Tag Archives: Marketing

Next Diwali, Let’s Avoid the Condescension of Doing Good? [Financial Express]

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© Priya Narayanan, Assistant Professor of Marketing, IIM Kozhikode. Views are personal.

This article was first published on May 27, 2022 in the Financial Express and is available here on the publisher’s website. In this article, I present my take on the “condescension of doing good” that is visible in recent Diwali advertising, and urge marketers to put human values first.

The version below includes links to the relevant advertisements that I discuss.

It was Cadbury that hit upon the idea of brands doing good during Diwali in a seriously big way – the 2020 ad from Cadbury Celebrations showed how small local stores that were hit by the pandemic could be brought into the customer’s consideration set through geography-based hyper-personalization. “This is not just a Cadbury ad,” they said, and so we believed: the ad nudged us towards local stores. Thus it was that in the midst of the pandemic, Cadbury found a way to do good and be good, and yet gain marketing momentum.

But the next year, as the prestige factor was upped, Shah Rukh Khan’s charisma was deemed essential to do the same job for a similar ad by Cadbury. In this ad, Shah Rukh Khan names local stores in his voiceover and this, again, was powered by technology. It wasn’t too bad, except the realization that our purchases of Celebrations were funding the expense incurred in engaging the celebrity actor.

But this year? With its #ShopsForShopless ad of 2022, Cadbury has, despite its best intentions, fallen prey to “purpose”, the new catchword in marketing. Somebody (or worse, everybody) at Cadbury seems to have decided that for Celebrations to stand out, it had to be tagged with purpose. So, now that good old eating and gifting are not enough for Diwali, the Cadbury ad tells us to scan a QR code on the sweet box, help roadside hawkers set up virtual shops, and buy from such shops. For the kind of “help” that they received, the gratitude in the eyes of Damodar (not Damodarji?!) and his helper is nauseating in its excessiveness.

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Learning Marketing from Shelby Hunt – A Tribute

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(c) Priya Narayanan, Assistant Professor of Marketing, Indian Institute of Management Kozhikode

Caution: this article is on academic research. If that isn’t your cup of tea, you could read my recent popular article on The CMO’s Playbook instead.

Context of this article

About three months ago, reading (again) Shelby Hunt’s “The nature and scope of marketing”, I decided to write to Prof. Hunt, not with any particular research question or objective, but to interact once with the great mind that could, in one sweeping paragraph, summarize all of marketing till then:

“During the past three decades, two controversies have overshadowed all others in the marketing literature. The first is the “Is marketing a science?” controversy sparked by an early JOURNAL OF MARKETING article by Converse entitled “The Development of a Science of Marketing.” Other prominent writers who fueled the debate included Bartels, Hutchinson, Baumol, Buzzell, Taylor, and Halbert. After raging throughout most of the ’50s and ’60s, the controversy has since waned. The waning may be more apparent than real, however, because many of the substantive issues underlying the marketing science controversy overlap with the more recent “nature of marketing” (broadening the concept of marketing) debate. Fundamental to both controversies are some radically different perspectives on the essential characteristics of both marketing and science.” (Hunt 1976, p. 17, emphasis added)

Reading this the first time, towards the end of the second year of my PhD, I was not impressed. But, having read and written and thought and analysed much, I start to sense in Hunt’s writing a comprehensiveness, clarity, and directness that was not visible to me earlier. To learn that the author of this writing is no longer with us and that the meeting I considered requesting (I even wondered which email address would Prof. Hunt be reachable at, since he had recently retired from his long-standing faculty position), left me with a sense of loss that I did not anticipate. This article is an attempt to understand why.

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Towards The CMO’s Playbook – A reflection on teaching and learning marketing strategy

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Two months ago, forty-seven eager young minds started on a quest for “the CMO’s playbook” – a journey to understand strategic decision making in marketing. An equally eager but not so young mind (yours truly) joined them, mainly to prove that fun and learning can go together. It was a tall ask from all of us, but we managed to pull it off!

Finally, it was the student teams that prepared their original playbooks for CMOs, and I might have merely orchestrated the journey – a journey through a mix of simulation, business cases, discussions of real life marketing, and minimal reliance on pre-cooked frameworks.

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Why the Netflix business model will take more than a quick fix [Forbes India]

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© Priya Narayanan, Assistant Professor of Marketing, IIM Kozhikode. Views are personal.

This article was first published on May 27, 2022 in Forbes India and is available here on the Forbes India website. In this article, I present my take on the key issues at Netflix and a consumer-centric ecosystem approach to solve these issues.

Here is the full text of the article (caution: long read ahead!).

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“You can have mine”—be it a pencil during a kindergarten exam or one earpiece of a pair of earphones, or even a Netflix password, the tendency to share is innately human. A business model that views sharing as a threat is simply swimming against the current.

Netflix’s loss of 200,000 subscribers in less than 100 days to March 2022 has been surprising and yet, in hindsight, quite inevitable. For over 20 years, this much-vaunted disruptor of the movie industry has played the same game. The decline in subscriber numbers is just another indicator that it is time Netflix recalibrates its business model which is no longer the recipe for success that it once was. Indeed, the growing young population in the so-called emerging markets might well have been prolonging the death of a cracking business model that has ceased to be about customer value.

