Business Today Web Exclusive

Confer Different

Conferences have gone virtual. And DirecWay of Hughes Escorts Communications expects to set off a trend.

New Alchemy: Virtual is in

'Here's to the crazy ones...' begins the classic Apple ad ('Think Different'). Except that there's not a murmur from the audience. The audience is not even there. It's a virtual conference, and all the delegates are sitting far far away in various parts of the country in front of PCs, watching proceedings on their screens - beamed across from a studio at Hughes Escorts' Gurgaon headquarters, live via a VSAT network.

Anyone in Bangalore want to ask a question? Key it in and email it across - or speak into the microphone. Samit Sinha, consulting partner, Alchemist Brand Consulting - there, alone in the studio -- would be glad to answer. Quite glad, in fact. At least he'll know his virtual audience is actually out there somewhere. "I'll pretend you're laughing at my jokes," he warns, before delving into the finer details of how to colonize consumer mindspace. 'Inside a Brand' is the theme of the seminar, organized jointly by Agencyfaqs, an advertising site, and DirecWay, a distance-education and e-conference enabler run by Hughes Escorts.

Interactivity is critical, says Amit Tripathi, vice-president, Hughes Escorts Communications Ltd, otherwise good old-fashioned broadcast technology would do just as well. And it's sure cheaper than hiring a five-star hall. All it takes, by way of resources, is a hired studio, a set of outstation VSAT-linked classrooms and adequate satellite bandwidth (a packed-to-capacity seminar of 150 delegates would soak up a good 8 mbps of bandwidth, which DirecWay sells at Rs 40,000 for a full-day session).

Sadly, rues Tripathi, corporate India has been painfully slow in its adoption of e-conferencing.

Luckily for DirecWay, a brand seminar by Agencyfaqs can't be anything but a celebration of early adoption - as an attitude. So between adclips for tradition-booing J&B and icon-nosethumbing Pepsi, Sinha talks about branding for the truly brand-savvy. The brand that's not just an identification mark or even a quality discriminator, but a true "repository of shared meanings". The brand as an "unwritten contract" between customer and corporation. The brand as PATH - Promise, Acceptance, Trust and Hope.

Questions, naturally, there are --- as you'd expect of any presentation that peppers marketing theory with provocative observations of the Indian market, with all its collectivist urges, deference to mother figures, emphasis on duty and other such perplexities (from the MNC perspective).

Appropriate point, perhaps, to have the seminar's next speaker, Harish Doraiswamy, director, marketing, Adidas India, take over the bandwidth. With a global turnaround story to tell, he takes the audience all the way from Herzogenaurach, the German town of Adidas's origin, to the brand's recent comeback. The takeout? A brand mantra: 'Listen, test, modify.' Trials are important, but before any of that, listen.

Listen attentively and objectively. It is frightfully easy to hear the market all wrong, as many a marketer has learnt to his horror. That's why the next session, by Kalyanmoy Chatterjee of Taylor Nelson Sofres-MODE, is all about 'reading the consumer's mind' through statistically sound market research. A task made difficult by four things, in Chatterjee's view: social conditioning, embarrassment, rationalization and deep-rooted needs.

Take clothing, says Chatterjee, a market on which his research agency has just conducted an indepth study using something called the St James Model (which makes use of correlation coefficients). And do you know what product attribute is found to have the biggest impact on Indian clothing purchase decisions?

Price? Wrong. Way off the mark (it is 17th on the list of parameters). Brand? Well, better. Sixth on the list, but still wrong. The most influential parameter, believe it or not, is plain and simple safety. Or 'Not harmful to skin', to go by the report's actual wording. The whole point, Chatterjee emphasizes, is to "understand human psychology".

Issue Contents Write to us Subscription Syndication