Here’s what the feedback form looked like,

Hockey Pokey website: http://www.hokeypokey.in/

Here’s how the discussion has been heading,

Ed Roach: “I feel it’s terribly skewed towards the optimistic. There is no fields for dissent. All choices are positive ones. They fail to understand that they can grow from any negatives. Typically if a customer has any bad experiences they vote with their feet. Give them a chance to vent in your surveys.

A bit of humour is fine, but by their tone I don’t think they really want to know – but want to “appear” to care what you think.”

I replied: “I felt exactly the same as you did and believe, feedback forms/surveys if anything must be ‘Neutral’ is nature, thereby allowing openness in responses. With this particular feedback form, the data extracted, based on which future potential marketing decisions are made, may be terribly incorrect.”

Ed Burghard: “I think these point in time estimates are helpful for staff, but not necessarily representative of the mean. They tend to represent responses from the extremes (+/-).

As a manager, I can use the responses to correct major issues (address the negatives quickly with my staff) or provide positive feedback on performance. But, I would not make important long-term decisions from these data. I would invest in a more robust research study and seek to understand the why behind the what.

The other thing these feedback instruments do is give the staff the impression their performance is being measured by customers. That in itself may encourage better service since people like to score well. Used correctly by the manager (results reviewed with employees) it can be a motivational tool.

The analogy I would give you is course evaluations. Their value is limited, but they are great disaster checks.

Remember, no data is valuable if there is not an intent to act on it some way consistent with the limitations of the data in representing the mean value. “

I replied: “Thanks for your thoughts. I kind of agree with you on that with a slight hesitation. I do not believe this feedback form to have got to do with anything related to their service at all. That in fact raises another good point against the company. The feedback form, IMO is product centric rather than being both product and service centric.

That being said, I agree that long-term decisions are better off not taken based on the current data. With all due respect to unstructured data, a robust survey, preferably in a structured format is in fact essential if they mean business with this feedback form. I recommend they use the Reichheld way of measuring consumer feedbacks (The ‘would or would not recommend’ Q). Have you used this in your practice and would you recommend the same too?? ”

Ben Rennie: “Yeah this is interesting. I found the web site absolutely painful with that song. Awful.

However, in regards to the survey. I found this quite interesting and I have read through your comments above and I wish I hadn’t as I think, sometimes, we can take things a little too seriously. This is a business, thats serious, but it is also an ice cream company, thats not. So the theme here and it is written everywhere in the brand communication is fun. Nothing on this site or feedback form represents serious… its all fun.

So this survey in particular can only be skewed towards optimistic. It actually creates a great form of feedback from the responses not bending towards the brands expectations (i.e. score a 2/10 and of course, wallah, negative feedback). So they can learn a lot from this. In relation to the customers opportunity to vent, they will always find a way, we certainly dont need to provide a form in a “service industry” asking them “what they didn’t like”. That would be assuming that we offer up poor ice cream. But to create the expectation that what we provide as a brand is valuable and remarkable, then, thats important. The sad customer will always find a way. The happy one, will more than likely tell his friends Hokey Pokey rocked.

@EdRoach, I like your feedback but this is a fun brand and everything about it speaks of optimism (allbeit painful with that song). The Largest ice cream is called a knockout (stupid but fun).

Lets not take things too seriously when it comes to Ice Cream. Lets just eat it.”

I replied,  “A good point there Ben.. Nice to see some critism rolling in.

I think, we cannot, in particular, judge their brands expectations for obvious reasons. So obviously the marketing information they’d like to scrap from this survey is inevident in nature to our knowledge. That being said I presume, we all agree that the core purpose of this form is to get an overview of what consumers think or percieve of the brand Hokey Pokey and/or their products/services which will consequently help them improvise.

If they (optimistically) assume that the sad consumer would find a way to vent out his/her anger in a way that the company (somehow) notices it, then why bring up a feedback form altogether.

IMO, yes, it is a “fun” brand but when we ‘re talking data on the basis of which potential marketing/branding decisions can be excuted, the expressions utilization should be neutral (encouraging neither optimistic nor pessimistic).

Once again, Nice point though.“

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Aol. New Corporate Logos

Trading as a separate identity called for a new corporate identity to help revive the company’s tail spin journey. As a part of the re-branding process, its brand, ‘AOL’ will now be symbolized as ‘Aol.’ with an essential dot in the end. A view master, a high heeled shoe and a kissing couple are but few background features that are set to be replaced with some other weird backgrounds like, a gold fish, some four abstract scrawls and an obscene hand gesture. The logos were designed by Wolff Olins, the agency that came up with the logo of London 2012 Olympic Games.

