Breaking Brand Ambassadors - 'Facing' the Music!

A brand ambassador offers credence to the brand. The brand is personified with the qualities of the brand ambassador and thus the brand is transformed in identity to take in the characteristics of the brand ambassador in value and spirit. 

Celebrities are used as brand ambassadors in organizational campaigns. Companies leverage the identity of the brand ambassador to have a rub-off of the ambassador’s lofty image on the brand. The synonymous identity struck between the brand and the brand ambassador is built by using repeated associations in communication. The reach of such communication results in the reinforcement of the personality traits of the brand ambassador as the tenets of the brand itself. Cadbury was earlier faced with the worm infestation crisis and since then it needed to reposition itself as a credible brand. The engagement of Amitabh Bachchan as the brand ambassador has adorned its campaigns all these years and it has reinforced a great deal of trust in the brand.

It has become commonplace for brand owners to project themselves as their brand ambassadors in recent times. Vasanth & Co, is a home electronics and household appliances retailer whose owner is H. Vasanthakumar, a Congress party politician in Tamil Nadu. He is featured in the brand logo itself, which is in the form of a quality and trust seal. In all the communication campaigns of the retailer Mr. Vasanthakumar is starred. More known as a trusted politician in the catchements of his stores than the proprietor of Vasanth & Co, his identity has indeed helped promote his brand of stores in Tamil Nadu.

We have been witnessing the emergence of the yoga guru Baba Ramdev and his associate Acharya Balkrishna as the brand ambassadors for the Patanjali brand in India. In fact the range of herbal and ayurvedic products has been built on the aura of the yoga guru Ramdev. All the Patanjali retail stores feature the image of the guru on their signboards! Whether it is Patanjali Atta Noodles or Patanjali Cow’s Ghee, Ramdev signs off with his yogic credentials, anchoring his stance as the brand ambassador!

Motivated by the owner turned brand ambassador concept, the owner of the New Saravana Stores in Chennai has become the value retailing company’s brand ambassador. The youthful looking hero-like owner dances to the advertisement tunes amidst a show of expensive cars, pompous models and sartorially elegant clothes! A non-entity otherwise, he has quickly become synonymous with the brand and the whole audience now knows that it is the proprietor of the brand himself who has become the brand ambassador! The ads feature popular actors like Tamanna and Hansika also (along with him), whose faces sway the audience's attention from the unknown face of the brand ambassador who tries too hard to sell himself. Has it worked for the brand? Only time will tell us!

We may see many such owner-cum-brand ambassadors standing by their own brands in future!

After all, a Trump is only known by his brand to the World!!

 - Dr. Gibson Vedamani

The bell rings ding-dong! There goes Jabong!!

Discounters always have a huge sales turnover. Wal-Mart is yet the largest organization in the World! It is reported that only one out of the top ten retailing companies in the World as on 2015 is an online retailer (amazon.com) and all others are yet brick and mortar retailers. Retailers struggle hard to organize their merchandise assortments, make customer deliveries and refill their shelves, but the brick and mortar ones excel in these functions. Most of the online retailers are mere ‘moderators’ of the business, having an establishment of humongous supplier linkages that facilitate customer deliveries without any inventory holding responsibility at their end. If one becomes successful in identifying deep pockets that could place trust on the business model one projects, any new online retailer may commence his business easily these days!

Today in the newspapers in Mumbai we read a huge full-page advertisement of a new online retailer of ‘customized’ products! The advertisement features a high-powered customized motorcycle on the front page but in the second page it shows products as simple as clothing and footwear for customization! The offered scope of customization is huge – items that range from high involvement purchases to even impulse buys! One has to wait and see how ‘customization’ is executed on such a wide variety of products. While customization partners may actually execute the business, the online retailer may just provide the platform for the business and the company’s role is that of a moderator who coordinates the business deal and collects the revenue! In short, such ‘moderating models’ of business may crop up in plenty in the near future, imaginably fashioning their own new valuation methodologies as well!

Mergers and acquisitions may become commonplace in the Indian online retail sector, these days. As many organizations have grown in product transaction value, they have discovered the new methodology of assessing the value of the company by its Gross Merchandise Value which is the sum total of the marked retail price of all the products put on the platform for sales. These online retailers could never go by EBITDA figures as they all presumably had negative gross margins. Investors are yet hopeful of making money some day and see the light of day!

