The CMO’s Playbook – This Year’s Collage

Whenever the small-group discussions in the classroom get noisy, it means one of two things: the students are so interested that they forget they are in a classroom, or there are movies playing in laptops, hidden by the huddle of heads. When these discussions are about marketing strategy in The CMO’s Playbook, it’s the former.

Sometimes we teachers are happy when the class is loud.

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Here is a (hand-made) collage from the cases and contexts that we discussed in the course last year (2023 Jun-Aug). Can you identify all the companies and situations?!

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Here are a few answers.

Coca Cola in India: A product portfolio worth boasting about, but who wants sugar and fizz now? This was (and is, and will continue to be) the dilemma of what is perhaps the world’s best built brand (for a brand backed by hardly any product worth its price). The new year spells interesting times for Coca Cola and more so for Coca Cola India with cannibals and competitors galore.

How NOT to Write a Research Internship Application!

After writing this up, I was in two minds whether to post it. But when I received an application that, quite confusingly, began: “Dear professor, my name is [your name]. I am a third-year undergraduate…”, I decided that time for this post had come. So here goes.

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Dear undergraduates,

Every so often, I receive an email from someone among you who wants to do a research internship with me. They are mostly alike. The ones I do take a risk on, by inviting for an interview and often taking onboard for a piece of work, are different, though. How? Those have a genuineness and care to the writing.

That set me thinking and I listed here, for your benefit, who to do and what not to do (the latter first) when writing a research internship email. This is all based on my experiences with prospective interns like you. Much of this is written in a light vein, in the spirit of laughing over one’s own flaws and picking up from wherever we are. I hope you have fun reading and applying this, because I had fun writing it!

So, here’s what to avoid in your email:

The Swoosh and the Squiggle: Is there a logic to brand logos? [Businessline Brandline]

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

This article was first published on July 24, 2023 (after edits) in The Hindu BusinessLine BrandLine and is available here on the publisher’s website.

Note: Post the writing of this article, Twitter rebranded to X in a seemingly arbitrary and unnecessary move. But given Elon Musk’s penchant for names that might sound odd to others, the rebranding of Twitter is no surprise.

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Pepsi’s recent announcement of its new logo has put the spotlight on brand logos, those ubiquitous symbols that stand for brands and often convey much more than any textual description could. The redesign of Pepsi’s logo makes us wonder whether the design of the logo matters all that much. Put simply, if Nike had always sported a squiggle instead of the iconic swoosh, would that still make us just do it and buy our Nikes?

Of course, it is easy to argue that the design matters. But, toss in a bit of psychology to the discussion and it becomes clear that the brand is much more than its logo. After all, the Nike swoosh is now wired into our brains not so much as a shape but in terms of the meanings and memories that the shape evokes. And that could explain why successful brands can have logos as intricate as that of Wagh Bakri or as simple as that of SBI.

To word or not to word

Prior to its redesign, the Pepsi brand name was placed outside the circular logo. Segregating the brand name and the logo is not, in itself, a big problem. Brands such as RedBull and Puma follow this pattern. For Pepsi, however, this design was not working well. As the brand found out, when consumers were asked to draw the Pepsi logo from memory, then tended to recall the brand name as being placed inside the logo. And so, the Pepsi brand name sits smack in the centre of the new logo. In direct contrast to Starbucks, which took away the words surrounding the siren in the center.

Of course, there are brands such as Nike and Apple for which just an image of the logo is sufficient to make consumers think of the brand. But Pepsi cannot do that. (Keen observers might even discern similarities between the old Pepsi logo and Pacman!) At the other extreme, there are brands whose logo is simply the brand name written in a stylized font. Coca cola and IBM, for instance, use stylistic writing and color without a shape. Perhaps, having little material to play with has a role in keeping the Coca Cola logo stable over the years.

Apple logo evolution (source: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/418764465322053506/)

A game of color (or its absence)?

It might be hard to believe today, but Apple once had a very colorful logo – the same shape of the apple with a bite taken off, but with rainbow colors. Today such a logo would be surmised as related to supporting LGBTQ+ rights. After all, several brands change their logo to rainbow colors during LGBT pride month, so much so that this gesture could lose its value. But the white logo of Apple is so omnipresent that the absence of color glorifies the brand.

Does that mean all brands that seek to be perceived as premium need to go white? Not necessarily. Other colors can become iconic just as well, be it Coca Cola red, Starbucks green, or Tiffany blue. And while the jury is out on which colors can really set a brand apart, Apple has once again upped the game with a highly colorful art-based logo on its Apple BKC store in Mumbai. Well, if Apple has decided to color itself for India, maybe it’s time to rethink the plain = premium theory!

Controversy, copyright and more

Refreshing a logo is always dicey business. Even when a business school goes about redesigning its logo, as in the recent case of the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad logo makeover, when various stakeholders held differing views on the new logo. A few years ago, apparel brand Gap decided to revert to the old logo after tremendous uproar from customers. Not surprisingly, customers have a natural tendency to feel possessive of logos, as many logos are worn on the physique and many others are placed on containers for food and drink.

