep into books and reports to understand how these two companies, selling practically indistinguishable products, had made their marks in people’s minds separately and distinctly.
The project report was, to toot my own horn, a masterpiece of chicanery; the story was perfect, but I wanted to write it in the style of a news story (I was interning at a news channel at the time), so it required various quotes (soundbytes) from people involved. I knew none. So I made them up. Interspersing the story were quotes from people like Robert Goizueta (once president of Coke) and the India head of HTA. My guide for the project, business editor of the news channel I interned at, thought the world of the it, telling me that the story was exactly right, though the quotes, and the bibliography (I made up 15 book titles), was a sham.
I got 49 on 50 for the project.
This love affair for marketing continued into my working life as I got into the audio-visual content medium. I made a ton of corporate AVs and other below-the-line films for a variety of brands in my early- to mid-twenties, and made a ton of money from them too. As I worked in television, I got to know the concept of AFPs (advertiser funded programming), title sponsors and the like.
Eventually I drifted into the digital medium and specialised in branded content, creating videos for the likes of Airtel, Google, Ford, Titan and Lenovo. I started understanding the marketing landscape, how it operated, how it affected people. I started to comprehend the new digital consumer and her appreciation (or lack thereof) of marketing directed towards her.
Briefly, a few years ago, I also worked as the Creative Director at a small ad agency. Didn’t work out, but I did tilt at that windmill.
Because, in the end, marketing is about people, isn’t it? It’s about their wants, their needs, their dreams and aspirations, their triggers and inspirations. To be able to sell something to someone, you need to know who they are, what makes them tick, what drives them and what they see themselves as, collectively and individually. To be able to market something, you need to know people.
Now, in the middle of my productive years, I decided to learn about marketing properly. It helped that I worked at an online education platform. And when the company allowed employees to take up any of the programmes it offered, I jumped at the chance to solidify my understanding of marketing, to get my head around the technical bits that were the cogs and wheels within the edifice.
This, then, is my blog. It is a personal enterprise more than anything else. As I go through each concept, through each session, I will be writing down the gist of what I learned. Purely because, if I have to put down what I learnt in a clear concise and comprehensible manner, I need to understand whatever I’m writing about.
And maybe, inspire someone else with the dreams of marketing.
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