Anywhere in the world, whenever there is a mention of the Indian economy and market, people often talk about the demographic advantage this country enjoys. It is a youthful country with high disposable incomes, they say. The oasis for marketing companies across the world! But there are few studies available that give insight into the attitude, behaviour and perceptions of this huge consumer base.

Blyk, which is a youth-focused brand addressing consumers in the age group of 16-29 years, reached out to its 1.68 million members to understand them better. There are three observations that I particularly wanted to share from this study. These observations are key to understanding today’s Indian youth, because it looks at the essential parameters that make them tick.

What comes out very strongly is that the Indian youth is trying very hard to balance modern and progressive outlook with the rootedness in culture and family. They are faced with contradictions of behaviour and mores. It was interesting to note that while 46 per cent admitted to cheating in a relationship, 61 per cent youth thought it was un-cool to be rude!
They are to a great degree driven by perception and are highly aspirational. For example, 3 out of the 4 youth that we spoke to wanted to change the way they look in some way or the other. And there is a significant proportion of young people in India who own more than 5 pair of shoes, use cosmetic products on a daily basis and want to sport branded clothes. Image is everything and they take good care to build a good image.

And finally, the gadget closest to their heart—no prizes for guessing this—is the mobile phone! The youth spend the most time on it. It is the most stated object of desire and used most extensively, which highlights the growing importance of the third screen as a vehicle to reach out to this group.

Having shared these observations, I would still say that this is a very dynamic group. For any brand marketing to them, there has to be a finger on the pulse at all times.

It’s time to pop the bubbly—Blyk turns 1 in India! Time sure flies when you’re having fun. And the year gone by has been nothing if not fun. From launching our services to having a subscriber base of 1.68 million opt-in profile members, the journey has been extremely thrilling.

Take a moment to absorb that number: 1,680,000 young (16 to 29 years old) people in India have voluntarily chosen Blyk and given it permission to send them marketing messages from the brands we have tied up with.

Since they have voluntarily given permission to be contacted and have shared their basic information, it makes for a very potent mix for advertisers. Our formula is simple: Basic Targeting + Behavioural Targeting (based on responses) = Relevant Content + Relevant Ads. The result—an impressive 25 percent response rate.

For the consumers, it is a no-fuss service where they get to enjoy deals, information and more in the areas they want—and only in the areas they want. At a time when SMS spam is driving people up the wall, here is a service that only sends them relevant information that they asked for. It never crosses the line between permission-based marketing and spam. Never. And this is why we are able to add 3500-4000 members every day.

In the one year of our existence in India, we have acquired deep insights into the mind of the Indian youth. We have been able to bridge brands with their consumers and built a successful three-way relationship.

In the coming years, I have no doubt we will increase our subscriber base and our client base exponentially. Our ambition, however, is to continue to enhance the user experience—both for the consumers and for the brands. Cheers!

The title doesn’t refer to my willingness to please. In fact, it refers to people who are the most difficult to please—consumers. In my last post, I talked about a study brought out by the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) on permission-based mobile marketing. The premise it works on is that if you get a buy-in from consumers, your marketing efforts can become more targeted and yield higher return on investment.

The study says that permission based mobile marketing helps marketers in a big way by helping them send out focused messaging to only those consumers who would be more interested in that message. It helps them break away from the clutter and avoid sending out spam-like broad-based messages that ultimately don’t result in much value against the advertising investment.

Over time, this becomes a much richer way of segmenting customer bases, offering even more value to consumers and producing a better return on investment. Because you are asking the consumers for their preferences, the likelihood on them responding to the target message is higher.

It also helps create a more long-term, engaging relationship between a brand and its consumers. The intangible benefit that brands and marketers draw from this is that consumers are also more likely to trust a brand or service that values them. This develops into a more sustained engagement, rather than a one-off interaction. And over time, this engagement makes for brand loyalists and ultimately ambassadors for the brand.

Relationships based on mutual respect and trust last the longest. With permission based mobile marketing, brands can develop exactly this kind of relationship.

If I asked you nicely and gave you deals, discounts and gifts against things you wanted to buy anyway, would you allow me to share my marketing message with you? That is the premise that permission-based mobile marketing works on. It is marketing that has a buy-in from the target audience. It is not just about transactions, but about building a dialog between the consumer and the brand.

The Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) recently came out with a white paper detailing case studies from around the world on permission-based mobile marketing. Supplied by the MMA Task Force, of which Blyk was a part, the case studies illustrate what I have long held—if you get a consumer buy-in with customised and targeted marketing, instead of blind mass-dissemination, you have a consumer for life.

