Can Marketing learn from Religion?

It’s often hard for people to step back and look at religion objectively. The very title of this blog post is interesting yet slightly disturbing.

Disclaimer 1: I consider myself religious and do not want to offend any religion or any particular group, person or faith

Disclaimer 2: I am NOT an atheist nor am I promoting their ideas

I simply observe, analyse and interpret things in order to lean more. Effective Communication with an open-mind is the key and the cornerstone for understanding this matter further.

Politics and Religion have always been the oldest strongest examples of marketing that man has ever known. The irony is that today most people do not even know it completely and yet they follow it, adapt to it, spread news about it, live by it, die for it, rebel against it, be indifferent towards it or simply ignore it. You may be already getting second thoughts on reading this further and that’s the whole point because you have already subscribed to some religious school of thought or political party for or ideals for that matter. Let’s compare marketing and religion in general and leave politics for another blog. 

MARKETING	RELIGION
It creates needs and fulfills wants to achieve customer satisfaction profitably	It fulfills basic needs for your soul, then promises bliss and eternal happiness at the cost of sacrificing certain desires, lifestyle or habits (and in some cases wealth too).
It contains concepts and jargon which most people think they understand	It is based on concepts and has a lot of terminology which most people do not know how to interpret and simply follow others
It focuses on brand building and has logos	It focuses on making the faith and its followers stronger and they do have symbols to differentiate
Its roots stem from psychology	It revolves around philosophy, ethics, cosmology, metaphysics and jurisprudence
It is a science with artistic values	It is a science and the way we study, practice it becomes an art
It caters to products and services	It caters to the human needs and soul satisfaction
It is run by agencies and businesses	It is run by trusts, individuals, families, empires or communities
Has different forms and stages	It is layered and going in-depth makes one a sage or fanatic
We are exposed to it since a young age	We are exposed to it since we are born and till we die
Different cultures adopt different styles	Different religions have sub-faiths, cults and schools of thought
Results in Gaining rewards or suffering Losses	Promotes good deeds and repentance and shuns evil
Stories & claims are reinforced again and again	Stories are narrated time and again to reinforce faith
Advertisements are paid for and non-personal in nature	Charities, donations and trusts fund religious causes and community building in general
Uses various tools to execute ideas into action	Uses relics, literature, spirituality and in some cases blind faith
The idea is to make customers loyal to a brand through advertisements & promotions	Every religion wishes to attract more followers by having a display of festivals, pilgrimages and auspicious periods.
Messages are often misunderstood by audiences	Most of the time verses taken out of context and misinterpreted
Uses social and digital media today	Every religion has it follower base or forum online.

The above were just some of the thoughts that one can think of, there are plenty otherwise. There may be some who disagree and you are free to read on or close your browser or go to another website/blog as you are reading this. Anyway, so in a nutshell one would observe that people need a sense of belonging to something much larger than life, media and popular culture help us to do so, it becomes a societal norm to follow a school of thought(s), larger numbers encourage more interaction and participation (sheep mentality) and stories are narrated, reinforced time and time again to drive a point. Wouldn’t you agree that marketing and religion fit the above statement?

If not…. leave the blog or else continue to read on.

Much of the business and marketing world clearly has taken cues from what religion has done successfully for centuries. Religion successfully gathers people globally to publicly brand themselves as followers and work without any compensation through word of mouth marketing to attract new members to their religious brand of choice. Most studies show that religion even affects consumer behavior.

So as marketers, what can we learn from religion:

1)      Strengthen the brand by creating a following: Digital tools and social media when used creatively have helped brands over the years, yet Religion has existed successfully in many forms for centuries mainly because people desire to belong to something.

2)      Be open to collective ideas: The new generations Z are not satisfied with relics, claims of their forefathers. Many of the current religions and large businesses are already relics in the mind of today’s young digital-born generation. The successful businesses of tomorrow will not be the ones that mimic the religious institutions and businesses of the previous generations with a pure top-down approach.  The way moving forward is to collaborate ideas from all your stakeholders into the mix – include everyone, especially your customers and front-line workers.

3)      Kill the machine-logic - You are not great merely because you say you are.  Prove yourself in tangible formats so that your marketing messages can be backed up with case studies, testimonials, tangible proof, etc. Mainly, figure out new ways to learn and experiment with new ideas.