Commenting on the Re-branding process, Tim Armstrong, the chairman and chief executive of AOL, said the branding was “uniquely dynamic”, while his marketing team added: “The identity … is a platform for expression and creativity reflecting the content, products and services Aol offers.” Yes, we at Webalue.com, agree to some extent but there are larger issues that ought to be attended. I formed three easy interconnected steps for Aol. To follow,

Step 1. Global Brand: Let’s face it. We all know AOL has been trying to establish itself as a global brand. The company has yet failed to shed off, ‘American Online’ as a spot on alternative to ‘AOL’. Non-U.S countries have thus not proved to be as profitable to the company.

Step 2. Being Global, Acting Local: AOL will need to kick off major campaigns, to integrate its brand within foreign cultures. Until the day, these cultures (or countries) adopt AOL into their lives, this company aint going anywhere. In emerging countries like India, where Internet usage has been achieving record growth year-on-year, AOL has a great opportunity. But a major chunk of the market would rather opt for Yahoo or Rediff.com (an Indian portal). AOL is still largely perceived to be American Online, which straight away disassociates non-US consumers.

Step 3. Cultural Dimensions: (This one’s funny) How many times a year do we come across companies committing cultural blunders. Some brand names sound offensive in some countries, while other logos find themselves emitting wrong gestures and signals. Well, here we go again. ‘AOL’ (oops.. or should I say, ‘Aol.’) is all set to be a classic cultural blunder in ITALY. One of their new logo background, has a rock-concert-like hand gesture (See in the Image above) which in Italy indicates a man whose wife has been unfaithful. (Gulp…!!!) Hope Aol(dot) addresses this before launch in Italy.

Apart from these 3 steps, there is another concern that I feel is worth a review. The company recently announced a major lay-off of over 1/3 workforce accounting to cost-cutting measures. This could have well been a gist of actions taken during the AOL-Time Warner’s bad divorce. But, it might have left a bad scar on the retained employees of Aol-dot. As a new company, establishing new and some changed brand values, it is important for the management and the employees to bond together and work as team. Cost-cutting may have been essential, but the timing could have well been wrong. On the flip-side, though it is also possible that the management has foreseen this internal branding risk and would have wanted to leave all negativity with AOL while starting afresh with Aol-dot.

We’ll keep a watch on ‘Aol.’, and keep you updated. So, do we think this company is all-set to take up new highs? Well… uhhh.. Nope not yet. Unless ofcourse if it looks up into addressing the above mentioned 3 steps in one way or the other.

Update (11th December’ 2009)

Shares of the newly independent AOL Inc. (Aol.) opened at $23.39 on the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday as the Internet company officially separated from media giant Time Warner Inc. (TWX) AOL (oops… Aol.) shares slid after opening, recently trading at $23.09, giving the company a market value of $2.44 billion.

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Today we talk about how the international breakfast industry leader Kellogg Company often referred to as “Kellogg’s” learnt this the hard way in India. Kellogg’s entered India in 1994 to introduce Corn Flakes into the market, eyeing opportunities right after the Indian economy liberalized.

Kellogg’s, we believe, rode on the globalization horse confidently hoping for a smooth growth and revenue in the Indian economy. The company did everything they usually did while entering new markets without realizing that they were about to enter an emerging economy with strong cultural roots and essentially a very low-priced (moreover universally embraced) breakfast Industry competition which included Hot milk, Idli, Dosa, Vadaa, Bread & Spread, etc depending on various regions.

Kellogg’s believed that its brand equity carried forward from the West would mirror its success in India. So it started building its brand by promoting its quality crispy flakes which were a worldwide success accepted throughout the western countries. But what sounded like a safe strategy, turned out to be drastically daunting for the company.

Firstly, Indians have always preferred their milk hot. When the Kellogg’s crispy flakes are mixed with hot milk, they turned out to be soggy thereby out rightly rejected by the consumers. Kellogg’s later had to modify their products to suit hot milk but the damage had been done.

Secondly, the cost of a 500 gm package of Kellogg’s was itself way higher than its traditional rivals. Kellogg’s brand was mostly meant to be targeted at the middle-class consumer. But the high pricing resulted in the consumers buying their products on one-off basis as a status buy rather than a nutritionally rich breakfast.

 Additionally, Kellogg also managed to overlook the cultural dimensions of India. Something similar to what we saw turned out to be vicious for Pizza Point (see how Pizza point missed out on appealing to the Indian consumers) when they entered India. Apart from the high pricing, it proved to be an unachievable task of convincing consumers about the highly nutritional contents of the corn flakes. The Indian consumer typically holds extremely strong cultural values and refuses to let off traditional (eating) habits. The company should have known and researched well into these factors.

