Think beyond categories and consumption
In the past marketers have focused too narrowly on a category or customer group, it is time to go wide
Pay attention is a peremptory childhood admonishment heard from irate teachers, despairing parents and expensive tutors. It is meant to save young minds from the wasteland of woolgathering and root them in the fertility of attentiveness. Success, it is implied, comes from a hard, unyielding concentration on a task. This is not new in India—Arjuna impressed Dronacharya by a single point focus on the eye of the bird. We carry this concept—that attention needs to be tunnel-like—through life, and into our beliefs about marketing. It is reinforced by business school professors, work-place mentors and thought-leaders. Advertising pedestalizes reductionism by insisting client briefs are distilled into a single communication idea.
Focus, it hardly needs to be said, has significant merit. But there are risks to too hard a focus. In his article In Search of Distraction in the Poetry Magazine, Mathew Bevis refers to Darwin’s observation about attention in The Descent of Man, “Animals clearly manifest this power, as when a cat prepares to spring on its prey.” But, Darwin added, “Wild animals sometimes become so absorbed when thus engaged that they may be easily approached.” The hazard of paying too close attention? The animal itself might become prey. We saw this in Indian telecom: while most players remained focused on voice, making incremental plays in data, Jio ate their lunch. Kodak’s focus on film, costing it a future in digital image capture, is a frequently-quoted case study on this point.
There is great value in softening attention, in shifting focus, in looking at all of Dronacharya’s bird, not just its eye. Back in the early-2000s, performance-led differentiation in premium detergents, (Surf Excel and Ariel in India), had plateaued. Unilever’s Global Brand Director David Arkwright, with Lowe & Partners’ strategist Pierre-Emmanuel Maire, found a new strategy for worldwide growth. They discovered several reasons why consumers had less dirt on clothes: long hours in sterile offices, decrease in outdoor leisure, years of advertising that ‘dirt on clothes impedes success’. For growth, consumers had to change their attitude to dirt: instead of avoiding it, they needed to go out and get dirty. This led David and PierreEmmanuel to the idea that ‘dirt is good’, leading to multiple interpretations globally, including Surf Excel’s popular ‘puddle war’ ad in India.
Silvia Lagnado took over the Knorr brand globally in the late 2000s. Knorr was, for historical reasons, principally soups, stock cubes and freeze-dried meals. This brought convenience to the preparation of meals, but offered little opportunity for short-term product value addition. Silvia and her team widened their marketing gaze, looked beyond Knorr to what meals do for families. They found a world of benefits. Families that ate together are better bonded, emotionally happier and physically stronger; children are interested in a wider range of subjects, have larger vocabularies, are high in self-confidence and do better in life. The team had found a powerful brand idea: The magic of mealtimes. Knorr wasn’t about just soup, it was about the benefits of family meals.
Shifting attention isn’t only about widening of one’s gaze. It could be about making hitherto unseen connections. A famous story in science is Sir Isaac Newton’s discovery of gravity. Newton was obsessed by the orbit of the Moon around the Earth, and eventually reasoned that the influence of gravity must extend over vast distances. Noticing how apples always fall straight to the ground in 1666, he spent several years working on the mathematics of gravity. Newton’s attention was on the moon; when his focus moved to the apple he understood gravity.
Too funnel-like a focus could greatly reduce the quality of life of all of us in India. Look at our transportation sector. TERI’s National Energy Map for India: Technology Vision 2030 tells us, “Economic growth of 8 per cent per annum requires major provision of infrastructure and enhanced supply of energy. Consumption patterns indicate that despite rising oil prices, demands for passenger and freight movement have been rather inelastic. Efforts need to be made to enhance rail-based movement and the use of public transportation.” Despite life-endangering air quality in many Indian cities, we still hunger for cars and trucks. A shift in attention will get us more quickly to electric vehicles and better mass transportation. Similarly in telecom, a non-partisan collaboration might be the best way forward as it would be in public health. The need and urgency to shift attention has never been more acute. 2018 should be the year we learn to do that.