Consumer Goods Marketing and Sales

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...

So we are back after almost 4 years. Kaushik & I have been thinking of reviving this platform for a while now but then life & work and the founder’s ambition of doing his 2 nd MBA from the big 5 got in the way of it. But now we are back and hopefully will be more regular with this. Well done Kaushik for chasing & living your dreams and here’s to many more milestones you shall achieve. At the onset let me tell you, this piece will make sense to someone who has been in the marketing function for at least 4-6 months. Otherwise, it will just be one of those marketing book things one reads in college or post work which has little application. My aim in this discourse is to simplify Media for first time marketers. There is of course a lot more to media than what I will cover. For Harry Potter fans, media planning is much like brewing a potion. You can put in the right ingredients and follow all instructions but there is a little magic in media which comes only to the inspi...

This is the final part of the series. Please read the earlier parts before going through this post or it won't make sense. Links below: Working with Numbers - Part 1 Working with Numbers - Part 2 Working with Numbers - Part 3 Working with Numbers – Part 4 So till now we have covered 3 major sources of information – internal numbers, Nielsen & HHP. We have also covered how to tie in the internal numbers to Nielsen and how to use both of them in tandem to arrive at a richer, deeper and more insightful analysis. This post shall cover how to marry all 3 sources together and to work towards aligning marketing strategies and actions to grow everywhere. As with everything else in life – this post shall work on the following assumptions: ·         Market Share is a marketers pride – ultimately you are doing everything to make consumers buy “more” of you in comparison to other brands ·      ...

So my apologies for being so inactive, Anupriya had sent me this post a few weeks back, and owing to work pressures and other such things in my life, I was unable to update the blog - although planning a revamp and lots more interesting stuff next quarter, so keep visiting the blog! As always, thanks Anupriya - star you are! Very kind of you to take time out and write :) Also, just crossed 10,000 hits! Thanks for your support people! Working with Numbers – Part 3  In the 2 previous parts we have covered the basic sources of data that we have access to or use as marketers and a deep dive into 2 very important ones – internal numbers and ACN. In this part we will try and understand Household Panel (hereafter referred to as panel) and then try and put the 3 sources together i.e. internal numbers, ACN and HHP Panel is your one stop shop to understand what your consumers are doing. What is their purchase behavior? Understanding of Panel makes you understand the consum...

Part 2 of Anupriya's 3 part series! As always, t hanks a lot :) For Par t 1 click here . ---  My first post covered the various sources of data that we have access to or use as marketers. Now I will dig deeper into 2 sources - Internal Numbers & Nielsen and most importantly how to tie them together. As discussed earlier on also, internal numbers are the only reality of our lives. We need to live with them and all marketing activities at the end of the day need to culminate into better sales growth.  For simplicity sake for this entire piece we will assume Primary Sales = Secondary Sales  Some Key Points to remember while looking at internal numbers: Actual numbers are important but most important metric to look at is growths. What is most important is to chase a growth objective and chase it hard While looking at growths always delink the volume growth and value growth – for e.g. if you took a price increase by 10% and your sales growth...