Important lesson to be learnt out of this is that, globalization may be an increasing trend, but regional identities, customs and tastes are distinct as ever. There may be more opportunities in localizing your concept in the market than globalising the market as someone rightly said ‘Think Globally, Act Locally’. What Kellogg’s wrongly tried to do in India was the attempt to turn the consumers against their cultural tastes which wasn’t quite well received.

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The new 'Fiat' Logo

Fiat usually positions its cars as ‘reliable and sturdy’ cars for middle-class consumers. This strategy has worked well for the company especially in emerging markets like Brazil. In 1997, the company entered India through a joint-venture with Premier Automobiles Ltd (to sell its new car ‘Uno’), which it had successfully partnered with previously (since 1951) allowing the latter to sell Fiat cars in India that were dominantly used as taxis back then.

The Uno’s pre-launch image appeared to be very fascinating, but Fiat screwed it up by continuing its position strategy in India carried over from its huge success in South America. It believed that the similar positioning would work for them considering that both Brazil and India share similar attributes (both being emerging economies). One of the major problems was lack of market research.  For a start, their brands’ perception was largely associated with the cheap taxis that had been selling for several years. These cultural issues needed to be considered to counter such perception through aggressive advertisements. Apart from this, we reckon, the company failed to look into the demographic statistics of India. Only about 600000 cars were being sold to a billion people every year. On account of such low sales, Cars therefore were more of a status symbol in India than a utility option. Therefore they were wrong to market the car as a reliable workhorse, which obviously led to their failure to woe the Indian consumer.

When did Fiat learn its mistake?
Just after they re-launched the Palio in a limited edition bearing the autograph of world-class cricketer Sachin Tendulkar, the management knew they had indeed struck the right chord in the Indian consumer’s hearts.

What followed was the recent success of its Palio Stile and the latest new products in the form of, Linea and Punto (priced way higher than its competitors) that gave the company a great new Brand Image.

The Old 'Fiat' Logo

The company knew it had to build this new image to appeal to the younger generation. The new ‘Fiat’ logo played its part in building a newer generation Fiat image.

So has the Indian market changed to suit Fiat’s ‘reliable and sturdy’ image?
Not really. The company literally flipped its positioning strategy. Although today the number of Indian population who can afford a car has more than doubled up since 1997, it is still minimalistic when compared to the huge population. Check out the table below which indicates the rise in sales of passenger cars in India. This means that buying a car in India is still a status symbol than being a utility-based purchase.

Domestic Auotomobiles Sales trends for Passenger Cars

Fiat now targets the higher class market in India focussing on ‘Luxury’ and ‘Style’ rather than ‘Reliable’ and ‘Sturdy’ image. This helped the company to connect with its consumers right away. The Consumers said “Well, we want our cars to be associated with ‘high status and comfort’ ”. Fiat responded, “You got it!! Buy the new Linea or Punto”.

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In emerging economies like India, consumers are not exposed to global brands for a long period of time, causing a lot of variance in the perceptions of brands and products. In this case, consumers’ perception of Pizzas largely oriented from global brands like Pizza Hut and Dominos. The Managers at Pizza Point reckoned that two-thirds of the market could not afford the highly priced Pizzas offered at the international pizza chains. So they created a brand hoping to capitalise the flexibility of being a local brand offering a localised pizza at cheaper rates. On one occasion Pizza Point senior managers had quoted, they would like the brand to be much more localized and not thought of in a glamorous manner.

Eventually, Pizza Point failed to position their brand locally. Why? Though the prices were cheaper than those of their International competitors, they were much higher than the prices of local food like curries and other similar dishes. This immediately reflected on their perception; consumers would not visit a Pizza Point unless it was a special occasion when they are prepared to spend more.

Many consumers also felt that the food was ‘foreign’ and not ‘Indian’, which inadvertently gave Pizza Point a status symbol to be associated with (something they never wanted). The management could have perhaps gone for an Indian-(ized) name to go with, which could have countered the glamorized image. A major problem for Pizza Point came from pre-conceived perceptions in their target markets’ mind oriented from a product category that was  dominated by Pizza Hut and Dominos. This never allowed Pizza Point to differentiate their image from the International pizza giants.

The lesson to be learnt here is, that many a times industries hold more prominence than a brand’s name, identity or strategy. Since several companies have failed to consider this fact, we hope to come up with more real time evidences on the above claim in the near future.

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The Bajaj Logo

The Bajaj Group is amongst the top 10 business houses in India. Its footprint stretches over a wide range of industries, spanning automobiles (two-wheelers and three-wheelers), home appliances, lighting, iron and steel, insurance, travel and finance. The group’s flagship company, Bajaj Auto Limited [BAL], is ranked as the world’s fourth largest two- and three- wheeler manufacturer and the Bajaj brand is well-known across several countries in Latin America, Africa, Middle East, South and South East Asia.

