Storm the Norm

by Anisha Motwani

  In its 175th year, the brand took activism to a new high with a slew of campaigns under the I Lead India initiative. The Youth Brigade programme encouraged young people between eighteen and twenty-four years of age to take on a civic-related issue in their city. The idea was to demonstrate that a group of motivated young individuals, sans any official standing or authority, could make an impact on issues where the authorities had failed to deliver. Across twenty-seven cities of India, the Youth Brigades made their presence felt and many ensured sustainable change.

  Going a step further, the I Lead India Organ Donation Day, on 6 August, drew the attention of citizens to a subject that had been the preserve of the medical profession. The initiative busted long-held myths on the subject, got support from a galaxy of celebrities and, within a fortnight, achieved over 60,000 pledges for the cause, higher than any NGO involved in the space achieved in an entire year.

  Ever-expanding footprint

  The TOI currently has editions in fifty-three cities of India, with more in the pipeline. With a total print order of more than 4.8 million copies, the brand is the undisputed leader in key metros such as Mumbai, Bangalore, Ahmedabad and Pune, is neck-and-neck with HT in Delhi and a close second to The Telegraph in Kolkata. It continuously challenges incumbents in Chennai and Hyderabad.

  The approach the TOI adopts for entering a new market is essentially to target the youth. The biggest example of a successful launch in recent times is that of Chennai, for long the bastion of a well-entrenched rival, The Hindu. The TOI realized that the youth of the city were open to a change, after years of consuming the conservative rival. A high-decibel launch which grabbed the city’s eyeballs, superior local coverage together with the glitz of lifestyle supplements, accompanied by aggressive newspaper pricing and attractive package rates for advertisers saw TOI gain strong presence in the market, making the incumbent look over its shoulder in alarm.

  What is also interesting is the brand’s increasing focus on non-metro markets. From a scenario wherein the metros used to contribute 100 per cent of the turnover, today their share is 85 per cent and the day is not far when Tier-II cities will contribute 30 per cent. The idea is to capture the highest quality reader profile and target group in these cities. In line with this thought, TOI’s leadership is also established in a slew of smaller cities such as Jaipur, Lucknow, Patna and Bhubaneswar. Recent months have witnessed the TOI being launched in markets such as Madurai, Trichy and Kolhapur.

  Youthful at 175

  Few brands in the world can boast of a legacy that goes back 175 years and appeal to the young even at this venerable age. The West has seen the newspaper industry decline due to the drop in young readers. So what is the magic potion that ensures the TOI is picked up by all ages from sixteen to sixty and seen as relevant for them?

  The TOI makes a conscious attempt to target youth. This is based on two sound reasons. The first is that under-thirties make up 60 per cent of India’s population, ensuring the average age of the Indian is twenty-six. The second is that this is a digital generation that can access news from several alternatives.

  What the brand does is to empower the youth, giving them a forum to express themselves, celebrate achievements and voice angst. Instead of the traditional role of moulding public opinion, it tries to give young readers the choice of arriving at their own conclusions. Acknowledging the irreverence of youth, TOI gives primacy to the individual over the establishment. View-Counter View, Speak Out and the I Lead India initiatives stand as prominent examples.

  It acknowledges the passions of the youth, increasing coverage for cricket and Bollywood, to name but two aspects. Youth prefers brevity and this has seen the average length of a feature story drop from 700 to 400 words. Coverage of areas such as education, jobs and career and health has also increased. The TOI also stands for positivity, always viewing the glass as being half-full rather than half-empty. It offers readers a buffet of content spread over a diverse range of interests.

  Possibly the greatest lesson for marketers from the dynamism of the TOI is to attain a balance between heritage and modernity. The only constant in the TOI’s marketing plans is change, in accordance with the ever-changing needs of the reader and the advertiser. The brand has understood the danger of getting so enamoured of what has worked in the past that one could neglect what will appeal to the youth of today who are the future, the tomorrow.

  Taking the brand ahead

  In the current period and coming years, the digital medium will increasingly dominate information and entertainment for the most desired audience of advertisers, upwardly mobile youth. The challenge will be to remain relevant to them.

  The Times Group has begun taking steps in this direction. The TOI’s online version is already India’s most popular news portal with its web, online and application versions together having a massive 57 million unique visitors (Google Analytics). Times Now, the English news channel launched in the previous decade, is a leader in its own segment. The recent introduction of Alive, an augmented reality application enabling readers to use their smartphones to access video content offers a new platform for advertisers. The group enjoys the advantage of being able to leverage multiple platforms, across radio, television, Internet and print. This gives it the strength of being able to cross-sell to advertisers across platforms.

  At the heart of the future strategy will remain the newspaper—the soul of the brand. The thrust now will be on lightening the paper’s content, simplifying writing styles to make the language more sharp and punchy, enhancing design to make it more contemporary and enabling readers to access news as it develops through the day using tech-enabled online links placed in the paper. User-generated content will find more space in the paper, adding another layer to reader engagement. The TOI will continue reflecting the changing India, tomorrow as it does today.

