(Here's a short story I wrote a while back...one couldn't avoid the semi-autobiographical touches!)
He realized all was not well with him when he caught his parents staring at him incredulously. In fact mother looked very worried.
“ You skip programs on TV to watch ads,” she said.
“Marketing ma,” he said. “ I need to know what’s happening in that free for all chaos called the Indian market. There is a paradigm shift happening in it that necessitates value added marketing to overcome its constraints …”
“You worry me,” she replied quietly.
He couldn’t understand it. After all his entire undergraduate life had been punctuated with pithy little sarcasms from these parents on his passion or rather lack of it, for academia.
Now, when he finally seemed to be doing something in that direction-there was cause for worry.
So he called up his friend and asked him if there was anything wrong in watching advertisements. He explained why he felt there was no cause for alarm and gave him some statistics on how American kids always preferred ads to TV programs and how they all happily turned into rabid compulsive spenders.
He also added helpfully that there was a marketing term to describe such behavior.
“You worry me,” the friend said.
He realized it was time for some deep introspection. It was true. He was in the cold steel grip of some terrible disease. He decided to take a walk alone and sort out things for himself. His head was spinning. At odd moments in the night he could hear voices whispering long convoluted sentences into his ears. The stench of management jargon assailed the nostrils.
Realigning core competencies, asynchronous transitional, said the evil voice in his ear. The only way to drown this diabolic drone out, he figured, was to spend some time at the little bookshop round the corner.
On his way, a pretty girl passed him by- his neighbor’s daughter. She smiled at him. She stopped. “ How are you?” she beamed.
Here, he said to myself, is a customer of the future. A young woman who will consume, spend, watch ads, rear children that are brand conscious morons – he needed to target her, segment and then position for her types. He needed to get into her mind.
“Hello”, he said with his harmless type smile. ‘You needed to get them to lose their guard before you get down to the research part’ said a voice in his head
“Where you going?” she asked
“To the bookshop”
“Same here…mind if I tag along!”
“Sure”
An eager research subject-every marketer’s dream. His spine tingled. Maybe he should start, he thought, with her food habits. He had read somewhere that women are what they eat.
“You’ve seen the new restaurant down the street?” he asked her…
Soon lovely brown eyes were telling him her preferences in fast foods, service quality expectations, spending habits…great control had to be exerted over himself as customer insights filled his body and soul.
He gave a huge moan of delight that must have sounded to her like a cry of great pain. She stopped talking mid-sentence about the way rotis are made in restaurants and stared at him… blank.
“You all right?”
He excused himself. They had reached the bookshop. He needed to be alone with the books, to get his mind off his affliction.
The bookshop was crowded with people busy browsing their way through the latest best sellers. Point of purchase advertisements for music CDs and computer games beckoned the unwary. Clever and strategic placement of ads he told himself...perfect eye level placement of products.
And then it happened.
He found himself dragged by an invisible force towards the shelves where the management books were neatly arranged.
Consumer behavior…he carelessly skimmed through the pages of the first book he laid his hands on.
“Indicative of future prospects, failure to enter solution mode interfaces brand equity” it told him.
Not many would have understood that. But he did. It was obvious. There was a message in all of this and no one seemed to know about it.
He took out another book and read the first line his eye fell on. Kotler…“ Premier Customer experience helping markets focus on immediate objectives…” Glorious! It was a jig-saw puzzle just for him and the pieces were all falling in together on that momentous day.
He went from book to book and hungrily turned the pages for those meaningful lines.
He had to tell some one the deep secret he had suddenly uncovered.
There she was, his very own pretty brown eyes. She caught the mad gleam in his eyes and asked “You sure you alright? You worry me!”
He told her about all that he had discovered, of his great revelations.
Segmentingtargettingpositioningcustomerdelightbrandidentity
brandperceptionmatrixdesireactivationmodelmarketskimmingparadigmshift….
The words flowed like an endless torrent as he shared his enlightenment with the world at the top of his voice.
She screamed.
The doctor and the nurse were smiling at him. He had been there for three months. The nurse held out two little pills in her hands. Choose one…he chose the red pill and studied her reaction. Cunning method of finding out the subject’s color preferences he told himself. Could be useful in packaging studies to develop optimal marketing mix…
