“We must design for the way people behave, not for how we wish them to behave” (Donald A Norman, Living with Complexity)
Nano Marketing Story
We are all too familiar with the Nano marketing story. Tata Nano, the ‘people’s car’, somewhere down the road lost its position to being a ‘cheap’ car – a much unexpected turn in the road. Cheap is not a word Indians, or for that matter anybody, would like to associate themselves with. So while the product was designed to provide a safe and relatively comfortable ride for the middle-class Indian family, it ended up being a mismatch between aspiration and association. The important marketing lesson here is the need to deeply understand the customer and their preferences.
Zomato’s Cultural Misstep in Marketing
Here is another story that failed to consider customer sensitivities – the right-to-your-doorstep delivery service, Zomato. Zomato, and its other close competitors, are more than a service to certain customer segments, such as the binge-watching college student or that owl-shift worker. Doorstep food delivery is a great convenience. However, despite being so close to the customers’ living rooms, sentiments – and culture – may be completely missed.
Zomato is also popular for their creative advertisements. But just like some bog brands, Zomato too failed to understand what its customers like to read. You would be aware of the cringe-worthy billboard advertisement on which they tried to play with words that were not culturally welcome. The marketing strategy tried to give a playful twist to abbreviations that are, especially in the northern part of India, considered offensive.
Zomato attempted to redefine ‘MC’ and ‘BC’ as ‘Mac N Cheese’ and ‘Butter Chicken’. This, however, backfired – hard. Some customers not only found it distasteful, but outright offensive.
‘MC’ and ‘BC’ as ‘Mac N Cheese’ and ‘Butter Chicken’
What went wrong? Understanding the customer. Understanding who he/she is. Understanding their self-image and value system.
In the case of the Tata Nano, Tata seemed to have missed on two fronts. One, people also project their social position by not only the clothes they wear or the jewellery they adorn, but also by the car that they drive. Ever noticed Indian car adverts? It’s always about celebration, festivals, family togetherness and other joyous moments. As a Tata Nano owner, would you want to be associated with the shallowness of your pocket? In Zomato’s case, well, customers aren’t just the binge-watching college student or that owl-shift worker, but includes senior citizens, the doting father and the very strict mother. Understanding the cultural milieu of the customer is very important to strike the right chord.
So, why did both these go wrong? It stems from the simple fact that both the behemoths failed to understand the customer (in these instances). Tata inadvertently impacted the ‘aspirations’ of the potential Nano owner. Zomato’s approach to give a twist (probably targeting the younger generation) seems to have twisted it a little too much making the advertisement culturally unacceptable.
While these happen across the spectrum of organizations from technology to fast food, it is necessary to understand the purpose of ‘communication’ in marketing, especially the message, and not get carried away.
Marketing is about meeting the aspiration of the buyer and for this understanding the customer is paramount. Storytelling, which is a key component of marketing, is predicated on understanding the customer and telling the story that they like to hear, the way they would want to hear it.
Enter Design Thinking
Design Thinking plays an invaluable role in marketing. Design Thinking is all about looking at opportunities to create value (solve an existing problem or launch a new product or service) keeping the end customer/user absolutely at the center – and without losing focus at any moment. An approach that is centrally focused on the end customer guarantees absolute customer delight.
However, to keep the customer in the center, it is important to first know the customer completely – inside out. To help with this, Design Thinking uses a tool called Persona. The Persona tool helps one to capture salient aspects of the customer, contextual to the issue he/she is facing. It captures the customer’s background – education, family, experiences – all relevant to the current context. It also highlights the motivational factors for the customer – what makes the customer do (whatever they are doing) even better. It could be appreciation, self-image or something more intrinsic. It also considers the customer’s detractors – the doubts and fears that the customer may have in his/her role. This is also reflected in the challenges the customer is facing. Finally, it attempts to capture the aspiration of the person – where do they want to be, what do they want to achieve? These five aspects provide a clear understanding of the customer – again – in context. However, what truly enables the marketer to gather such information is the ability to listen to the customer without any bias or without the intent to reply, observe the customer deeply, read about the customer from all sources to get better background information and finally dialogue with the customers themselves. We call it the skill of the LORD – Listening, Observing, Reading and Dialoguing.
The Importance of Advertisement
Communicating with the customer based on a deep understanding leads to magic. Here is a small story that the popular advertisement personality, Ambi Parameswaran shares in his book ‘Nawabs, Nudes & Noodles: India Through 50 Years of Advertising’ (Macmillan, 2023, Pg: 18-19). “While working on a confectionery brand in the ‘80s, I was part of a serious discussion on the role of advertising and the best time to launch a kid-focused campaign. I said that the best time to reach a kid was when she was free, maybe during vacations, in summer or during any of the other breaks. The veteran marketer T Krishnakumar, who now heads Coca-Cola’s very large bottling business in India, destroyed my hypothesis by saying that the best time to launch a kid-focused product was when the kid is attending school. The argument went as follows: A child learns about a new product from the television or the retailer. He then has to tell someone. When he goes to school the next day, he has ten or twenty eager listeners, eager to learn something new. If the kid is going to be the viral mechanism for the new product, it stands to logic that a kid does not see the ad for a new product – of interest to him – as an ad. He or she sees it as valuable information that could be traded in school.
So it was propounded that when advertising to kids, we need not apply the minimum principle to advertising. The levels of advertising for products aimed at children could be much lower. But if we advertise during the period when the kid has the maximum audience, we will be able to amplify our message that much more. As Spanish poet, philosopher and novelist George Santayana has said, ‘Children are natural mythologists; they beg to be told tales, and love not only to invent but to enact falsehoods.’”
Conclusion
Marketing is never a one-size-fits-all approach. The outcome of effective marketing is based on a deep understanding of the customer. The application of Design Thinking in marketing has proven benefits. Design Thinking focuses on the customer than the initial problem. The insights garnered from such an approach ensures that the outcome isn’t just for the here and now, but for the foreseeable future.
At the School of Design Thinking, our Design Gurus not only focus on these concepts and techniques during our workshops, but also contextualize them to elevate and design the thinking to the next level.
