Top Star Nayakan was my brainchild as a young ad executive handling Lipton Top Star Tea which was sold to tea shops. My insight gathered during field visits drinking tea at 30 shops a day was that each shop owner was very proud of their tea and touted it as being superior to that of any other shop. They were also first-generation entrepreneurs and most had graduated from mobile tea stalls to running a fixed shop – a huge achievement that deserved to be celebrated. So we celebrated a select few with their photos and a brief life story on the side of the box. It was a packaging innovation and executing it was quite complex with the technology of the 90s. The pride and happiness of the featured tea shop owners is something that still brings out the warm and fuzzies for me.
Marketing for One
To create a product designed just for you and marketed just to you is the ideal. Costs make this unviable for many products and audiences and hence the need for both mass manufacturing and its sidekick mass marketing. Shah Rukh is famous for dancing at weddings for a fee which is out of reach for many. And charging millions for an ad campaign. But in 2021 Shah Rukh featured in a hyper-local campaign from Cadbury’s asking people to do their Diwali shopping at their local shops which were suffering during the Covid lockdown. The amazing use of early AI was that the ads mentioned each shop by name in his voice. Even better? You could create your own ad with your business name using his avatar. How cool is that? Or warm and fuzzy 🙂
AI will cause a proliferation in products as we will have the ability to create products for a market of one. That will also cause a proliferation of marketing. And of course an eco-system to help us find our way through the noise.
In the Shah Rukh Khan ad example, it doesn’t matter if the viewer knows that AI was used to get him to say the shop name, because the storyline remains authentic – that SRK wanted you to shop at local stores and help them celebrate Diwali. This nuance is what differentiates this communication from shoddy ads that are being mass-manufactured with little thought – and makes me super happy that I opted out of my IIM campus job to spend the first three years of my career working at Ogilvy.
The NEW Marketing Stack
What we have to understand is that machines are very much a part of the marketing and sales eco-system. They can amplify your message, act as gate-keepers or be the decision-makers depending on your product and market. Marketers ignore them at their peril. But. Humans are also very much a part of this ecosystem and perform their roles as amplifiers, gate-keepers and decision-makers. The problem is when the same content is directed to both audiences. This ignores the fact that human attention span is declining while the machine has an infinite capacity to consume information (limited only by the cost of tokens).
As marketers we need to create TWO marketing stacks – one directed at the machines and the other dedicated to humans. We have to consciously address the overlaps that are bound to occur. And when you get the attention of a human – who still control most of the spend – treat it as the precious resource it is and don’t feed it AI slop.
These two audiences require different marketing channels, content and affirmations of credibility. So rather than AI reducing the cost of marketing it is more likely to increase it. And you may need more people.
I really enjoyed discussing this with the marketing team and CEO at CIEL HR (I am on their Board as an independent director) at the newly renovated Royal Orchid Yelahanka (I retired from the Board of Royal Orchid a few years ago). As a human nothing replaces in person meetings with fellow humans while eating amazing mango tiramisu 🙂
The OLD marketing principles
The good news – at least for me – is that even as the channels and audiences evolve the principles of marketing remain the same. So if you know your marketing models you can apply them to the new consumer universe. You can use AI to do the hard work of research and application of course, but you really need to know the right frameworks to apply. If you’re not sure you do, take this “Do you know your marketing frameworks” quiz from my website.
Even better news – again for me – is that the books I wrote are still relevant 🙂 If you’d like to read more anecdotes like Top Star Nayakan or discover frameworks that will help you do low cost marketing do buy a copy of Marketing Without Money.
I want to feel like I matter 🙂
I’ve been reading a book called “Mattering” which says that all of us want to feel like we matter to someone, even if it is only briefly and in the context of a commercial interaction. After the workshop yesterday I went with a group of teens to a gelato shop called Milanos, which sells a “flower” cone. This is ice cream hand-carved to look like a rose – for Rs 200 I enjoyed the attention 🙂 I was happy enough to post a pic on my instagram – thereby feeding both the machines and human eyeballs on their behalf!
If this newsletter made you smile or gave you a pop of insight please do write back and let me know!
This has been written entirely by hand and no AI was involved in the research or writing. It’s created by a human for fellow travellers.