4)      Drop the negatives and absorb the positives – Every religion has some negative aspect over time due to its leader or follower(s). In marketing, the company may have a bad reputation but a wonderful product or vice-versa. Marketers need to take the positive of religion and not the negatives into their ideas, processes or designs.

5)      Don’t be pushy and Interfering – Many religions and faiths have been short-lived or had a great downfall where only part of their remains live up to the day as a reminder of their failure. Most religions are viewed negatively since they meddle so much. Trying to force yourself/your brand on people by knocking on doors and forcing your beliefs into areas they don’t belong does hurts your reputation and will backfire in the long term.

6)      Study sociology and history - The best marketers have a strong understanding not just of business and playing the corporate game, but more importantly of our culture and the bigger picture of how society has been and is currently functioning.  Studying everything in our world, from religion and politics to popular culture will help you be far more effective in creating strategic communications. Learn what makes ideas spread and learn the content archetypes for ideas that stick and apply it to your own marketing solutions. Learn where other companies went wrong so you don’t repeat that mistake.

7)     The Brand/Product/service Story attracts people – Religions all over the world have attracted followers by narration of heart-touching stories, narrations about personalities and miracles that have occurred in ancient or today’s times. If marketers call sell stories backed up with proof and have an emotional connect (at any level) – you’ve got yourself a loyal consumer.

No matter what your belief, faith or religion is – it is an undeniably powerful marketing force.  The answer to me is YES, marketing can learn from religion and hopefully this blog can serve as an eye-opener to the obvious truth and not to question religion; rather learn marketing from religion as a medium or vehicle to shape the very direction of our society. 

 

Social Impact Digital Marketing

So everyone is talking about 'Social Media' all the time and how it has brought people together digitally and how it has transformed lives, blurred borders, easy to market stuff, spreading the word and all that babble!! Be it Facebook, Twitter, BBM and a whole bunch of other wannabe sites and apps. Lets face it, most of us who use it have become addicted to this stuff through our phone, PC, browser and any other gadget having internet access. In other words you are a slave to the Social Media. But lets leave that for another blog.

A website which has come to my attention is Made in a Free World - and it is crafted really well - good design, usability, smooth transition (provided you have good broadband speed) and sends a strong message to the 'slaves' out there to become an 'anti-slave'.

No....its not related to the stuff I wrote at the top. That was just to catch your attention. Made In A Free World attempts to calculate the social impact of our lifestyle – not the entire social impact it would have, but merely attempting to measure how much forced labour it takes to sustain the way we live in our current situation.  Slavery isn’t much talked about today, but yet there is an estimate that there are 27 million of them.

Most people have heard about their ecological footprint or carbon footprint – which is a way of measuring your lifestyle’s demand on the eco-system and how much pollution you are contributing to the environment. 

Made In A Free World makes it easy: You fill out a nice questionnaire.  It looks at what you consume, what you own and gives you an estimated number of how many slaves that a supply chain would likely have. San Francisco creative agency MUH-TAY-ZIK HOF-FER and digital partners at London's unit9 have created an innovative calculator that allows you to figure out how many slaves are working for you. 

 

The number you are given represents the total number of forced labourers likely to be involved with creating your products,  looking at source countries, raw materials and the processing of the most popular consumer goods. I'm not going to talk about it here, because the geniuses at Made In A Free World believe in  transparency methods in what they do and explain it rather well.

A companion mobile app, called 'Made in a Free World', allows people on-the-move to make inquiries about what a brand's supply chain looks like from an ethical labor point of view and call attention to their questioning. For instance, checking in at a brand will create a post on both the brand's Slavery Footprint page and the main Slavery Footprint page. MUH-TAY-ZIK created over 1,000 individual brand pages on Facebook to aggregate the inquiries. 

You would be surprised how a simple lifestyle will reveal so many hidden supply chain horrors. 

Go ahead..give it a try and see how many slaves you have!!

And NO...I am not advertising for them and No again - I am NOT anti-consumer. If everyone stopped buying goods - it would only increase slavery than reducing it. The whole idea which most people would agree is to join brands and make them aware about these supply chain horrors. Improvisation and tweaking is what these brands need to do. As for me, I am simply engaging in a kind of social media awareness thingy.

Steve Jobs - a mere marketing tool for Apple !

