The Indian Retail market—ranked the fourth most attractive amongst 30 emerging markets—has caught the global market attention by storm in the last few years. Still heavily tilted towards traditional retail, times seem to be changing with the introduction of 100% FDI for single-brand retail and 51% (currently under debate) FDI in multi-brand retail. In fact, the organized retail market in India is expected to grow at 25% and reach a size of US$200 billion by 2020.

India’s retail boom is driven by a plethora of reasons–from increasing disposable incomes and changing lifestyles, to growing demand in rural areas and smaller towns, and the rise of the global consumer. Indeed, global retail giants are trying to tap into this vibrant market but their core business model seems to be failing their aspirations.

The reason behind this change—the unique purchase drivers of the Indian consumer. Think–Value for money (through deals and bargain-hunting), convenience (e.g., deep rooted system of home delivery of purchases) and relationship based customer service (legacy of “kirana” or corner stores).

So, to survive and grow in such a consumer market what are retailers doing? Tweaking their business models and making their stores locally relevant. Take a look at how global and local companies are adapting and innovating their consumer marketing strategy for the Indian consumer in the organized market. Read More »

We’re about to launch a substantial consumer survey on personalization.  It will explore how consumers value different types of relevance and how they make trade-offs between increased relevance and decreased privacy.

Below are six of the bigger and edgier hypotheses we’re testing.  If you have any other suggestions/thoughts, please email me soon and we’ll try to add them to the survey. Read More »

As the year draws to a close, we’re wrapping up our five favorite ads of 2011. This year’s best ads almost all focus on something we called a few years back: that brands, in order to avoid downward price pressure and maintain share of wallet given recessionary habits, were going to have to make a concerted effort to inject shared values into their marketing communications, and become more than sellers of goods, but enablers of a better life.

Three of this year’s best hit those buttons, we think. As for the other two: a little levity never hurt anyone. Here are our thoughts – let us know what you think in comments!

Read More »

As marketers, we’re doing a lot to get closer to our customers. It’s partly because we want to improve customer service and sell better to them – tailor messaging, that sort of thing – but it’s also because we want to do a better job of designing the offering to their needs. But what’s much more difficult to accomplish is making customer insight a key driver of strategic internal processes, an asset that animates key decisions across the firm.

Facing a mismatch between internal processes and voice of the customer, health care products company Cardinal Health had to do just that. Looking at sales data, the company’s marketers realized that customers – seeking to dampen costs and not seeing the value in Cardinal Health’s complete offering – often purchased one element of what was intended to be an integrative solutions deal. Not good! Read More »

Health and pharmaceutical marketers have a tough job: they work for some of the biggest companies in the world, but gaining and maintaining the trust of their customers is incumbent, in part, on providing individual service and cultivating a reputation as something other than a faceless corporate behemoth. But what if the industry could turn size into an asset?

Readers familiar with the outer reaches of the social media space may have heard of a concept called “the quantified self“, an ethos and accompanying suite of technologies designed to give average people data and insights into one of the most mysterious things in the world – the workings of their own bodies. Nike+, which we wrote about a few months ago, is a “quantified self” technology, as are more comprehensive solutions like the Jawbone Up, which – in addition to physical activity – can track daily calories burned and sleep quality.

Part of the value of quantified self technologies is ease of comparison – you can easily figure out if something that’s going on with your body is normal or cause for concern. But in order to get enough data for comparison, you have to have a critical mass of users – and quantified self stuff is probably not mainstream enough for statistically-significant sample sizes for any given question.

Well, what if there were organizations with hundreds of thousands of health consumers – enough to provide adequate sample sizes for just about any “is this normal” question, with a vested interest in those consumers taking preventative health measures? Oh, wait, there is! Read More »

Lately it seems that every other marketer we speak with wants to know about marketing in emerging markets. Perhaps this isn’t too surprising as growth in developed markets has effectively come to a halt and by some accounts emerging economies are expected to account for 59% of global GDP by 2030. (Likely one more instance of a long-run trend being brought to a tipping point by the disruptions of the past three years.)

