Issues for brand manager:

Consumers
Competition
Landscape

Business Objective:

What should be done, sold?

Size of category, Target custoemrs

Amazon vs Flipkart
2014 Amazon decided to take on India.

Business objective for Amazon: Increase penetration for people who were not shopping online.

Target,
New category users:
1. Why should they consider the category? (more choices, convenience etc.)
2. Why to go with my brand?
Number 2 brand convinces customers to get into ecommerce, but customers may go with the
leader. (No.2 brand does all the work and customers will mostly pick the No.1 brand)

Existing users:
1. Why to go with my brand? (consumer loyalty)

Drivers of Category: Convenience, choices

Barriers of Category: Products are not genuine, service is not good, no return policy, touch and feel,
online transaction is not safe

First brands try to target drivers of category.

After demonetization Paytm still focusing on drivers of category (which was done by govt. already)
Had their focus was on barriers, they could have got more people in.

Aur dikhavo campaign for people who do not shop at all

Husband and wife bet ad- for the upper middle class

Size of the category:

Total availability * How many consume * How often they consume * How much they consumer
Market/Geo Penetration (%) Freq of consumption Avg weight of consumption

Target Consumer

Who did Amazon go after?

1.People who love to shop
2.People who hate having to settle or compromise (Aur Dikhao target consumers)

Thumbs up: Target consumers: Macho image seeking youth. Aim to delight.
All other consumers: Accept only to please
Those who develop a taste for Thumbs up, will not go for pepsi or coke.
These consumers advocate the brand. (people in the house also get used to the brand)

Carefully choose your target (the super consumers) and commit to delight them.

Vodafone blackberry boys ad: 2 issues. Killing their super consumers- the corporate people; The
youth college students who aspire to use an expensive phone- the ad says that it is cheap.

CCI: Communication challenge and Insight

What is Amazons communication challenge? (both)

Establish choice as the most important attribute of a delightful shopping experience
Establish Amazon as the player with the widest repository of choices

Brands should have a clear differentiator with respect to the No.1 player and that differentiator is
essential to their experience. Then the user does not compare with the No.1 brand.

Swatch Bharat Vidya Balan campaign: Social stigma used to influence people
Head and Shoulders, 1960 1st introduced dandruff issue, social stigma.

Insight: Always includes tension.

Observation: A deep understanding of the motivations, attitudes and beliefs that impact behaviour/
non-behaviour. Based upon human truth (valid for a large proportion of population. Ex: for a lot of
people music is not just pass of time but an expression of self).

With Flair and Structure

Insight: Our clothes say a lot about us, and not having the right outfit makes it harder to be the
person you want to be.
Product Idea: App that suggests outfit ideas for specific occasions or identities.
Communication Idea: Outfit that express your possibilities.

For Amazon, No paralysis and enough choices.

Acing Marketing Cases:

Structured cases: GDs
Unstructured cases: Interviews and some GDs

GTM Case cracking:

Segmentation
Targeting
Insight
Proposition

SEGMENTATION:
Start with a psychographic or a need state (benefit) based segmentation and then demographics.

Needstate: Social, Casual, Serious, Marriage

 Social (FB all ages) Casual (Tinder) Serious Matrimonial (Shaadi)
Teens Y
18-23 Y Y Y
24-31 Y y Y
31+ Y Y

TARGETING:
Principle: Choose based on: Attractiveness, Ability to win
Pick a segment that you are familiar with
Niche but likely to grow fast in the immediate future
Something that market leader is not good at

So we can pick serious relationship segment between 24 to 31.

INSIGHT:
Put yourself in the shoes of the consumer, imagine this person.
Find out the biggest problem/ tension that this person has WRT to your category
Or else what does the product means to someone at a human level

PRODUCT: (App for serious relationships)

Resolve the challenges/ problems faced by consumers
Choose features/ benefits that are distinctive

BIG IDEA: (for Binder- isnt love marriage a necessity)

Resolve the tension
Say it with passion

Deciding effective medium to reach the TG:

For a dating site and to get more women on board, google search wont work. Because they arent
going to search.

How do you get the most ROI? Run campaign when the customers are ready to listen to you.

PRICING
DISTRIBUTION

Pointers:
Handling a brand extension case:
Mother brand (Hero splender) targeting youth, does millage really matter?
Value added by mother brand.
We vs Me in GDs
Cracking an interview when you have no idea what the right answer is.
The candidate who made the interviewer speak more is the one who will get through.
Tell me something about yourself: what do I need to persuade the recruiter of? Strengths
(not bluntly) need to come out in the introduction. Practice story telling.
Personal story telling: (10 competencies that recruiters look at)

Understand the recruiters need

8+2 core sales and marketing competencies
Build the self-charter
Identify and articulate your core values and strengths
Construct the outline of your stories
Points. Written format. Write your key strengths and back up with stories
Make it interesting
Use tactics to tell it with drama, humour, passion
All good stories are about conflicts. What you learnt from the conflict and moved on
Every great story has a twist.
3 Ps (Practice, practice, practice)
Help the interviewer visualize the story

Behavioural questions