 Steve Jobs...RIP....I admit contributed greatly towards the use of everyday computing and communicating and of course Apple!! The question is HOW?? which many people fail to do.
When it comes to Apple - I'm seriously thinking of buying an Ipad 2 or a MacBook Pro. The irony is Steve Jobs is just flashing at you when you think of Apple or go shopping for any of its products, but then again maybe not. On one hand you see these sleek, elegantly simple yet beautifully crafted pieces of technology. But then all I see is this whole load of stuff in books and magazines (even TV snippets) and so many people yapping about who he was and without him Apple would have been crap and so on and so forth.

Would Apple be what it is today without Steve Jobs ? 

 Most people I meet, know or come across or even read about - would say NO.

I think there is only a little truth in that !!
According to me and what I have researched and studied about him and Apple as a company makes me say he didn't know much about computers, designs or phones or even music devices. He practically knew nothing about making or developing things for that matter. What he did know - was how to make a hard-sell, usability of devices, crating consumer wants, simplicity (after he went on a spiritual trip), convince people to be minimalistic and make people use technology in a way which no one before him dared to. Lets face it - most eccentrics turn out to be geniuses in their own right.
Ever heard of the term Megalomaniac???

Steve Jobs was more or less responsible for that term being used at offices or in general because he was a MEGALOMANIAC. I'm referring to the years when Steve Jobs had long hair, wore dapper suits, sat bare feet in his office, had a bunch of weird habits, verbally trashed his employees, pitted his staff in nerve-wrecking competitions and so on. He and Bill Gates were the famous pirates of Silicon Valley back then enjoying their riches. Only Bill Gates turned out to be tad smarter and more business-minded than Steve Jobs who got lost in his conquest of glory. Ultimate result - Steve Jobs got Fired from Apple.
Anyway, we all know how he then came up with NeXT, his new journey and then ultimately how he returned to Apple. Think of it this way - you need to sell your stuff so you get back the best salesman, right?? That's exactly what Apple did. Steve Jobs created his new persona, his lifestyle in such a way which attracted people because of his new simplistic approach of doing complex things. This philosophy translated into most of Apple's products beginning with the iMac. As Apple's research wing got better and created its own persona in the computer market - it could now look at different platforms and technologies.

'Jonathan Ive' accomplished that for Apple.

Apple products are now all about design. Go have a look at designs by Jonathan Ive. Apple's rule is to get it out cool designs in the market when a new technology has just surfaced. The Walkman to iPod. The smartphone to iPhone. Tablet PCs to iPad. They let the consumers do the talking and there you have it - the most powerful marketing tool - 'Word of Mouth' at work. Add to that a launch or prototype demo by Steve Jobs and you had everyone drooling before it even hit the markets. Even their apps are given that Apple 'look' - even when you are looking at their app content or logos for that matter - sophistication which android apps can hardly ever achieve. 

My perspective on Steve Jobs changed when I watched the movie/documentary called 'Pirates of Silicon Valley' (pic attached). From a marketing or advertising industry perspective - Steve Jobs was the 'client-servicing guy' whereas the creatives, planners are a whole bunch of other people who were just happy taking the backseat and making heaps of money. He could go to any lengths to represent Apple for what it stood as. He never stopped dreaming and I guess he saw most of his dreams come true.So to all the client-servicing guys and gals who literally curse their careers every day - you could be a Steve Jobs someday!!

More on this in blogs to follow.

David Kolb’s Models of Learning

Posted on June 18, 2012 by Northpoint Centre of Learning

 

As in the diagram below, David Kolb’s Models of learning is based on two preference dimensions, giving four different styles of learning.

The experimenter, like the concrete experiencer, takes a hands-on route to see if their ideas will work, whilst the reflective observers prefer to watch and think to work things out.

1) Divergers (Concrete experiencer/Reflective observer)

Divergers take experiences and think deeply about them, thus diverging from a single experience to multiple possibilities in terms of what this might mean. They like to ask ‘why’, and will start from detail to constructively work up to the big picture. They enjoy participating and working with others but they like a calm ship and fret over conflicts. They are generally influenced by other people and like to receive constructive feedback and their logic leads to exploration which leads to discovery.

2) Convergers (Abstract conceptualization/Active experimenter)

Convergers think about things and then try out their ideas to see if they work in practice. They like to ask ‘how’ about a situation, understanding how things work in practice. They like facts and will seek to make things efficient by making small and careful changes. They prefer to work by themselves, thinking carefully and acting independently. They learn through interaction and computer-based learning is more effective with them than other methods.

