Masters in metamorphosis

What I do for a living was difficult for me to explain about 8 years ago even when I first started work. Over time one would have imagined clarity would have descended upon me and I would not have to fumble or think twice if asked that question. It has only gotten more complex (I wouldn't like to say worse) - thankfully this time...not just for me but for many others who I speak to :)

So here are the interesting bits

For a long time now, there isn't one single organization I have worked for. What started off as freelancing ended up as 'open' work arrangements where I would give only a part of my time to an organization sometimes working with 2 or even 3 of them at the same time ranging from market research to brand communication to retail design. Some days ago, I was called for an interview for a full time position in an advertising agency. Full time was the hitch though the recruitment consultant persuaded me...go ahead and meet them at least. What do you stand to lose anyway? To be honest I felt a little foolish going for a meeting knowing very well I would not be throwing away my existing work contracts. I enjoy the freedom and flexibility of working in diverse areas. I called a friend (a veteran ad professional) to ask her whether i could suggest to this agency the possibility of working as consultant...would it sound too outlandish ? Her response took me by surprise. Are you kidding me she said, who in this day and age commits all their time to one organization! Now I know that might not be a universal truth but it is becoming more and more prevalent. She then went on to cite the instance of another advertising professional she knew who worked at two competing ad agencies at the same time and they both hired him knowing very well he worked with a competitor. On his part he had to tread the confidentiality line cautiously. But that is not an impossibility.

A conversation with another colleague whose career graph has moved from teaching to copy writing to information design on social media and writing for children, was about how as professionals it is imperative today that we invent and reinvent ourselves, else start feeling obsolete. Gone are the days when people specialized in one core skill and stayed with it for their lifetime.

A few others I know mention that whenever they need to switch jobs it is close to impossible to seek help from a recruitment consultant since those consultants who are used to understanding the water-tight world of neatly chalked out job definitions very often do not understand what kind of a job role to fit them into and therefore end up randomly matching key words and sending them leads which do not make any sense

Some one else (an enterprising digital marketing consultant) saw this as an opportunity to offer resource management as a supplementary skill to his clients. He has been with the industry long enough to understand the kind of people that would best fit the requirements of this industry. Digital marketing being a relatively new area, there is little chance for anyone to find people with a specific degree or academic lineage that would be a straight fit. Brand planning is another such specialization I am told. It is a decade old practice in many agencies in India. In the initial days client servicing guys who understood the agency business well graduated to brand planning.With the field maturing and competition intensifying there is a need to hire 'specialists'. Ironically the specialist could come from (not advertising but) a related industry -brand communication or research / consumer insight agencies.

So what is all this leading to...

• Going forward we may see open organizations - lose collaborations between working professionals who come together for a project.


• Open job definitions - I have already seen this happening in some organizations which are lean and each employee plays more than one role. So the brand planner also doubles up as a copy-right expert and the office boy also offers basic IT support. And all this is possible made due to the sheer appetite to learn


• Maybe more 'generalizations' rather than 'specializations' in academic programs. Today's newspaper carried an advert of a private university in Gujrat offering a program in liberal studies - a choice based learning approach where one could chose to study music and economics as electives perhaps. How one applies these unique skills to earn a livelihood would be a challenge but an interesting one at that !


• And on a more fundamental level - it would allow us to define our own benchmarks, boundaries of competition and metrics of success. After all how many people do you know who combine knowledge about consumer insights and the subconscious mind with maybe retail design? :)

Indian Ingenuity, jugaad and customer support

Indian Ingenuity or 'jugaad' as it is locally known is now a globally accepted term and philosophy. It features in the HBR and the management gurus and media love discussing at lenght whether the jugaad mindset is helping India & indians grow economically or does this mindset reinforce the constraints that first led to the birth of this way of working and therefore keep us living in compromised situations. Just google 'jugaad' and 'indian ingenuity' to follow the intellectual discourse on the subject

It is difficult to define since it encompasses the creation of alternatives, substitutes, improvisations and make-dos that is spurred by a native inventiveness which is characteristic of a culture steeped in scarcity and survival. It has inspired the creation of hybrid vehicles used as transport in Indian villages to the corner stores on the street making the pc / mobile technology more accessible to masses at a fraction of a cost to the local electrical making a contraption that functions as a home appliance and what have you!

