Time: The cycles of brand building have been massively reduced. This is not a 2010 phenomenon, but to give you some perspective, in that year Flipkart was just venturing beyond books and hardly the well known brand it is now. Zomato was a ‘promising startup’ according to a list made by the Smart Techie magazine and had just expanded beyond a single city. The flip side is that some of the other startups in that list no longer exist. AlooTechie, which reported this, also does not exist. I had a Nokia E series phone then, and they are pretty much a non entity now. In short, that word – change, and it’s faster than ever! It is said that brands get built over time, but do business cycles allow that liberty now?

Geography: A cliche used frequently is “Geography is history”, but a little incident reminded me that it may not altogether be true. One of the regular conversations these days is around taxi rentals and Uber is a favourite among many of my friends. I casually asked them whether they knew of the heavy rap Uber was getting in the US for remarks allegedly made by a senior VP. (alternate perspective) They didn’t, and it isn’t as though they don’t consume news online. They missed it amidst all the ‘noise’. While a brand may be global, how much does its international stature impact regional preferences, even in this hyper connected era?

Perception Transience: One of my favourite definitions of brand had been “a brand is a promise” Another favourite topic of discussion in the recent past has been the ‘failure’ of Flipkart’s Big Billion Day. Funnily, not only do most people not remember (say) Snapdeal’s campaign around the same time, their usage of Flipkart is also unlikely to stop despite a bad experience. Perception, it would seem, is transient, and also dependent on the value being provided to a consumer at a point in time. What does that do to what the brand stands for?

Context: From a few media platforms and actual consumer experiences to a multitude of channels and consumers as publishers, there has been a sea change in a span of a few years! (Was there a social media job in 2010?) Iteration cycles in brand planning exercises are increasingly getting crunched and while technology and data are theoretically providing profound new ways to understand the consumer and personalise brand experiences, unfortunately for the marketer technology cycles on the consumer side and those on the tools/processes on the marketing side are two different things. That has meant that brand marketers have had difficulty in providing even consistency in experience across consumer contexts, let alone cohesion. (consistency vs cohesion) Additional contexts and platforms also lead to an extended ecosystem and partners beyond the standard media, advertising and digital agencies. We are arguably moving from that one big idea to finding incremental benefits from multiple touch points. How does a brand even begin to plan for all this?

Having said all that, I think the fundamentals remain the same. Technology allows marketers a load of contexts and information on a consumer and his/her preferences. Whether we simply use that as a better way to target our push messaging or do we use it to create a fulfilling experience for the consumer and form a relationship is what will define the brand marketer.

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I had a similar experience with an entity i wrote about (like a lot of other people did) a few days back – in.com. Like I’d mentioned, I skipped the mobile invite and was content with an email one. And as they’d promised on the site, it arrived within 5 days (4 days – customer delight?). And it wasn’t just one, i got 5 of them. I started out with the first one, didn’t work. I thought it was just me, and tried the second, that didn’t either. No, I wont bore you with single counts anymore, none of the 5 codes worked.

Since i love to give the benefit of the doubt to everyone but me, i started googling for similar experiences, and found out there was at least one more guy like me. But the number of positive entries there made me try again, still didn’t work, so I guess the cosmos’ message is pretty clear “Beta, it’s not for you’. Sigh. Fine, i get the message.

There’s another tangential set of experiences. I have always bemoaned the lack of a good ‘Amazon-like’ site here. So whenever i notice there’s a new player in the field, whether it be rediff’s feeble attempts, or newbies like gobookshopping or the flipkart guys (who i got to know of through a brilliant marketing exercise of giving away bookmarks outside the Strand Book Festival) I immediately sign up. The next thing I do is check out if they have stocks of a book that I’ve not been able to get offline.

The latest case is that of ‘Dublin’ by Edward Rutherford. I have asked all three entities for it, but have not got a response. Rediff actually billed me for it and then sent a mail a few days later stating they didnt have stocks.  And this is not the first experience of the kind.  However i keep getting ‘push’ messages from them about ‘latest releases’ and ‘mega discounts’. I wish they’d understand how much difference a conversation with the customer makes. Meanwhile, Strand would note it down in their book and give me a buzz as soon as they got the book.

until next time, action and satisfaction