At a reported negative EBITDA of Rs. 415 Crores ($ 60 million) on a total sales turnover of Rs. 940 Crores ($ 135 million) in the financial year ended March 31, 2016, Jabong went on the block. Myntra, belonging to the Flipkart Group clinched the deal according to recent reports, at $ 70 million. The buyer’s offer got the better of two offers – one at $ 35 million from the Future Group and the other at $ 50 million from Snapdeal. The erstwhile valuation parameters have been defeated perhaps for the first time. Jabong made a desperate attempt to make a sell-out as it was struggling hard to make both ends meet! Newspapers reported that it was a ‘hush-hush’ deal between the Flipkart Group’s Myntra and Jabong! The valuation of the company resulted in a worth that was considerably less than a quarter of its sales turnover! And what the other contenders offered was even much less; the offer from the Future Group reportedly being only a half of the deal amount!

The valuations of such companies may go down to even smaller fractions if profit further fractures and true value revelations may be made! Reality seems to slowly dawn over the online retailing madness of valuations and investments!

Judiciousness, I see thou unfurling, in the right time!

Dr. Gibson G. Vedamani

Go Incognito, Ye Online Shoppers!

Online shoppers show a variety of shopping behaviors.  One may enjoy window-shopping in a department store or one may love strolling in a mall with the objective of spending time all by oneself or with family for sheer relaxation. Likewise online customers too enjoy browsing retail sites often, just to understand trends or to know about the latest products or service innovations and introductions. Often while browsing we are bombarded with information and recommendations continuously based on our browsing history. Even as we open our emails and begin to focus on them, information from various online service providers would pop up distracting our attention, through the cookies stored in cache memory. One is awed many a time about how this tracking machinery could consistently do the job! Offline retailers tend to forget their regular customers, as people’s memories are short-lived. Even customer relationship programmes do not have an efficient process to alert the presence of regular customers in the store premises as they seldom deploy any reliable system to know repeat visits of customers, despite having a track of purchase histories.  

Quite a few technology geeks who are employed with marketing organizations, eagerly exercise their capabilities to do online snooping and search engine indexing. They attempt to closely track customers’ browsing and search behavior and successfully direct them to their own websites and offers. The intelligence system of online retailers is mind- blowing. No one can hide from the tracking of information when they are determined to snoop on customers’ browsing and purchase behavior. It is a man-eat-man world out there in the cyber space to grab customers from one another. Search engine indexing is found to help a great deal in the matter of collecting, analyzing and storing data for use by the search engine. The search engine index is the location where the collected data is securitized. Technical experts in competing online marketing organizations would work overtime to outsmart each other in designing the most efficient search engine indexing so that their product or service would get precedence and priority over the other in showing up first in the order of search results. Often such competitors pip each other at the post!  What may appear first in search results may also stand the chance of gaining the customer view first. Thus search engine indexing is said to precisely help overcome competition on searches made. The adequacy of the search is dependent on a properly designed search engine index with a plethora mix of key words and linked content, so that information is picked instantly to show on the results page first. Search engine spiders or crawlers, as technologists call them, are said to be deployed to go all around the web universe to enable the search engine index update information in a jiffy. 

Technology experts recommend online shoppers and browsers to go through the privacy options built into the software, including the operating system, which as customers we may have ignored so far. The safest way for organizations is to connect to the Internet through a Virtual Private Network (VPN). The VPN helps securitize information from any kind of snooping consequent to adopting the order of encrypting and decrypting of information, rendering it unreadable by snoopers. Individuals who would shop and browse online and want to be free from the botheration of advertisement pop-up, alerts and suggestions during unwanted occasions, can browse and shop from the privacy of their space by using the ‘go incognito’ mode in the browsers. Though it may not ensure a snooper free browsing experience, it may give relief to the browser from the information storage and the consequent pop-up troubles caused through cookies stored in cache memories! Most of us may have been unaware of the knack of escaping from cookies while browsing! 

So, isn’t it high time we went incognito while browsing?!

- Dr. Gibson G. Vedamani