The bank won the honor in recognition of its strategic initiative to leverage Bank of Baroda’s brand equity signaling the recognition of new business paradigms in a globalized world, staying in touch with their heritage and enduring relationships on which their bank is founded. By adopting a symbol as simple and powerful as the Baroda Sun, they have managed to communicate both.
The much-celebrated SMIAs were presented during the Symposium on Marketing Impact and Effectiveness, organized by S.P. Jain Institute on Saturday, February 10, 2007 in Mumbai, which was attended by the top corporate czars from the world of business. The Bank of Baroda team was selected by the distinguished Jury panel comprising of distinguished leaders from industry and academia awarded the SMIA 2007 Trophy and a cash prize of Rs 75,000/-. The runners up from ITC were awarded a cash prize of Rs 45,000/-. All short-listed entries will be compiled into an annual SPJIMR publication.
This pioneering initiative of presenting marketing awards was instituted by S.P. Jain Institute of Management and Research, the top management institute in the country, and is a prestigious annual event, for showcasing the effectiveness of marketing success stories in India. Some of the major criteria for determining the winner were the nature of challenge, competitive framework, the marketing solution and initiative, scale of operations, difficulty in implementation and the overall marketing impact and effectiveness. Participation for the SMIA 2007 was open to corporates, public sector and non-government organizations. Last year, Tata Steel won the SMIA for its path-breaking ‘Redefining Retail of Steel’ paper.
Previous SMIA award winning papers include ‘The Apollo Clinic’ by Apollo Health & Lifestyle Ltd. In 2005, ‘Balbir Pasha: Reducing Aids Prevalence’ by PSI & Lowe in 2005 and ‘Redefining Retail of Steel’ by Tata Steel in 2006. This year the list of entries were ‘Akanksha Art Workshops: A Unique Marketing Initiative’, ‘Bank of Baroda: Rebranding Strategy’, HCL Technologies’ ‘Enabling Organisational Transformation’ and ITC’s ‘Weather Insurance- Derivatives Marketing.’
The Jury panels in the last two years included eminent personalities like Mr. Santosh Desai (McCann Ericsson), Mr. Kal Sundaram (GSK), Mr.Pranesh Misra (COO, Lintas India), Mr. Harish Bijoor (Consultant), Prof. Abraham Koshy (Marketing Professor, IIM Ahmedabad), Prof. Kulkarni (SPJIMR), Mr.Thomas Puliyel (President, IMRB), Mr. Bhaskar Das (Bennett Coleman & Co.), Prof. Sharad Sarin (XLRI), Mr. Partha Rakshit (ACNielsen ORG-MARG), Mr.Ramesh Thomas (Equitor), Prof. Harsh Mohan (SPJIMR), and Prof. M.S.Rao (SPJIMR) among others.
The day-long event began with the lighting of the lamp by Mr. Kiran Khalap of Chorophyll, Mr. Nehal Medh of Ipsos, Mr. Ranjiv Singh of Microsoft, the Director of SPJIMR, Dr. Rajan Saxena and Prof Ruppal Sharma of SPJIMR. Speaking during the inaugural address the Director, Dr. Saxena emphasized on the evolving significance of marketing effectiveness. Mr. Kiran Khalap, CEO, CFO, Chlorophyll spoke at length about the future of branding and role of marketing and the transition of branding from the 19 th century branding of trade marking and ownership to the 20th century branding revolving around advertising.
Commenting on some of the recent uses of advertising in branding, namely Coke and the Blind Test, Mr Khalap spoke about the Research and Society for the Real Thing formed in 1985 by Coke and the concept of ‘Brand ownership’ being passed on to the consumer. He said that the product might belong to the manufacturer but the psychological owner is the consumer. Yet another important example of branding was the one adopted by Sahara Airlines and the successful ‘Emotionally Yours’ tag line.