The group introduced an emotionally connected ad campaign sometime in the 1980s and have stuck to it until the current decade. The theme back then was “Buland Bharat ki Buland Tasveer….. Hamara Bajaj” which translated into English meant ‘Strengthened (fundamental-wise, culture-wise, etc) India’s Strong Image….. Our Bajaj’. It eventually transformed into ‘Naye Bharat ki Buland Tasveer….. Hamara Bajaj’ which in English meant ‘New (modernized, yet culturally strong) India’s, Strong Image…. Our Bajaj’. Check out one of those ad campaigns below. Also note the tune of the advertisement, this tune lasted for the two decades in all generic Bajaj ads.

Transcript of the Above Video:

Scene 1: A young guy travelling on his bike comes across a God Idol installed on the street near a tree. He makes it a point to offer a short prayer on his way.

Scene 2:Four young stylish hunks are walking towards their respective bikes parked close to each other. While sitting on the bike, one of the guys accidentally brushes his shoes against the others clothes. He offers his apology in a traditionally Indian attitude.

Scene 3: A young couple riding on their bike, are having fun while getting too close to each other. But while passing a senior citizen, the girl smoothly takes her hands off her man as a gesture of respect and an attempt to avoid embarrassing a senior citizen.

Scene 4:Two bikers enjoying their speedy ride in a residential colony come across a Rangoli (A traditional art form of sand-painting decoration that uses finely ground white powder and colours, and is used commonly outside homes in India.) drawn on the road. They make sure their trail doesn’t disrupt the design and beauty of the delicate Rangoli.

Scene 5:A married young woman is riding in the rains. After the downpour she stops by to check if her Sindoor (Sindoor is the mark of a married woman in Hinduism. It is a red coloured powder or vermillion that is traditionally applied at the beginning or completely along the parting-line of a woman’s hair) is intact and hasn’t faded off.

Scene 6:A young Punjabi guy has befriended a foreigner and likes her. He takes her to a holy place in Amritsar Punjab popularly known as The Golden Temple where he puts a Dupatta (a Scarf or a stole) on her head signifying that he does not want to take undue advantage of her but rather looks at her in form of his future wife.

Scene 7:Two youngsters are travelling with a very old Indian classical music instrument called Sitar as opposed to most youngsters who are fans of electric guitars and other modern instruments.

—–

But then of recently early this year, the company in a campaign to promote one of its latest bike, came up with a disastrous advertisement that, in our opinion, conflicted the entire 20-odd year old campaign associating its brand with the culturally rich traditions and attitudes of youngsters in India.

The new ad shows a group of youngsters breaking into a Bajaj Factory to investigate the new bikes features. The company apparently wanted to showcase the excitement in the youngsters about the new bike. Check out the video below. All through, many viewers of this audience had the “New India’s, strengthened image” saga running at the back of their minds while watching these youngsters (“New India”) breaking into a high security zone of a Bajaj factory.

The above advertisement caused a conflict of ideas passed on through two different ad campaigns to the viewers. As on the overall Bajaj Campaign, the company conveys its association with the culturally rich yet modern youngsters of India. The recent ad above, on the other hand, showcases certain youngsters, that Bajaj has been portraying as the ‘New India’ all these years, are illegally breaking into their high security zone factory. Such conflicts do their best in confusing a brand user’s perception about a brand. We reckon, the launch of this ad may have had an negative impact on the ‘Culturally Strong’ image of the Bajaj brand.

This is a perfect branding mishap occurred due to a failure to maintain a consistent brand image. Such mishaps generally creep up due to changes in business strategy or management positions. In case of Bajaj, the most obvious reason was a demerger that was approved by its shareholders and unsecured creditors in 2007 (Financial Express, 2007). The demerger may have brought in a change in the business strategy or management level positions. Often, companies fail to execute change successfully. Many a times they refrain from consulting or hiring (contracting) change management veterans to mitigate risks and threats associated with the change.

Nevertheless, the consumer perception of the brand Bajaj has been dented with a scare that might take some time to be re-healed.

We invite the brand managers of Bajaj company to respond to our findings and would be happy to work with them on their upcoming campaigns.

Financial Express, 2007, Demerger of Bajaj Auto gets shareholders’ approval,
URL: http://www.financialexpress.com/news/Demerger-of-Bajaj-Auto-gets-shareholders-approval/211217/

—-

Update

24th August’2009: After no response was recieved to the above post from Bajaj Auto’s representatives, we have buzzed the Marketing Manager (2 wheelers), Bajaj Auto Limited. It will be interesting to see how (if ever) he responds to our criticisms.

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