Grey Group India’s chairman and MD Sunil Lulla brings back the roar of the lions

Sunil Lulla, Chairman & Managing Director, Grey Group India (pictured) shares his views on thought leadership.

I returned to advertising in India after a long hiatus of 23 years. In India it has undergone a generational change, as Media Agencies have now developed giant muscle; Creative Agencies are weaker due to profit erosion and low pricing power and all kinds of specialist boutiques are the new predators.

The impact is hurting the business. Consequently, impacting the kind of Lions it attracted. Never short of creative ideas but the conversion to profitable growth had become a daunting challenge. Some are even saying the days of ‘Partnership’, between client and agency, are diminishing.  Worse still, ‘Ideas’ are now short in tenure. While I do not subscribe to the cynicism, I do believe such a view has currency. Frightening. Let’s put those ghosts away.

The business of Ideas will be eternal. Be it in product, service, community, content or its communication. So let’s go back to understand what is required to cause change and to create an environment where Lions can grow and feed their brood for building a jungle, far and wide (including @Cannes).

The global conversation is very much about, Brands are back and Brands with Strong Ideas are back with a bigger bang. So time roll in the fundamentals, which may have been forgotten.

In a recent poll of students and those with under 10 years in the advertising industry, I got only a very few hand raises when it came to simply being familiar with these fundamentals, which I queried: Segmentation, Product Life Cycle, Diffusion, and Positioning. You may say, this has nothing to do with the craft of advertising. But it has everything to do with the science of advertising. Just as when a body ails, one needs to understand the science of the body to fundamentally redesign its strength and capability. We need to fundamentally re-design the mind of the advertising Lion.  

What do these fundamentals teach us?

1.     Maslow on his discourse of A Theory of Human Motivation, describes the Hunger Drive, rejected by Society in earlier days, but which is the pillar of consumer behaviour.

2.     Philip Kotler combined the thinking of Marshallian Economics; Pavolian Salivation; Freudian Thought; Veblenian Cultural references and the Hobbesian Organizational Model to establish The Behavioral Model for Analyzing Buyers. The backbone of the American Marketing System, which drove the world’s largest economy.

3.     Theodore Levitt’s Marketing Myopia, defines why growth fails and how organizations, brands and people can create a sustainable model and culture. The same Levitt, went on to define The Product Life Cycle, the back-bone of all major Baby Boomer Marketing and the force of many large consumer industries.

4.     Roger Everett in The Diffusion of Innovations defined the pace of idea development, giving birth to the concept of Innovators, which today define the global economy.

5.      Al Ries and Jack Trout in all their seminal theories of Positioning and in their classic, Positioning The Battle For Your Mind, illustrate the single organization pursuit which can make or break a company and a brand.

Disney, Google, Apple, Facebook are just some of the brands and companies which have made this and more their religion. Using the backbone of technology and blending years of classic proof have made these brands iconic.

So why can’t Advertising, a business known to produce Hyper Million Ideas per millisecond, globally, not re-visit these sciences and inject it into their content. I call it content and not just advertising because in the current context, it is that and more.

Craft, which creates ideas, has to be science-enabled craft that breathe ideas. This is just stimulus as a thought, of how the agency of this term may evolve. At the current velocity Agencies as such are headed towards, Social, Mobile, Programmatic, Data. Nothing wrong with that – go with the flow of currency. But that does not fundamentally change the agency; it only gives it new muscle to develop. Collaboration and Culture are new norms for creating osmosis and enabling veteran crafts folks to merge their experience with the ebullient and young technologist oriented mind.

But imagine an agency, which has its ‘Peeps’, now as Motivator, Analyzer, Innovator, Positioner, Life Stage Expert. An agency with folks, that brings back these sciences into an agency. Imagine what happens to Ideas. Yes there is a ‘Product Life Cycle’ for Ideas. An ‘Innovator’, which works with the Product to, extends its use. A ‘Segmenter’ who finds the new segment to target and with the ‘Positioner’ defines the uniqueness for the brand.

You may say it’s the role for Strategy and Creative (In Agency parlance) to work together. But this is more; this is fundamentally redefining the purpose of partnership, which is to build great brands. Bring back the science into advertising and let the Lions roar.

Let’s learn from Media and create these disciplines, which enable building strong muscle, respected practices, which drive commercial value and fuel the growth of ideas that create profit. The thinking, which goes with, this, needs to be made contemporary in today’s mobile, hyper competitive, social world, powered by Technology. Individuals in Agencies need to be experts at creating this practice and demonstrating value to clients. Be it solely as a discipline or blended in the range of services, which can now command a premium.

So the practice of Positioning, using research and social techniques or the practice of Segmentation using data, shopper habits and mobility or penetrating the less advantageous economic classes to be empowered and benefit from fair social justice.

This requires deep development and re-engineering at the Agency to create commercial value for its clients and itself. My attempt is not to specifically and simplistically suggest a solution, but to raise the subject, which was triggered by the lack of hand-raises, on the fundamental and science in our business.

Nonetheless there is growing evidence of the changing landscape (biased with GREY group examples). When it comes to enhancing the brand value of safety for Volvo, none does it better than Life Paint from GREY London. Beyond content, it’s a product – an extension of brand Volvo. Segmentation led the idea of looking beyond borders for the Indian Army and blending it with the defining positioning of the country’s largest employer, from GREY India for the Indian Army. In a cluttered Fashion Accessory market, resonating with the youth, meant breaking opening the pages of Maslow, for understanding behaviour, redefining ‘The Labellion‘, Shaze, by GREY India.

Structures need to evolve and drive economics. Beginning by just getting everyone in the agency to simply understand these seminal classics is a starting point. Evolving from here to a practice, which showcases these skills and enables enduring ideas, will create for a new partnership and new revenue streams too.

The Lion can roar louder!

(All views expressed are personal, and do not reflect that of the organization)