Here is one more such jugaad solution that I encountered.

I had to get my Braun hand blender fixed. Turns out that Braun does not have an authorized serviced network in India. A local vendor promised to fix it for me and actually did, although getting spare parts for Braun products is not that simple.

The man imports a few pieces of Braun's original appliances. He then dismantles them completely. And sells it piece by piece. If I need a plastic joinery for my blender he would happily replace it with a new one and charge me a small premium for that part. Though I know I am being over-charged I pay it gladly. Why? I would have had to otherwise junk my machine entirely. He benefits since the sum of his parts make up more than the whole. Reverse synergy in action here :) It is a win-win situation for both of us.

I can bet my last buck that if i requested / expected such help from a branded service shop - it would be years before they would relent and offer anything close to this. Though I wonder why?

Do brands become less agile...less responsive as they grow?

As for the debate - yes the jugaad solution did prevent me from junking my old appliance and getting a new one. And an economist might argue that my truncated spending cycle does not do much good to the economic growth that gets spurred by consumer spending. Blah!


jugaad, Indian ingenuity, Braun, Culture and Branding,

New 'News'

A while ago I was doing a piece of research for the BBC when I started paying closer attention to how much news format / content has changed in India in the last few years.

I've been witness to the change everyday - from the predictable Doordarshan 9 o'clock news - to the first glimpses of how slick / interesting private new channel feed could get through 'The world this week' - to engaging journalism of the early days when everything in the newly liberalized India was opening up and along came with it the influx of the first few private news channels - to splitting up of the NDTV team into splinter channels, the fight for TRPs and sensational journalism - to its current avataar where the content bears little resemblance to what we once knew of news. And so, had not thought about the extent things have changed, until recently.

During the research discussions people's reactions ranged from nostalgia about the older days to outrage at the trash that is thrown at our face and sometimes humor. Since we were benchmarking to BBC the transition from 'news' to 'new news' seemed quite stark. A few interesting snippets -

• We have seen a general 'dumbing down' - instead of talking about the Prime Minister's outlook on the economy, news channels cover his hospital visits
• News anchors - instead of moderating discussions, inviting views - dominate discussions, out-shout panellists. Welcome to the world of high decibel news content.
  
• There is day-to-day reportage on celebrities, their whereabouts, who fought with who. As if that was not enough, even the ups and downs of Reality TV shows are regularly covered.
• There is even something called 'fake / made up' news :) - tune into to India TV that feeds you with breaking news stories like 'end of the world in year 20xx, gateway to heaven' - I am yet to make up my mind whether to call it news or entertainment or the workings of some lunatic mind.
• Most news programing now have regular ad breaks. Recently, I happened to catch Vinod Dua anchoring a news show and leaving the audience with his favourite bollywood track to listen to - bang in the middle of news!
  

This conversation between a colleague and his son sums it up quite well...

Colleague - trying to catch up with the happenings of the day, Son - Papa what is this that you are watching. Colleague- This is the news beta. They show you what is happening in the world
Son - Then why are they fighting and shouting so much?

'2.0' phenomenon in the real world

glumbert.com - Supermarket 2.0

I'm sure this video is going to be doing the rounds of blogs for a few more days before we forget it. It was interesting to see the adaptation of the Web 2.0 concept in the real world. Going beyond the humor...many of those situations are workable

User comments on products...we see this happening in book stores where people who have read certain books, leave behind their comments for others to see.

Refreshing names for product variants...specially for low involvement products - 'quality time', 'tickling', 'better audio' - definitely catches more attention for ear buds than labelling those by size / softness

'Most popular' lists for a category ...reminds me of conversations i have overheard at the supermarket - people standing in the same aisle...looking at the same product category consult each other with suggestions on which brand to buy. Putting up a list of the fastest moving product variants / brands - could aid undecided shoppers zero-in on their purchase.

Predictive shopping...if you are buying Olive oil and pasta sauce - then you surely may be in need of dried pasta or oregano. Reminder tags placed where these products are stocked or pop up messages at the self service check outs is not too distant a possibility

RSS feeds from producers :)...this is already underway in a small way. I get a newsletter from 'Innocent' that tells me (amongst other things) - the new product variants that are on offer or are being planned.