The basic premise of permission-based mobile marketing is simple—it is about value exchange. It is a tacit agreement between the consumer and the brand. In exchange for their contact information and personal preferences, consumers expect the brand to respect their privacy even as it offers them value in tangibles like coupons, offers, deals, samples, or intangibles like apps and content.

It is essentially a four-step process. You start with giving the consumers the chance (and, of course, a compelling reason) to opt in. When they do, we can create a database of their preferences, which are then shared with the brands. The preference profiles are kept updated so that the engagement remains relevant for the both, the consumer and the brand.

For the brand, the benefit is the potential of a long-term relationship and compelling engagement with the consumer. And we all know that translates into higher return on investment. For the mobile networks, it is a chance to increase customer satisfaction and stand out among their peers with compelling content.

The study also illustrated that this type of marketing is best suited for a device as personal as the mobile phone. It is a device that offers the best one-to-one platform for interaction, giving the consumer personalized content and services.

Even though it is new in India, permission-based mobile marketing is already beginning to take off. After all, gives Indian consumers what they’ve never had—a break from being treated by marketers as just a huge mass.

There is a huge comfort in speaking, reading and writing in your own language. However, the Internet, at least in India, has largely been a bastion of English language. Of course, there have been some remarkable examples of sites in regional languages, but there is still a long distance for these languages to cover on the net.

On the mobile, in terms of both SMS-based VAS as well as apps, the story is similar. In a country with 22 constitutionally approved languages, there is not one app or service like, say, China’s Baidu. The diversity of cultures in this case dilutes the numbers.

There are enough studies to suggest that regional mobile content market is not something to be ignored. For instance, Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) and market research firm IMRB International have come out with a study that says there is a huge demand for regional content.

With mobile penetration higher than broadband penetration, the mobile is being increasingly seen as the medium to reach out to the Next Billion. The mobile networks have a huge potential to drive governance services in the area of education, healthcare and public information systems to those who need them.

The problem so far has been the lack of a truly convincing business model. Advertising is hard to sell for regional content. The Indian love for the movies, though, is one sure-shot direction to look for advertising revenue—promotional content for Bollywood or Tollywood or any of the regional movies.

But will that be enough to make investing in regional mobile content a viable option? I wonder.

Even though the Indian market is dominated by the traditional forms of media, namely print and television, there is a lot of buzz around the digital medium. And this has been the case for some time now. Companies often talk about how digital is a key component of their marketing strategy and they see more monies being spent on it in future. If one goes purely by overall statistics, the medium does not look very appealing as a vehicle to reach out to larger audiences. There are around 12 million people with a broadband connection, compared to roughly 100 million in neighbourhood China. But when one looks at the socio-economic and demographic profile of the internet user in India, it becomes a compelling medium for the advertiser. And with the advent of 3G and a huge mobile subscriber base, more and more people will be surfing the web through their handsets. Going by this, one would assume that internet advertising will already be significant in India, if not substantial, and definitely grow rapidly in the future. But when one looks at the numbers shared in various reports, they seem to be on the conservative side.

Recently, the consultancy firm, PricewaterhouseCoopers, released its global outlook for the Entertainment and Media industry (2010-15) which spoke of the next five years being the “golden age of empowered consumers”. It also pointed towards an increase in demand for digital by consumers all over the world. In India, internet advertising will be growing the fastest among all mediums with a CAGR of 25.5 per cent. But again, when one looks at the numbers for the size of internet advertising in India, it looks conservative. I think the medium will be attracting much more advertising monies in the next five years than the current estimate of Rs. 24 billion.

Part of this conservatism stems from a lack of standard measurement tools to measure the reach and impact of digital media campaigns. Majority of media planners are comfortable with traditional media, for not only it is huge, but also there are standard measurement tools which give quite a detailed picture. You might argue, how representative they are or how much do they reflect the ground realities, but they are accepted by the industry. When it comes to the digital world, there is no such tool. People call for developing standards but somehow I feel that it cannot be created by forming committees of experts. When Google started its search engine services, it came up with its own advertising measurement tools and they became the standard. Likewise, there will be digital companies who will be able to develop a tool through which the advertiser will be able to measure the impact till the last dollar spent. So while committees are good, I think the digital world will itself churn out a solution.