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Me e Mia: An Introspection into Brand Love

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Part I: The Customer’s Perspective

© Priya Narayanan, Assistant Professor at IIM Kozhikode. Views are personal.

The other day, I shared a thought on LinkedIn on the Mothers’ Day video of a jewelry brand. Mine wasn’t a well thought out analysis, it was simply a spontaneous reaction to the content of the video. Writing the post, however, made me wonder: why did I care so much? Why was I so strongly unhappy with the ad? (The tone implied in “golden shoulders” surprises me now!)

Well, eight years ago, I wrote about this very same brand, on wearing the Tanishq Mia mantle of confidence.

Rereading that led to some introspection, which then led to the conclusion: I am in love. Yes, I don’t wear much gold jewelry but I love the brand that is Tanishq. Naturally, I felt the possessive anger that only love can lead to when Tanishq made a statement I didn’t feel good about or agree with. So says the marketer in me about the consumer in me. Me e mia. Me and mine. Me and my brand.

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The Customer Unmasked: What the Indian shopper will buy when the pandemic is over and out (Economic Times Brand Equity)

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© Priya Narayanan, Assistant Professor of Marketing, IIM Kozhikode. Views are personal.

This article was first published on March 15, 2022 in the Economic Times Brand Equity Blog and is available here on the ET website. In this article, I present my take on what the “customer unmasked” would be like. Here is the full text of the article (caution: long read ahead!).

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With the pandemic on the decline, it is a good time for marketing managers to gather their thoughts on what the future will bring. Shopping behavior of customers is going to change, but in what way? Five key insights tell us what the post-pandemic future of shopping could look like.

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Digital Customer or Digital Marketing?

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© Priya Narayanan, Assistant Professor of Marketing, IIM Kozhikode. Views are personal.

SEO, influencer marketing, content marketing, social media strategy… these are some of the terms that exemplify popular views of digital marketing. But when trying to comprehend digital marketing, two problems arise: What exactly is “digital” in digital marketing? And does digital marketing include anything beyond digital communication?

In this article, I attempt to answer these questions based on my experience in marketing and digital marketing, experience gained through learning, teaching, and consulting. I also include definitions by researchers and the American Marketing Association, and offer a book suggestion for those interested in learning more.

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Just What I Like: What Brands can Learn from Ronaldo’s Snub of Coca Cola

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© Priya Narayanan, Assistant Professor of Marketing, IIM Kozhikode. Views are personal.

It was during the final match of FIFA football World Cup in 2006 that Zinedane Zidane, the French football legend, head butted a player from the opposing team and watched from the benches as a penalty kick saved the day for Italy (watch the video here). After all these years, Ronaldo’s snub of Coca Cola is possibly the nearest I have seen to Zidane’s act in terms of wilfulness.

While many might disagree, the point remains that a statement was made at the last month UEFA pre match press conference. Avoid Coca Cola, drink water. A point well made indeed, as can be seen in this video that soon became viral. Apparently, Coca Cola lost $4 billion in stock value that day for this reason. (This Forbes article, though, presents an interesting counter view.) Regardless of monetary losses, customers might have started to think.

A celebrity sportsperson blatantly deriding the leading fizzy drink of the world! Could this be the end of sugar and fizz? Then again, one could argue that those who drink Coca Cola will continue to do so, some might take pride in their unwise loyalty to the drink. But, right now, the anti-Coca Cola sentiment that has dogged the brand like an unwelcome guest seems to have found form. Till memory fades, the Ronaldo incident can be used to present a silent but clear visual sword-shake at the brand.

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The Ferrari Formula: A Ferrari in Every Home. Really?

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© Priya Narayanan, Assistant Professor of Marketing, IIM Kozhikode. Views are personal.

From a well-known brand of racing cars to a fashion brand label, Ferrari has come a long way. Yes, you read that right, Ferrari is now selling in-house fashion apparel. Here’s a video of the models on the ramp, oops, on the Ferrari production line. Are we witnessing the democratization of luxury, or is this just another unimaginative attempt to milk the market?

So, Ferrari seems to say: If you can’t buy the car, you can buy the jacket. Or at least a cap. But then you could always buy Ferrari merchandise earlier through franchisees. These branded products have been used in product placements as well. (A hilarious scene in the Bollywood movie Munna Bhai MBBS shows taporis whisking off a tourist – wearing a Ferrari red cap – to supply a personal cadaver for Munna Bhai, the doctor-to-be, to tear apart and learn.)

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Google Duo’s New Campaign in India – To What Purpose?

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© Priya Narayanan, Assistant Professor of Marketing, IIM Kozhikode. Views are personal.

Saw an ad for Google Duo the other day, and this one is worth talking about. But probably not worth much more.

It shows the freshest couple in town – who else but actor Anushka Sharma and cricketer Virat Kohli! – at their admirable best. Even earlier, every young couple had wanted to be like them: rich, famous, good looking, and young forever. Now, in this video ad available on YouTube, we see the camaraderie between them as Anushka plays a prank on Virat.

Agreed, the laughing wife and the trusting-but-fooled husband are quite adorable. However, in a video calling market increasingly captured by Whatsapp – everyone uses Whatsapp messaging, and its video calling is seamless with messaging – it is not clear how developing a celebrity-based liking for its brand will help Duo.

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