Consumers who spend a great deal of time online and are already familiar with these concepts - would welcome seeing them in a 'real world' environment. For others - many of these ideas if implemented would mean an important step taken by a retailer to cut down the time and energy wasted on decision making in a cluttered environment.

I am going to mull on this for while...meanwhile if you have any thoughts on more adaptations of the 2.0 concept in the real world ...drop in a line.

supermarket 2.0, Web 2.0

Is your music personal or social?

A few days back I was at the doctor’s clinic with 2 others - a guy and a girl. While the 2 girls had no problem chatting away for the 2 hours preceding the doctor's arrival, the guy was bored with no newsprint in sight. Out of courtesy we occasionally chatted with him. On one such occasion girl 2 told guy 1 - you should have carried your iPod. I peeped into my bag to see if i had mine...I did...I shut my bag. A pause later I asked him hesitantly - I have mine...you could have it if you like. He paused and said...no that is alright! I was relieved.

Between the moments of my asking and his refusing, I was hoping he'd say NO. I don't know why - but it felt like I would be exposing a personal part of my life by handing over my iPod to him, though when i think about it logically, it only has my music files on it. It’s not without reason they decided to call it 'I'- Pod

Contrasting this with the Zune trying to create a 'social' - around the concept of listening to music I wonder how many people would be willing to share their music (via wifi) with strangers?
Even assuming one would come across another Zune owner in the vicinity - would it not be difficult to judge what his taste in music would be, to be able to decide which song to beam across to him? Would one not feel silly about sending in the 'wrong' kind of music?

Or was it not supposed to be a 'social' of strangers in the first place. Was it supposed to be friends introducing each other to music and thereby 'discovering' new tracks? Then why call it a ‘social’? The imagery that a social conjures up is of a large gathering of college kids, not really an intimate meeting of close friends.

It’s difficult to judge whether what's gone wrong with the Zune marketing is just a wrong choice of words or a larger issue of not getting the behavioral aspect around music listening right. But something surely is amiss and what’s more - even 6 months after launch people are talking about the same issues that users encountered when the product was just launched. But then again Microsoft was never known for being responsive to consumers.

On doing a blog search on Zune – I felt like I had walked into a soap opera – even if you tune into it after 6 months – you don’t hear anything new. The only thing different I read was the news about iPod launching their wifi enabled devices in the course of the year. It would be interesting to watch how they market this feature - if they decide to make a noise about it at all that is.

P.S – I did a random image search on the iPod to see what comes up. It’s interesting to view the range of situations in which iPod users interact with their devices – None of it seems like a social!

zune, iPod, welcome to the social

Food for thought...

It’s been a year since I started blogging about Qual Research. The reasons I started writing about Qual Research were a) to grow in my own thinking and b) since I found very little being written about it.

My vision for this blog has been, to develop it into a comprehensive source of information on commercial qualitative research. Over the past few months I have realized that there are many related areas / disciplines that impact a researcher's thinking and contribute to her skill set & knowledge and a blog about qual research is incomplete without discussions on such related disciplines.

I would posting such thoughts here - half baked to begin with - in the hope that I learn something from the discussions they create.

Hope you enjoy these interesting bite sized portions!

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Today's FFT - Does communication differ on planet mars v/s venus ?

Susan writes about the gender genie - a gender-writing analyser that can read your blog content or any piece of writing for that matter and predict - your gender. I put in my blog content there and the genie decided I have a masculine style of writing. Maybe true.

Men and women do tend to write differently and even relate to / interpret communication differently. Susan's post touches up on the 'thinking' v/s 'feeling' preferences in men v/s women.
I wondered after reading her post - when communication is designed to target a specific audience - are these differences kept in mind consciously / intuitively by communication experts ? Would copy / creatives developed by a man appeal to the sensibilities of a woman as well as if those were designed by a woman herself?

For instance - I had a discussion with someone a while ago about the way marketing has been designed for lingerie brands. I had a hunch that there were two distinctive ways in which lingerie was being marketed - 1 seemed like an overtly masculine perspective reflected in the product line (loud colours, fish net stockings) and the store ambiance (raunchy looking models) - the brand that comes to mind is Ann Summers. The other seemed to take a feminine approach - pastel colours, where the mannequins looked elegant rather than overtly sexy - the kind that one would see at M&S.

Do you also see that as a gender difference in the way the two brands have been positioned ?

brand communication, gender differences and brand communication