3) Accomodators (Concrete experiencer/Active experimenter)

Accommodators have the most hands-on approach, with a strong preference for doing rather than thinking. They like to ask ‘what if?’ and ‘why not?’ to support their action-first approach. They do not like routine and will take creative risks to see what happens. They like to explore complexity by direct interaction and learn better by themselves than with other people. As might be expected, they like hands-on and practical learning rather than lectures.

4) Assimilators (Abstract conceptualizer/Reflective observer)

Assimilators have the most cognitive approach, preferring to think than to act. Asking ‘What is there I can know?’ . They prefer lectures for learning, with demonstrations where possible, and will respect the knowledge of experts. They will also learn through conversation that takes a logical and thoughtful approach. Give them reading material, especially academic stuff and they will absorb it right away. Do not teach through play all the time with them as they like to stay serious.

When one comes across the word “intelligence” it invokes images of books, classrooms, and serious- looking professors. But, real learning is just as likely to involve wrenches, breaking a sweat, and repairmen examining the parts of a bicycle. After graduating with a PhD in philosophy and getting a job at a highly-regarded think tank, author Matthew Crawford became frustrated with the fact that his work was so abstract. He wanted to do something. So, he quit the think tank and opened up a motorcycle repair shop. It may sound unusual for such an educated person to choose manual labor. But, Crawford found that working on a trade was, in fact, more intellectually stimulating.

Look at banks in the early 90s, instead of analyzing the facts to determine if a loan applicant is creditworthy, the banker simply entered information into a computer. In many cases, doing things in the workplace became fragmented and lost its intellectual quality. One of the most important steps lifelong learners can take is eliminating their prejudice about manual work. Realize that thinking-jobs are no better than doing-jobs. In fact, in many cases doing-jobs require more intellectual stamina. Many disciplines evolved from purely practical concerns. For example, much of geometry came about from observational astronomy and land surveying. Even philosophy developed from certain problems of living. In India at least, there is a definite disconnect between learning and putting knowledge into action in our society. In a nutshell, if we embrace practical knowledge we would begin to bridge the artificial separation between thinking and doing.

My recommendations on enriching your learning experience:

1. Take up short assignments or stints for a year before taking up a degree course.
2. Do not follow only one author or textbook; keep your mind open to various perspectives.
3. Go away for long periods to get away from city life to focus your skills (Come to Northpoint)
4. Live independently most of the time so that you are well-versed to solving problems rather than your family rescuing you all the time.
5. Adopt different approaches to learning as I explained above through Kolb’s diagram.
6. Keep your mind occupied by practicing newly acquired skills.

If you are reading this and not currently working towards the ability to DO something, set a new goal for yourself. Get refreshed. You can work on any basic skill such as gardening, cooking, plumbing, cleaning your attic or store room, sewing, photography, browsing your visiting cards and making calls, changing a tyre or develop a passion for something you are interested in. Practice makes a person perfect that is why having practical knowledge is more important than mere theoretical knowledge. Discover the possibilities, make a choice, and work actively towards your goal. Get excited and you will notice that practical learning will enrich your life in ways you never dreamt of.

References: Kolb, D.A. (1984). Experiential Learning. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall
For more learning blogs visit : http://northpointindia.com/blog/

Creative Ideas Unleashed – Jargon on hold

Running through the 5 Days last week of a brilliantly knowledge-packed and fun-filled session about branding delivered by Sumit Roy (founder of Univbrands) followed by the two last days with Adi Pocha’s workshop (owner of Squirkle Productions Pvt. Ltd.) that left the advertising and media students of Northpoint Centre of Learning thrilled and wanting more.

The session built around consumer insights, event management and marketing, 20^th vs 21^st century branding, advertisement production…yes the students shot 2 professional advertisements (for their own made-up brands based on consumer insight) on campus with Adi and his team. The students hardly slept for 3-4 hours a day as they had the massive task of running an event with only 2 days at hand. The rule however was that no marketing jargon was to be used while teaching or learning and everyone found it so simple to actually explain things in a beautiful way yet being simple. 

All I can say is that Sumit’s sessions on branding would give marketing courses at academic institutions a run for their money as things went to grassroots level and then gradually touched more articulate and complex things. Adi on the other hand explained creative ideas and their development in a unique and interesting manner.

Sumit Roy

Adi Pocha

The possibilities with an idea for a brand or advertisement are limitless.

I’ll try to upload the 2 professionally executed video ads by the students soon.