Mr Khalap said that for the 21st century, branding will be equated to ‘keeping a promise’: a pact, with all the stakeholders; something that remains unchanged with time and today a brand is owned by the manufacturer as well as the stakeholders. He also spoke about the true meaning of Brand loyalty being the loyalty of the product or rather the loyalty of the brand to itself. Other examples that he used to illustrate this role of branding included that of Body Shop, Zara’s Democratization of Fashion strategy, Barista, Starbucks, Abbey Bank and Cadbury’s ‘Taste of Life’ Campaign
In the 21st century, all brands will be Corporate Brands because of the ‘I Age’ of Information, Internet, Interactivity, Internationalism and Instantaneity and the role of Marketing has evolved to keep promises made to all stakeholders involved. Some of the challenges include risk of employee non-alignment, societal non-alignment, marketing non-alignment, investor non-alignment, trader non-alignment and competition non-alignment.
Speaking at the conclave Mr. Nehal Medh, India Manager, Ipsos(India) Pvt Ltd said that it was the consumers, who own brands. The consumer has been impacted by many factors and measuring impact of marketing has gained center stage. The tools of the trade include mixing of element specific measurements and marketing mix concepts. Element specific measurements, Pre and post measurements like brand awareness and existing in customer consideration set needs to be considered.
He also spoke about the need to focus on marketing audit with the use of strategic reviews and marketing financials review. The importance of quality, differentiation, value and advertising to impact and create customer pull and operating push has continued to remain in the forefront. The need is for creating customer pull using price, distribution and promotions operating push strategies to convert into brand sales. Measuring the marketing impact is very necessary but very difficult to measure because of the changing business environment, changing customers and blurred boundaries of business decision making.
Mr. Ranjiv Singh, CMO, Microsoft, spoke about the ‘Umbrella campaign of People ready business’ where people drive business and successfully amplify their impact and companies then improve business results. He said that the need is for conversion of greater visibility into the effectiveness, more accountability through objective based measurement and better aligned marketing disciplines, processes and tools. End customers actions are getting more and more important now a days and companies will have to create more holistic way of acquiring customers by integrated marketing communication process and then measuring the success of the campaigns through devices like campaign response management and sales.
Prof Ruppal Sharma, Asst professor, SPJIMR said that demonstrating impact through marketing and the growing need of measuring marketing effectiveness should be the focus. One of the most pressing issues is the market valuation of the companies by the intangible assets like patents and the challenge of ROI marketing. Companies need to understand how their action of increasing customer loyalty has increased their profitability. ROI is more beneficial if u are comparing more matured markets and the impact marketing should concentrate on value creation. The focus should move to sales and market shares, which is intend to impact margins, working capital and cash flows. Metrics apply to marketing coz analytics evolving rapidly.
The Panel Discussion comprised of Mr. Mithileshwar Jha, Mr. Ranjiv Singh, Mr. Nehal Medh and Prof. Ruppal Sharma revolved around making marketing accountable and demonstrating marketing impact. Mr Jha spoke of seeing marketing as a function of philosophy and discussed the two major roles of marketing, which are to raise aspiration levels and to target and position products and ensure availability. Problem with traditional marketing is that there is a discord between happiness and consumption and the happiness scale has nothing to do with the per capita income of the nation. The focus should not just be on return on investment but there should be a new paradigm of marketing called the developmental marketing where the interest is human happiness.
India is a very exciting market and the budgeting and allocation of extra money to campaigns will depend on the fundamentals of the kind of explorations and design and not gut feel or instinct. In terms of return on investment there are two aspects of impact and efficiency and both are important. There are tools to create impact and measure efficiency and the difference is created by the passion, which is an essential element. Companies are getting more responsible about effective marketing but there is an emphasis to make business sense ensuring that the advertising expenditure translates to monetary returns. Altruistic and spiritual beliefs are still not applicable in the business scenario and the bottom line continues to be profit for companies.
The point that emerged from the enlightening discussion was that the metric should be used is the lifetime value to the customer. The marketing department is just a trustee of customer and not the target achiever, as the customer has become more informed and marketers don’t really have a choice. The pertinent question is whether the stakeholders are given enough metrics to judge how efficiently the companies are using the money for marketing. Market share and customer satisfaction are the two metrics that are being used, and others include employee satisfaction, CSR and Strategic review of every aspect of marketing exercise. There is a greater need for accountability and transparency in organizations. The kind of tools available makes it possible to deal with the complexity of the task at hand. Since it is at large scale hence it cannot be done manually. Marketers should try to reduce the elephant tusk syndrome, ensuring that there is no discrepancy between what they say and what they do to inculcate faith and trust. It is important to be honest and upfront and that there are trade offs that have to be considered.