On the mobile platform – just like everywhere else today – if you don’t move forward but stand still, you fall behind. The other reality is that perception is everything. You are successful if you can create an image of success. And if your image is that of someone grappling with changing realities, even impressive numbers can do little to change that image – just look at Nokia.

Nowhere are these two realities more evident than in the telecom operator space. In a market with less and less differentiation, if bandwidth is the only thing that telecom operations provide, they may soon become like utility providers. The only thing differentiating one from another would be price and even that can go on only for so long.

The fact is operators will have to find a way to stay relevant and to lead the market movements. Right now, they are not seen as the force of the future but as that of the past. They have to go beyond being just mobile bandwidth taps and they will have to offer services that make it irresistible for a subscriber to choose them over their competitors. Like Aircel is doing with Blyk.

The truth is that if you compare the revenues of the telecom operator industry with that of, say, the IT industry, you may find that the former is much higher. But the perception that the IT giants have created is that they can do anything. The same could be said of operators, if they would only believe in their capability and play up their role. And, of course, differentiate their offerings.

Ultimately, to the consumer, it doesn’t matter who is selling what. They have their basic needs—like the need to communicate, the need to interact socially and discover all things new—and whoever steps up to satisfy them, will get their attention and their money. The biggest obstacle operators need to deal with is in their own head – a lack of vision. Unlike Facebook or Google, they are not global players, and they easily let this limit their innovativeness and blur their vision.

For instance, offering Facebook is not differentiation—it is, in fact, just something you can’t do without. But is that all customers want? Surely companies who claim to know their customers inside out should be able to do better, much better.

Silicon Valley creates a great vision of the future but not the revenue to match it, while the operators create great revenue, but no future (and please save me from all the bandwidth and tech futurists!).

For operators to continue to register growths in their business tomorrow, they will first need to serve their customers much, much better than they do today. And after that they will need to sell a dream, and then deliver it.

Each one of us is entitled to our own madness, because we have our own method for it. Order imposed by someone else usually provokes us to rebel. We revel in our fragmented existence, putting things into categories only we understand. I find it hilarious then the insistence of some people to make everything ‘seamless’ and ‘integrated’. I can’t imagine how they believe it will work!

Sure, there will be things that are so compelling that people will want constant access to it. But that is credit to those services. For instance, if we people want to access social networking sites, they will seek them on every screen. Because these are things that add value to people’s lives regardless of where they are seen. Integration adds value.

And then there will be things people don’t want to integrate at all. For instance, no matter how much you try, most people will not use the television to make a phone call—even in an emergency! Some devices are best suited for a particular function and completely unsuitable for others.

Of course, there will always be people who want to live in a seamless world where the real, the virtual and the mobile all weave in and out of each other. They will want their car’s air-conditioning to have kicked in 10 minutes before they sit in it. They will want their mobile to switch on the lights of their home the moment it is in range.

But the idea that people will want everything exactly the same way across all platforms of interface is an idea that belongs in science fiction. People’s lives are fragmented and trying to integrate everything is not a smart idea at all.
The truth of the matter is that integration will happen only if it makes sense to the consumer. As people in the industry, we must keep in mind that we will be dictated by the consumer and not vice versa. And it just might happen that we end up with more number of standards instead of less, more consolidated ones. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Gone are the days of thrusting your message at the audience. If you want your target to appreciate what you are trying to say to them, you need to engage with them actively and even allow them to be part of the creation process. People are involved the most where they have been part of the process of evolution.

It is remarkable how few marketers understand this very basic logic and continue to tread the same beaten path. They continue to follow the same ways of pushing their message—one-way ads. If that process were made two-way, the results would grow exponentially.

People today are bombarded with messages across mediums. What are the chances of your message getting their attention? That will happen only if they have been part of the creation process. And for that, the engagement between a brand and its target group needs to be high. This can only happen once you can get inside the consumer’s head.

This is not as difficult as you might think. If you allow the consumer to customize the brand and its message to his or her own specific needs, you have a buy-in and the trust of the consumer.

This concept is what I call Open Marketing. It is a concept we developed for Blyk in 2007. Open Marketing is where the consumer and the marketer both participate and both create value. It is my opinion that if anything will work with the consumer today it is this sense of co-participation and co-creation. It allows them to develop their own solutions and gives them a sense of ownership for the brand.

Ultimately, the brand that partners with the consumer to co-create solutions will be the one the he or she will choose.  People embrace things they create. For that, marketers need to open up their messaging fiefdoms and allow the consumer in.