  What you didn’t know about The Times of India

  •The TOI’s earlier avatar, The Bombay Times and Journal of Commerce, was a bi-weekly, published on Wednesdays and Saturdays only. The paper turned daily in 1850.

  •The sobriquet ‘The Old Lady of Bori Bunder’ was given to the paper by B.G. Horniman, editor of The Bombay Chronicle.

  •On 7 July 2002, the TOI informed its readers that it was now the world’s largest-selling English broadsheet daily with 21,44,842 copies, pushing USA Today to second place.

  •The TOI’s spectacular 150th anniversary celebrations included ‘Timeless Art’, an exhibition of outstanding contemporary canvases and sculptures at Victoria Terminus (now Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus).

  •TOI’s campaigns have won global acclaim and advertising awards. Prominent among them were the Cannes Grand Prix 2008 won by Lead India, Cannes Gold Lions won by ‘A Day in the life of Chennai’ (2009) and the Farmer Suicide film (2013).

  •Former President K.R. Narayanan worked for The TOI in 1945, during the course of which he interviewed Mahatma Gandhi. The interview was not published.

  •Articles by a galaxy of guests have appeared in the TOI, including Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Winston Churchill, Martin Luther King, Albert Einstein, Sachin Tendulkar and others.

  •The TOI was only one of two newspapers in the world to grasp that the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand would trigger World War I.

  •The activist intent of TOI was stark when the accused of the Jessica Lal murder case were set free and TOI’s headline ‘Nobody Killed Jessica’ unleashed a public storm.

  •The Adarsh Housing scam of the last decade came to light when TOI reported that the land was not meant for those it had been allotted to.

  Capturing the essence of a city—TOI Chennai anniversary jacket

  Strategic lessons for marketers:

  »Innovation and change as drivers: At Bennet, Colemen & Company Limited, we have had a history of innovation. In fact we believe that if any new measure is legal and disruptive, we should try it. Even if it does not succeed, it invigorates the organization with a sense of having trie
d something new and fresh. Having said that, we are proud to say that many of our innovations have gone on to becoming outstanding success stories.

  »Positivity: The TOI has also stood for positivity, always viewing the glass as being half-full rather than half-empty. We would like to define our role in terms of what the reader takes away from the newspaper rather than just what we put in—in terms of emotional feelings and not just the functional aspects. So, what do we see as our primary role? We believe it is getting our reader charged up early in the morning with a feeling of empowerment to face the challenges that lie in the day ahead. To give him an energizing start to the day.

  »Engagement and empowerment: Traditionally newspaper journalism was defined by lofty editors preaching to the masses on what was good for them and the country. Post liberalization in the 1990s, attitudes began to change. Readers began to question the established order. And then the arrival of the Internet truly empowered them. The voice of the reader had to be recognized much more, and interactivity became vital for a newspaper in the changing milieu. TOI was a pioneer in this area.

  »Voice of the reader: The TOI, in all its initiatives, is reader-centric in the sense that brand campaigns and communication is less about the brand itself and more about the reader’s aspirations, hopes and concerns. It does not arrogate to itself the right to herd readers to a predefined point of view but seeks to empower them.

  AFTERWORD

  Market norms are stormed either by irreverent new entrants or by gutsy incumbents who have seen an opportunity they can’t unsee. These storms tend to leave markets far more vibrant than they find them.

  What does it take to storm a norm by design, and at will?

  The twenty brands featured in this book belong to diverse industries that have their own unique challenges. Yet, they demonstrate an interesting ability that’s common to all of them—the ability to shake up and transform stale, stagnant markets into fresh, vibrant ones.

  This unique collection of stories proves beyond any doubt that market storms aren’t purely accidental. There is a method to the magic, and they can be made to happen by design.

  The method we discovered could be used by you as the framework to make better sense of the stories or to drive your own next big challenge.

  The method to the magic

  It all begins with staleness. A market that has stagnated is ripe for a storm. These markets don’t necessarily have a felt need; just simmering, often indiscernible, tension of discontent below the surface.

  Look, for instance, at cinema exhibition space. In the past we have watched movies in cinema halls that looked and smelled, literally, stale. The business just trudged along through an extended period of sameness. Everyone cribbed a little but accepted it as a given.

  Stale norms

  Stale markets have norms that haven’t changed for years, leading to commoditized offerings, mindless ritualized operations and wafer-thin margins. The market generates very little revenue and hardly any profits. The players seem to have grudgingly accepted it and become resigned to their fate.

  Every entity adapts itself to survive in a resigned-to-fate industry, until a stormer arrives.

  Cinema halls resented the apparent price sensitivity of the consumer. All value-chain entities accepted their fate. Scarcity made everyone risk-averse and unimaginative.