Other issues surround logos due to their shape. Adidas’s three stripes seemed distinctive enough till two different instances of potential trademark infringement did not result in court wins for Adidas. Twitter changed its logo, somewhat inexplicably, to a dog, but has reversed the change (possibly to avoid having to rename itself Bark). Toblerone is up for a redesign of its logo because the iconic Matterhorn mountain can no longer be shown after Toblerone shifted part of its production away from Switzerland. Only time will tell whether the new logo can win the hearts of chocolate lovers.

Overall, redesigning a logo entails some risks, mainly because very few general rules exist, and consumer sentiment can throw up surprises. There are perhaps only two “truths” when it comes to successful brand logos, and neither has to do with the design of the logo per se. First, what the marketing department builds on top of the logo through follow-on marketing campaigns will, over time, build the equity associated with the brand logo. Be it Pepsi or Air India’s new look that is expected to be unveiled soon. Second, a logo of a well-known and loved brand is like the face of a loved one – familiarity and love overpowers looks.

And so, surprisingly enough, a squiggle on your Nike shoes – if marketed appropriately from day one – would have worked just as well as a swoosh!

“India’s social network” is tea. The question is, which tea?!

First published July 2, 2023. Updated Oct 31, 2023 with a) an edited version of the ad shared by Red Label (following my article?!), and b) link to relevant research article.

A recent advertisement projects the humble tea as “India’s social network”. The ad is probably trending by this time, and worth at least one watch. The customer insight is spot-on. The video portrays various ways in which tea takes the form of friend requests, likes, shares, trends, stories, and so on in India, becoming a social network in itself. Engrossed as we are in the narrative, we forget that this is a brand’s commercial. Finally, though, the very last shot tells us that the ad is from Brooke Bond Red Label.

Screen shot from the “India’s social network” ad (watch the full ad here)

Well, as I watched the ad play, my thoughts centred on the cup of Kanan Devan (Tata Tea) tea that I usually drink in the morning and evening… steaming tea in a steel tumbler… the quantity never enough but I never make more… I am happiest when that tea is fully foamy at the top… and when I blow on it a teeny bit, the foam makes space for the beautiful brown color beneath… if the color is the right shade, the tea will be the right taste… oh yes, the tea packet at home is nearly finished and I need to buy another of the green packets soon…

These and many other thoughts ran parallel to the ad that was playing. And so, when the ad ended with a visual of Red Label, the first thought that struck me was: I was thinking of Kanan Devan the whole time! Nothing in the ad would have helped me predict that the ad was by Red Label. For that matter, nothing in the ad suggested it was from any brand, and the ad could easily have been from the Tea Board of India, let alone brands such as Taj Mahal or Wagh Bakri or Tata Tea or any of the umpteen tea brands that fight for India’s throats.

Oh, well. Not good, says the marketer in me. If the ad does not unmistakably cue the brand, then why run the ad at all? Simple marketing wisdom says that the purpose of an ad is to strengthen the brand and/or drive purchase. But in the case of the Red Label ad, I am very likely to forget the brand, remember only the story, and even connect the story to a different brand, perhaps my favourite brand. Put simply, all this effort from one brand, and its competitor gets the benefit!

Understandably, brands that wish to narrate a story would not like to show the brand logo throughout the story as that could prevent viewers from being immersed in the story. A similar reason holds for not identifying the brand at the beginning of the ad: why spoil the story by bringing crass commercialism at the start? Then again, presenting the brand at the end of the campaign video poses a risk, as we see in the case of Red Label. (The whole issue might not arise if the brand is already identified, such as through a label on the YouTube video or search result. But consumers are not always paying attention to labels.)

So, can a marketer ever safely show the brand at the end? To answer this, we need to consider how the mind works. Product cues such as tea being consumed at a chai stall can spontaneously evoke “mental associations” – a collection of related information and memories such as product color, category, shape, prior consumption experiences, brands in the category, and so on that the consumer has built up over time. For example, a piece of chocolate could cue the purple color, the Cadbury brand, a recent purchase of chocolate, the taste of one’s favorite chocolate, and even the memorable Five Star “do nothing” campaign (watch it for fun, you won’t regret it).

When a product is shown without any brand information, the situation is ripe for the consumer mind to come up with related information and memories, which is very likely to include the consumer’s favorite brand and other top-of-mind brands. And so, the ad on “India’s social network” that shows many instances of tea itself and tea being consumed, and is thus replete with product category cues, triggers thoughts of a wide set of tea brands. By the time the viewer reaches the end, the Red Label brand hardly makes an impression.

Is there a way out? One solution is to cue brand in subtle way or in a manner that integrates with the story. Coca Cola’s recent art gallery ad does this very well. Another way is to use a story that cues the category very lightly or not at all. A Fevicol ad from 2019 that recently became popular uses this technique; the narrative is all about a sofa that passes hands for generations. By not cueing the category explicitly, the ad drives curiosity without crowding the consumer’s mind with brand names. Ads launched by market leader brands might not face as much a problem as other brands in the market.

