Consumer Goods Marketing and Sales

Hello people. Hope everyone is safe & has found a rhythm of working from home and I hope we soon resume normalcy because unlike for people like us for whom this is a matter of lifestyle and ways of working, for millions it is the thin line that divides destitution and livelihood. apologies for the morbid beginning but well we are living in uncertain morbid times. And I am also sorry for being away for so long. A lot happened in the last year or so including a role change, lots of work related travel, craziness overall but most importantly, writers block. I just wasn't sure what should I write about next. So thanx to a dear colleague who drew up a list of topics I could write about and this is the first one I have chosen. Before I delve deep, just a reminder - this blog is for FMCG/CPG beginners and hence may not be relevant for the experts or people who have done this for many years. Consumer promotions are what I call the absolute necessary evil of FMCG industry. You cann...

This was originally published on Network Capital , reposting here for higher visibility. Send me a line if you enjoyed this, I hope you find it useful. --- Kaushik learnt marketing at L’Oreal, strategy at McKinsey and now learning product in a tech company. He has also worked on projects for the World Economic Forum (presented in Davos 2016) and Rocket Internet. He graduated from INSEAD with an MBA and is based in London. Kaushik enjoys collecting single malt whisky, geeking out on trivia, and coaching people. This is his story. I’ve spent the first 20 years of my life in an India that was changing almost daily – and as a result I saw the problems with a closed economy in my early years, and quickly realised the benefits of a free market in my later years. I say this because growing up, there were very few career options. We were just moving from an era where government jobs were the epitome of life’s success, to one where the private sector was just about beginning to prov...

Hello people! Continuing our journey into the murky waters of inexact science of consumer insights; here is my 2 nd post on the topic. Also, as promised I am doing 1 every month (I started this in Feb just never managed to finish it & maybe I will do 2 in March) I personally find doing qualitative research or groups is relatively easier than doing one on one consumer immersions. For those who are hearing this term for the first time; it’s a fancy word for consumer home visits where you get someone to recruit consumers for you and you go and talk to them by yourself. In the beginning you can also request for a moderator to know how its done or accompany someone else who has done a few of them. Eventually however, you will have to find your own rhythm & way of doing them. For me, it is also what I love about being a FMCG marketer most – the joy of talking to the consumers. Unlike popular belief, I am a socially awkward person and hence talking to strangers doesn’t come...

Hello hello.......... Happy 2019 to everyone. Wishing for lots of goodness for everyone. I didn't keep up my promise of one blog entry every month last year but I am hoping I am going to be better this year.  This year I plan to focus on the 'not so exact science' part of marketing. As Dumbledore told Harry in the Half Blood Prince - we shall be leaving the firm foundation of fact and journeying together through the murky marshes of memory into the thickets of wildest guesswork. Consumer insights is pretty much like that. There are of course concrete quantitative proofs of what works for your consumers but we shall not focus on that part here. My entire focus in this piece will be to outline what is an insight and how to get there (at least eventually).  Let me begin by putting down some caveats. This, as said above is my personal experience with delving deep into the realms of a person’s motivations, triggers & aspirations. There can be (in fact, definitely i...

Hello people. I am trying to keep my promise of doing at least 1 post in a month although I am super delayed on this one. Let me try and be punctual and deliver on promised timelines in the future. The genesis of this post is a conversation I had last week at the lunch table with some colleagues who were trashing Kotler and saying how it was a waste of time & how it didn't help them to learn anything at all that has aided them in delivering on their jobs. I of course disagreed because I personally am a big fan of Kotler. I know a lot of you will be scoffing right now and may not read the rest of the post at all because of this. But honestly, step back once and think - did Kotler not make all of us know 4Ps of marketing inside out. We all have evolved our thinking on the 4Ps and in fact have moved into more evolved models of 5Ps and 7Cs and all of that. But the first time we all understood what does marketing mean is through Kotler and often enough we all resort to jargon from ...

Part 3/3 from Jayant - insightful piece on Price Pack Architecture to optimise portfolios. From whatever I've seen, this is one of the most effective parts of the Revenue Growth toolkit. Designing Pack Price Architecture (PPA) through Conjoint Most consumer decisions are made within the influence of several factors – price, competitive marketing efforts (media and trade promotions), brand significance, share of mind/shelf in the shop/retail, new innovative launches etc. So how can a researcher decide on a methodology that allows us to study the impact of these variables when optimizing a brand portfolio. Price Pack Architecture is important to ensure that each SKU in a brand portfolio is aiding in maximizing volume and value for the parent brand (with least cannibalization). Since each SKU would differ slightly in its offering (size, price, flavor etc.), it needs to be understood what impact does it have on the business by changing or introducing new SKUs or brands in ...

Here we are, in the middle of February and the year already seems to be slipping by. I thought its only been a few weeks since I wrote the last post, but then realized that the few weeks was actually last year and almost 2 months have gone by. So here I am writing the next part of the "Making Ads" saga. I am sure all of us have heard & maybe also used the age old saying "an ad is only as good as the brief" and even if it makes the creative people sometime wince; its actually true. The essence and the magic of a creative truly is in the brief. And hence, the next obvious question is what's in a brief.  Before I actually say what's in a brief or rather how to go about writing a brief; I think it’s important to call out what's not in a brief and what should not be in a brief. Firstly, your vision of what the ad should look like should not be in a brief because you are not the creative team and even if you can be one; it does not help anyone if...

2017 is almost over and I thought we must give something to the readers to mull over as the year ends. Year ends, in my opinion automatically put one in a reflective mode about the year gone by, what has one learnt, achieved and what will the new year bring in. As I was closing things on my to-do list today the fact that 2017 has ended hit me hard and needless to say I went into this mode of what have I done noteworthy in this year. I am putting all of these down because the post is an outcome of all the thinking.  I want to give you a brief synopsis of what I do in my current role so that you understand why am I writing about ad making all of a sudden. So I handle Equity for Dettol for all Developing Markets which means all ads that are run on Dettol irrespective of the product, country, culture, price segment, consumer et al are made by me and in 2017 I have made in excess of 20-25 ads and then they get multiplied by the number of countries and overall I have worked on approxi...