  Spot the hidden suboptimal

  The stormer has a unique perspective. He spots a potential change in norms that could cause disproportionate impact. One that makes the current norms seem suboptimal in comparison.

  The realization is breathtakingly obvious in hindsight and is so surprisingly powerful in its promise that once the stormer sees it, he can’t unsee it.

  Pioneers of the multiplex revolution realized that the cinema-watching experience that the consumers had accepted as a given was really a penalty. They endured it to watch their favourite movies. Undesirable spaces, rigid schedules, limited choices and unpleasant consumer engagement were suboptimals that were cramping the industry from achieving its true potential.

  Conceive and iterate the breakthrough

  The stormer conceives a breakthrough—a new product, process or business model. It’s so compelling for him that he can’t wait to build the first prototype, plays with it in the market and rapidly goes through multiple iterations to evolve it.

  This leads to discarding many concepts before hitting the most powerful one. One that is elegantly simple, with the kind of simplicity that is found only on the other side of complexity.

  Cinema was always about a break from the mundaneness of life. The large-screen audio visual experience allowed people to escape into the world of fantasy. But it took a lot for people to get to it.

  Multiplexes offered a far more immersive experience thanks to technology; they also made it very seamless. You could catch a show almost any time, impulsively—a refreshing change from planned, appointment viewing of the past. As a bundled proposition, cinema + food + shopping is vastly more compelling than just cinema.

  Pace to critical mass

  A great concept must trigger a storm and for that it must hit the critical mass at a certain pace. Any slower, and the concept could join the large number of ‘great ideas’ that almost made it.

  Lazy incumbents love failed upstarts. They reinforce their long-held view that nothing is possible beyond what they have been doing for years.

  Concepts that have evolved rapidly through iterations in live markets are not just accepted but lapped up by the market that is surprised by their elegance. This leads to them hitting the critical mass at vigorous pace. The large-scale impact of newly unlocked value begins to show. Synergistic economies of scale and scope get triggered; and the bandwagon effect follows.

  The price that the average cinema consumer is willing to pay today was absolutely unimaginable before the ‘storm’ arrived. More people watching more movies and willing to pay more for each, has been generating huge surplus that has altered the industry forever.

  This has impacted not just the cinema exhibition space but cinema itself. The newly generated surplus is fuelling innovations—new genres of movies new breed of producers, directors, artists and actors. New entrepreneurial energies have been unleashed and the industry has turned truly vibrant.

  Fresh norm

  And before anyone realizes, the new concept has become the new norm and the lazy, cynical incumbents are anxiously playing catch-up.

  It doesn’t end here. It’s a cycle. The fresh norm is after all a norm. And norms are usually the lull before the next storm arrives. The next stormer will spot the suboptimal in it and pursue unlocking of newer surplus that reinvigorates the market.

  Movie watching is already experiencing the beginning of the next storm—the Internet.

  Decoding the method

  A key effect of such a transformation is its impact on total surplus, which is the sum of consumer surplus and producer surplus.

  Consumer surplus is the maximum price the consumer is willing to pay over the market price; and producer surplus is the minimum price the producer is willing to accept below the market price.

  Notice how each brand in this book ended up unlocking new value by triggering generation of disproportionately large surplus.

  Stale, stagnant markets produce very little surplus. Consumers resent price rise. Producers find it difficult to make profits that can be invested in innovation that leads to better offerings. It’s a vicious cycle.

  A storm turns this into a virtuous cycle.

  An insight that the stormer has, throws up a new value equation that points to the possibility of unlocking new surplus.

  The insight leads to a breakthrough—and that could be a product, process, or a business model, or in some cases even a new ecosystem architecture.

  A stale, stagnant market turns vibrant as the new value proposition surprises consumers who find the new offering very compelling and are willing to pay far more than before.

  Producers h
ave money to plough back into business leading to more innovation and even more demand. Economies of scale bring supply price down further.

  This leads to a steep change in demand, more total surplus and more innovation—an almost magical upward spiral that causes the storm.

  Any function in an organization can initiate a storm-the-norm strategy. Here’s an example for you. The global financial meltdown in 2008 had an adverse impact on the life insurance sector. The market suddenly shrank and then stagnated.

  Marketing function at Max Life initiated a mission aimed at a market step-change. Here’s the storm-the-norm framework mapped by the team:

  This is how the Max Life team stormed the norm

  Now browse through the stories again and see if you, too, see this pattern. Or a new one!

  Ranjan Malik

  Source of data:Customer Syndicated Relationship Life Assessment Usage & Attitude Study, Nielsen 2012-15; Customer Relationship Assessment Syndicated Study, IMRB 2012-15.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I wish to personally thank the following people without whose contributions and support this book would not have come about in the form it has.

  Mahinder Motwani, my life partner for over twenty-seven years, for his companionship and unconditional support in every decision of mine, right or wrong.