The solutions above might not result in an ad that seems “ingenious” or “fabulous” as some social media comments have termed the Red Label “India’s social network” ad, but they will certainly help Red Label reap the benefits of its effort. And prevent the ad being attributed to Kanan Devan!

P.S. In carefully viewing later, I noticed that a product pack is indeed shown towards the beginning when Mrs. Masurkar makes tea. Very incongruously placed, though – in most kitchens, the tea packet is usually on the shelf, not the counter. The tea jar is what the customer handles every day.

Updates:

a) Red Label has uploaded, on Aug 29, 2023 – about two months after my article was posted – an edited 20-second version of the social network ad on its YouTube channel. (The original ad was uploaded Jun 29, 2023.) Interestingly, this edited ad starts with a shot that clearly shows the tea package (this was the very last shot in the original ad) and sports the brand logo on the top right throughout the ad. I would like to think that this is so because of my post and the subsequent discussions on LinkedIn! 🙂

b) The 2004 article ‘Do Not Wait to Reveal the Brand Name: The Effect of Brand-Name Placement on Television Advertising Effectiveness’ by William E. Baker, Heather Honea, and Cristel Antonia Russell in the Journal of Advertising examines the above issue in detail. The article is available at the journal website here.

From the gallery to the well: A Wimwian’s reflections on the journey from student to teacher

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

This article narrates the story of my academic journey, and my admiration for my teachers at IIM Ahmedabad, and was first published in Writing on the Wall (Issue 5, May 2023, page 53), the annual students’ magazine of IIMA. The full magazine is available at IIM Ahmedabad’s LinkedIn post here.

Caution: The article contains an inordinate number of references to I, me, and my, and is best suited for fans of Priya Narayanan!

Late in the summer of 2009, I officially became a Wimwian by enrolling in the PGP and received the keys to my room in the “dungeon” of Dorm 3, where the sun hesitates to enter and a sweater is needed even at midday in the peak of winter. What followed was a hustle of classes in the gallery seating of b-school classrooms – for the first time ever in my life, I was not on the first bench! – and a life packed with activities and placements. Later, the place felt home enough to return for a second stint, this time for a doctoral degree in a topic that had become my favorite over the years, consumer psychology.

Now, as I (try my best to) patiently ignore the sleepyheads in the classes I teach, I find a renewed respect for the faculty of IIMA. In my MBA students, I see myself – eager, anxious, frustrated, capable, enthusiastic, bored, creative, jaded but curious – and I feel a sense of responsibility. More than anything, I realize now the relief and pleasure when students laugh at a teacher’s jokes!

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In the second year of PGP, despite the usual RGgiri, RCP, and the boredom of soporific classes, there were some academic discussions which caught my attention. And Wimwi was a place where you explored whatever seriously interested you, be it cricket or music, or even research. I plunged into independent projects, exploring two topics that seemed to pose an endless set of questions – why did corporates have so few women moving to the top? And how could ecommerce managers engage customers both online and offline? (this was before Amazon and Flipkart, and well before TikTok!)

With the PhD degree came the power and responsibility of teaching, of having others listen to my words merely because I had moved from the gallery to the well. And so, every day I find myself dipping into the store of teaching styles and techniques that I had unconsciously picked up over the seven years that I spent at IIMA. There were teachers who excelled at orchestrating case discussions, at board-work, at connecting personally with students, at clearly explaining difficult concepts, and often, at all this and more.

Growing up in the midst of these teachers could be why I took to academia like a duck to water! Today I run original courses – one of which is titled ‘The CMO’s Playbook’ – which reflect both ideas and independent thinking that I must have first picked up while at IIMA. Today my research examines questions that are both highly practical and highly conceptual, largely related to consumer decision making and brands. In my research, I am also inspired by the several IIMA PGP alumni who occupy impactful positions in academia worldwide.

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Coming from IIMA meant that when I chose to sign up for a PhD, I neither looked elsewhere nor asked myself whether PhD was the right choice. After all, a good doctoral degree is never easy, either intellectually or emotionally. But the process is rewarding because a good PhD teaches you about yourself and gives you space to reflect about meaning and purpose, making you (feel) fit to provide intellectual leadership in your chosen domain.

Of course, being a teacher is as much about learning as it is about teaching. My confidence as a teacher and curiosity as a learner stem in large part from the years spent at IIMA, helping me in my attempt to be equally comfortable in the gallery and in the well. While the field of management education is evolving rapidly and the role of an educator becomes uncertain, the responsibility is not any less and I am grateful to my teachers. I hope one day to possess the generosity and humility that the best of teachers at IIMA so effortlessly convey.

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

© 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.

Learning Marketing from Shelby Hunt – A Tribute

(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.

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

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.

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

© 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.

Me e Mia: An Introspection into Brand Love

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 on 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.