What Ganesh Chaturthi taught me about Marketing

Here’s the thing, being a Bombay (what it was called then) boy, growing up a kilometer away from the city’s first public Ganesh pandal, one could never ignore the impact of the magical festival of Ganesh Chaturthi. 

Over decades of visiting major Ganesh Pandals in the island city and watching them evolve over the years, I learnt some extremely insightful lessons about marketing. 

At the most basic level, the job profiles of a Ganesh Mandal President and the CEO of a consumer company aren’t too different. The goal is to attract maximum people to your offering vs competitors and ensure they return every year. 

Here’s how Ganesh Pandal owners aced every theory in marketing using native intelligence -

1. Traditional Marketing - My product/brand is better than my competitors: 

This was around the time when I first started visiting pandals as a child between from early 90s to 2000. What excited me most was the size of the idol. Tall idols of 30, 35 and even 40 feet in Ganesh Galli, Lalbaug and Khetwadi 11th Lane, would attract the maximum number of people. This slowly evolved into best decorated pandals attracting most crowds. I distinctly remember standing in queues outside Tilak Nagar’s Ganesh Pandal to get a glimpse of life size recreations of famous Indian monuments. 

This I later understood, wasn’t very different from the “meri safedi uski safedi se safed” - school of marketing. The best idol, the best decoration attracted the most footfalls.

2. Modern Marketing - My product/brand is better because it makes you feel better. 

The key drawback of the traditional technique of positioning above competitors was, the risk of losing loyalty. Easy for competitors to make taller idols, more elaborate decorations to veer crowds away from the incumbents. A relatively more stable model would be to shift focus away from the competitors to the consumers (in this case, devotees). Lalbaugcha Raja, to my mind, aced this strategy. The focus was always on how devotees felt with the Lord watching over them. Consistency in the design of the idol, decorations and the rituals (including a 20 hour long immersion procession) bred familiarity among devotees. While visitors attended other Pandals for to see large idols and decorations, a visit to Lalbaugcha Raja always meant much more than that. This feeling, in the material world is eerily similar to how one feels about the purchase of an Apple product. The brand is good, because  it cares the most about customers, it makes them feel the best. Over time, following Apple’s lead, we’ve seen traditional marketers move more towards consumer obsession and cult - creation in their communication too.

 

3. “Go Green” Marketing - My product/brand is the best because it makes the world a better place.

Customer obsession eventually evolved from an individual focus to the focus on community. Over the last 5 years, I’ve noticed an increasing presence of Eco-friendly Ganesh Pandals. A few around my house in Marine Lines, speak about Zero Pollution, 100% Recyclable and Bio-degradable idols and decorations. There’s a growing cult around idols made out of Chocolate, Papier Mache and Traditional clay with water colours. This coincides with what I see around the material world too. Brands like Allbirds, Patagonia and Beyond Meat are almost exclusively based on the premise of making the world a better place for our future generations. I believe, this is also where all other brands will eventually move too. Increasingly, we hear Apple speak about re-cycling all the metals for new phones and Amazon wanting to reduce the usage of plastic in their packaging. Even hotel chains are promoting responsible, eco-friendly luxury to engage with guests and cultivate loyalty. Great move, for the earth and the customers. 

4. Socially Conscious Marketing - My product/brand is best because it takes the Right Steps for Society. 

Finally, this morning I read that Lalbaugcha Raja has decided against holding elaborate celebrations this year due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Instead, the authorities will devote those 10 days towards organizing blood donation and plasma therapy camps. This move, based on the reactions online, has been welcome and widely appreciated by the public. This closely follows developments around the world. Nike, J&J and Unilever have made some serious changes to their communication and product offerings in the wake of #BlackLivesMatter. In fact, Suresh Narayanan of Nestle also told CNBC-TV18, that brands are now realizing that beyond profits, they also have a big responsibility toward societal values. 

Thus, here’s marketing 101, learnt from my favorite festival. Years ago, I started by visiting these Pandals as an excited child and now I continue to visit them, as an observer of marketing trends, still excited and hoping that Mighty Ganesha continues to pave the way and remove obstacles towards learning new things. 

Life, is an Ice Cream

How often have we heard this, Life is an ice cream, enjoy it before it melts? Aplenty right? I’d always wonder, if there was ever more to it than the ‘time is precious, enjoy it while it lasts’ angle. So recently, I was enjoying the wonderful spread at Haagen Dazs’ outlet, when an observation made me realize the deeper meaning to this age-old cliché.

