Marketing is a mess today, Jack Trout is convinced. Brands are not able to create a difference, product categories have become commoditised, says the marketing guru in his latest book, In Search of the Obvious, quoting market research. The way out is to stick to the obvious — something which makes the peer group say, “Why didn’t we think of this before?”
When Trout was a young executive at General Electric, he was put on the job to sell everything that goes into making a power plant to prospective customers. Similarly, others were asked to sell to a housewife everything that she needed in a kitchen. The obvious fact here was that a utility provider as well as a housewife would like to mix and match to get the best result. Needless to add, the strategy had to be modified soon by General Electric.
General Motors, recounts Trout, many years ago experimented with two small Cadillacs: the Cimarron and Catera. In public perception, Cadillac is all about big cars. For smaller cars, the popular General Motors brand has always been Chevrolet. The obvious thing to do was to launch these cars under the Chevrolet umbrella. “You know it and I know it. General Motors didn’t want to know it,” writes Trout.
Another example: Some years ago, McDonald’s faced flat sales and earnings. Jack Greenberg, the then CEO, rolled out something called a New Tastes Menu to boost the finances — there was a complex collection of 44 items which would be rotated by the franchisees. This slowed down operations and created long queues at the cash counters. “Fast food became slow food with the ensuing complaints.” All this was turned around with Jim Cantalupo’s “back to the obvious” campaign. “We’ve taken our eyes off the fries,” he declared. Discarding all attempts to please Wall Street, he got back to the basics of cleanliness, quality and menu upgrade.
Trout’s book is a must-read in these troubled times. Marketers have a tough challenge to face. There is a huge clutter in almost every product category, ad budgets haven’t grown and, worse, big and bright ideas have got extremely had to come by. What must a marketer do to survive?
Trout has the answers. The first lesson is to find out what is it that keeps you from knowing the obvious. The biggest stumbling block is the stock market. Companies, says Trout, are too obsessed with the markets these days. This could be because of the pressure from shareholders or the stock options that employees hold. And this has kept them from looking at obvious solutions for complex problems. Great privately-held marketing companies rarely get written about in the media because there is nobody to look at their numbers every quarter. The other block could be the preoccupation of employees with stuff that is non-core, like managing their schedule of appointments or e-mail.
So, what is the obvious? Leadership could be one. It is the most powerful differentiator. Companies often fail to take advantage of their market leadership — an obvious point. For many years, Argentina had two leading beer brands called Antarctica and Brahma. Antarctica was the leader and Brahma was a close second. But it never occurred to Antarctica that it could capitalise on its leadership. Then one day, Brahma launched a campaign which suggested it was the leader. In no time, it actually became the leader. Consumers want to be associated with products that are market leaders. (The two companies have now merged operations so the two brands are now joint leaders.)
The other is to see what is happening around the brand. Here, Trout gives the example of Kodak. The company had for long dominated the market for camera films. But did it read the signals correctly when Fuji entered the market? Or when the market began to shift towards digital photography? (Incidentally, it was a Kodak scientist who discovered digital photography.)
According to Trout, the right course of action for Kodak would have been to come out with its own range of digital cameras quickly under a new brand — Kodak is too strongly associated with films — and the business should probably have been located in the Silicon Valley to give the feel of cutting-edge technology. Toyota and Honda, for instance, created new brands, Lexus and Acura respectively, when they went up-market. But the obvious lesson was ignored by Kodak.
This is the age of killer competition. It is difficult to find chief marketing officers who can hang on to their jobs for more than two years. Trout’s advice is simple: Don’t get inundated by data thrown up by research outfits and the Internet and use your common sense to differentiate your brand or business.
IN SEARCH OF THE OBVIOUS
THE ANTIDOTE FOR TODAY’S MARKETING MESS
Jack Trout
Westland
Rs 495; 208 pages