As we speak with marketers moving into emerging markets, many cite considerations such as how to organize staff to support these consumer markets or how to manage the trade-offs of having staff in disparate locations. In simple economics terms: how should they manage the “supply- side” factors”?

While examining the supply-side is important, an equally productive, but often under-usedtactic, involves analyzing “demand-side” factors—namely, what will drive customers in an emerging market to buy your product(s). Regular readers of our blogs will know that our latest research reveals that the drivers of customers’ purchase decisions are changing significantly in both B2B and B2C sectors (for those unfamiliar with this work, our B2B analysis of customer behavior here, and our B2C analysis on simplifying purchase decision here).

But, what do these findings mean for emerging markets? Read More »

By Claire Tassin

It seems clear that, for a variety of reasons, energy and resource constraints will continue to be key concerns for small business owners for the foreseeable future. Those constraints take a few forms – sometimes they’re around environmental concerns, other times they’re around cost. But what language should you speak to business owners concerned about energy costs?

We know that green marketing can be effective in the B2C world, but how influential are environmental sustainability and corporate social responsibility on small businesses’ purchase behavior? This year, the Enterprise Council on Small Business tested the impact of a myriad of factors on small business owners. As it turns out, value alignment – such as on green – has only moderate influence on owners.

Source: ECSB Research, July 2011, n=1099 N.A.

So, if green marketing isn’t an effective way to reach small businesses, what is? ECSB recommends positioning how members’ products and services can alleviate business owners’ pain points. In a recent study, ECSB asked owners what their biggest pain points are in all areas of managing their businesses. In the area of building and office administration, the cost of utilities ranked highest – despite the majority of owners not anticipating price increases for 2012.

At the end of the day, messaging how your products and services can positively impact the bottom line is likely to be more effective than green marketing per se in targeting small businesses. So, rather than focusing on going green, show business owners how your company can help them save some green.

How would you feel if you were served a dish which you never ordered, instead of the one that you really wanted? I can imagine feelings of shock and disappointment. Switch gears to marketing. Many B2B customers today find themselves unpleasantly surprised, when companies design offerings for them that they never asked for. Customers complain that companies claim to design products “just like they wanted”, except that they never wanted it!

Which brings up the question – how can B2B companies get better at customer understanding and at serving their customers? We’ve gathered some of MLC’s research over time to help marketers identify what their customers want. The following will help marketers gain an insight into their customers’ mind: Read More »

The most dangerous assumption in relationship marketing:

Most consumers are open to entering a relationship with my brand.

They aren’t.

There’s a growing body of evidence suggesting that, at most, somewhere between 20% and 30% of consumers are willing to engage in a “relationship” with a brand.   The vast majority of consumers simply aren’t wired to enter into brand relationships.

When we asked 7,000 consumers via a global survey earlier this year whether they have a relationship with any brands, only 23% said yes.  The rest said “no”, and when we gave them an opportunity to elaborate on their response in a free-text field, we got lots of comments like “It’s just a brand, not a member of my family.” Read More »

When I was young, my parents always told me, “Don’t speak unless you can improve silence.”  That can be quite the challenge, and to this day, I’m still not sure all my words are better said than unsaid.  But when speaking meant possibly worsening the silence, I knew to keep my mouth shut.  This rule-of-thumb always comes to mind when I’m giving word-of-mouth recommendations.

As many marketers know, word of mouth is one of the most powerful consumer marketing tools, and smart marketers are learning to harness, amplify, and improve upon this medium.  Typical approaches to boosting word of mouth focus on identifying and engaging the brand’s biggest fans (or – one better – the brand’s most networked and credible fans).   To engage these fans, brands often offer discounts, exclusive information, or even live visits to the brand’s HQ etc.  The aim of all these efforts is to motivate fans to speak – and they’re often successful.

However, two things are often missing: Read More »