As the creamy fruity flavors burst in my mouth registering their presence one after the other, I wondered, what separated great ice cream from a good one? For, all the good ice cream vendors I knew used fresh ingredients, the best quality milk and international standard procedures. But what actually separated the better one from the good ones was their texture. It’s insanely important to understand, what actually works for Ice cream is the texture, much more than flavors. I could have the best burst of berries and the sin of a chocolate in my ice cream, but it’d all be lost if it weren’t thick, creamy and left a buttery residue in our palette that enabled the flavor to actually linger. The secret to great ice cream, I understood, lies in the texture.

This is actually where it all got more interesting. If thought about deeply, the definition of texture, is nothing but, the way it feels. So, the idea of greatness lies, not in the way we are or what we’re made of, but how we make everyone else feel. Mind you, I’m not saying what we are made of doesn’t matter, but the transition from Good to Great relies on how we make the others feel.

I’d once read a Zaheer Khan interview where he said, we know when Sachin Tendulkar is upset or angry, he takes a second helping of ice cream. Which brings me to the calming aspect of ice cream. Here again, it’s the texture that works. Another example would be, the same ice cream, kept in the freezer for too long would crystallize and despite the ingredients, its magic would be lost. Sachin Tendulkar, as a batsman made us Feel good. Not that there weren’t batsmen of his caliber, but a when he scored runs, the nation slept well. His greatness lay in making a nation feel good. That’s the magic of texture.

Some of the best brands on earth are not necessarily the ones that make the most advanced products, but the ones that make us feel good about using them. It’s not about the mystery of an idol at a temple. It’s about what we feel once we’re in the environs. Faith again, is a feeling. The most effective marketing communication and the most successful movies, are actually the ones that make us “Feel”.

So, the point of this observation was Life, as an ice cream, would be enjoyed only if we made everyone else around us feel good. A kind gesture, a genuine compliment, a thoughtful deed, some support and just being a good human being would go a long way in adding the texture to the ice cream that our life is. Ingredients make one good, but the Texture, will make them great. There’s a limited time for it. So enjoy this, before it melts or crystallizes, else, the magic would be lost.

Inside Apple - Adam Lashinsky (Book Review)

Unputdownable.

At first, when I saw this book online, I thought it’d be one among the many, ‘post Jobs Cashing In’, books to be released by a capitalist publisher and a greedy author, with due respect to both of them. So while I was thinking of which one to order among so many of them, somehow, like all Apple products, this one ‘Felt’ right. And Boy, could my intuition be more accurate!

‘Inside Apple’ is an all access card to a secretive behemoth called Apple. The book takes you through all the areas of management, communication, product development and the workflow at Apple. Their obsession with perfection, their emphasis on details right from the text in their ads to the packaging of products, subliminal branding and most importantly, Focus.

There’s a line in the book, which says, Apple is “a company whose methods fly in the face of decades of well established management maxims.” I believe it’s only because they follow a method much older than recent management maxims. Their method is pretty much based on the Zen philosophy of Focus, Minimal and Simple.

It’s very rare for a company to grow to be the world’s largest, in the lifetime of its founder. Through this book, you’ll know, how Apple doesn’t care about either, the size or the growth rate In fact, doesn’t even care about the shareholders. Their focus, like their products, is Simple. Make “Revolutionary” Products and a “Wow” Product Experience, and the rest will take care of itself. Unusual and Surprising, are understatements for both, the company, and this book.

Adam tries to scratch the surface of Apple’s famous Secrecy policy. Right from anecdotes like, the company having plainclothes security at a close by bar to watch over if any Apple employee leaks some information in the heat of the moment, to their memento store at the office, which sells a tee shirt that reads “I visited Apple, but that’s all I’m allowed to Say.” So much is their belief in keeping things secret that most of the times, employees at One Infinite Loop, don’t even know what the person in the next cubicle is doing. The work culture is unlike any of the ‘Best Places to Work’ magazine issues. Something that amused me the most in the book was “Everyone inside Apple is trying to get out, and everyone outside is trying to get in.”

One more thing, it takes us through the leadership and succession planning for the post-Jobs scenario. As an Apple fan, you may rest assured, that the company’s going nowhere south in the near future, for Steve’s pumped enough of his vision into each employee. However, it’ll be interesting to see how things pan out thereafter. The closest one can get to know how Apple works without working there, is through this book. Adam Lashinsky has thrown this light on the ‘dark side of moon’ in a manner that you can’t not be amazed by this company which takes being Casual, very Seriously. I highly recommend it to all. It’s Unputdownable.