To my mind, there definitely is a problem; and I think this problem is more of technical nature and that probably the media has blown it up or amplified it. The world has moved on, and the marketer is stuck in his memories about the golden 1960s and the 70s. The marketers are very much media-centric today, at a time when they have to be media-agnostic. For example, take the cell phone; it’s been ever evolving. So is television, ditto for cable networks.

The Americans never realised that cable will be so powerful. The advertising revenue of cable companies has just surpassed that of television stations in the States. Americans never imagined it, leave alone thought about it. But this is a reality today. The American audience has also moved away from the Hollywood hotchpotches. There are so many other private 24x7 channels like the Sear’s or Wal-Mart channels giving them information, entertainment etc. Again, recently American online ad revenue surpassed that of television advertising. This is just the tip of the iceberg. There’s a whole structural change in the advertising model today.

A fascinating aspect is that there are no more any single markets today, be in the emerged markets or in the emerging ones. The diversity is so large that there’s no longer any single market segment in any major markets; and that today there are various ethnic, lifestyle, geographical and cultural groups demanding special, customised treatment from marketers of both products and services. There are so many micro-segments today in the marketplace.

What I strongly believe is that marketing will survive like computing but marketers will not be doing the marketing. Marketing as a function will survive and not as a separate process or a separate organisation.

Customers will be the marketers; peers will be the marketers. The customer-to-customer marketing is so powerful today, am sure they’ll be the biggest marketers in future. Obviously, marketing is not at its best today. In fact, it’s never been so. Outside forces are driving marketing today into a direction that marketers are unable to keep pace with. Again marketing has never been part of a core function rather a separate department, doing a distinct product function. Today it’s no longer in the same league as the chief information officer (CIO), chief technology officer (CTO), chief financial officer (CFO) or even chief legal officer (CLO).

What marketing has to do is to know the mindset of the CEO. Surprisingly, the chief marketing officer has no power in the new scheme of things when the CEO, CIO and CTO, even the CLO enjoy much more powers in many companies. In the IT space, the CMO doesn’t come to the picture at all. Marketing has to become an internal process. They’ve to do the internal value creation.

Marketing is customer-perspective driven, while selling is driven by product-perspective. But today to survive in the marketplace and beat competition you must know the customer needs more. The 4Ps model is completely product-driven, while the 4As (awareness, accessibility, affordability and availability) approach is fully loaded in favour of the customer.

The 4As framework, actually three of them, was implemented by Coca-Cola some decades back. Every employee at Coke, be he a janitor, accountant, or the receptionist had to justify what he’s doing and had to do the job of marketing. Similarly, every function and every employee in a company has to ensure that the product is not just acceptable to the customer but also accessible, affordable and distributable. Can you design a product in such a way that it can be described easily because it is so distinctive and that the product itself drives the awareness? Can you package and design a product so that it becomes so distinctive and self-explanatory? Can you design the product in such a way that it’s easily distributable and that meets the supply chain demands with all its nuances? That is the idea. This solves the product issue.

Similarly, pricing. It’s two sides—consumer’s willingness to pay and the ability to pay up. Here comes the affordability issue. To cite a successful example, in he 1970s, American chewing gums company Somber’s was finding it tough to sell its chicklets in Africa. I studied their problem and found that the major issue was packaging—they’re just exporting the same large packs selling in the affluent US market to the poorest market in the world. I suggested to them to sachet the gums. And the result was astonishing—the Africans lapped the product: the message is clear making the product affordable. And this is a good example of all the As coming into play. So, the top priority of any marketer should be selling the product in a manner that it makes it more accessible and affordable.

Today we have so many ATMs and the Internet to help the process of marketing. But the moot query is: how can the Internet be made to do the function of marketing? How to make the Internet and ATMs more passionate? How to make passionate sales people?

In fact, the problem is more complicated than it looks. We can have awareness, but why do we need irritating commercials that leave the people disgusting ethically and culturally? Why can’t we’ve more acceptable commercials and communications to drive our products and not just the awareness-seeking ones? All this can be solved by making the product more affordable. So, the 4P approach is about promotion and that is all about sales. How can we sell more? By making them more affordable. What I feel is that we must have more productivity and more efficiency and for this, we must make these technological tools to help increase consumer awareness. The 4As model is more of product management and not about customer management.

Absolutely. It’s there; it’s very much there. What we do in the 4Ps approach is compartmentalisation of an activity that has to be a holistic approach. Product management is measured by one metric, pricing is done by another, and trade by yet another. Similarly, marketing is done with different metrics. Most companies excel in one of the 4As. So, we are discovering more and more in that area today. The last point in the 4As is that it has a multiplication effect.

A few years back it occurred to me that if marketing is to be customer-orientation that Kotler talks about, it has to offer customer benefits along with the 4Ps and that’s how I began it. I’ve a prior book on Consumption Values that gives a preview of this thought, which identified the five consumer needs, all of which are veering around the 3As of awareness, accessibility, and affordability. In 1997-98, I wrote a textbook on Consumer Behaviour wherein I found every customer is a user, a payer, and a buyer. Marketing has to be able to make the product acceptable, available and affordable in order to drive its awareness, which brings the first three As of the 4As approach right into the framework. I look at marketing as a function of understanding the customer in a holistic manner.

Probably in next June or October. We are still working on it.

The very concept of branding is myopic and is an obsession. Too much obsession with branding is all about bravadoing the customer. Branding cannot be a marketplace action, because a brand is a promise and a brand is not the product. One can make any promise, but if not delivered, it’ll backfire. I strongly feel, this branding obsession is very myopic and unfounded from the very conceptual level.

But the most fascinating truth about a brand is that the best brands in the world are not any manmade products or marketers’ brands, but the religion. And I rate religion as the most enduring brand, for religion is the most evolved and the most popular product in the world has ever seen. Each religion has a logo. The Hindu Om and the Christian Cross, etc are symbols of a promise, hope etc. Religion is a brand that bounds well with the people across the geographies, across cultures and above their financial wherewithals.

The second best brand is the Internet. More people know about the Net than any other brands.

The third best brand is China, which dates back to 650 BC. Brand as a country-of-origin is related to a place. See, we’ve a lot of place or country brands. Another point is, great brands are destroyed quickly, with a slight change in its look and feel. They’re very fragile, fleeting; actually the fragility haunts any brand trough out. The once-great brands like Enron and Arthur Anderson are clear examples of this.

The biggest challenge is making it to relevant to the CEO and not about getting the mind share of the CEO. It’s the CEO who has the mind share of the customer. Today what matters more is sales and not marketing. Like the IT guys have their internal customer, marketing has to make itself relevant to the CEO. How can marketing give more equity and value to customers? How can it be made more relevant to the CEO’s mindset, should be the issues that marketing professionals must be going to bed with. The second crucial challenge is how to make it more productive, or what is being called now the RoMI? How can it deliver more and retain customer? Unless more capital is spent on marketing, it’ll continue to be dogged.

I am opposed to the current understanding of any intangible asset connotation to the brand. Attaching intangible values to a brand is the worst thing that can happen to a brand and the marketing domain. Today it has also to do with way the stocks perform. Unless marketing triggers capital value it makes no sense to have a higher stock value.

It’s impossible by law to do so because of income tax regulations. But as I see it, the issue is how to get the intangible assets out of the branding process. Today, the largest selling brands are all unbranded ones. Wal-Mart is the world’s, largest brand today. What a retailer has to do is to get a product line and get the supply chain in place and liberalise the clutches of brands form the stores. The large retailers will come out with retail brand or private brand and not a store brand. Sear’s has 12 private brands. So has HomeDepot, ditto for Wal-Mart.

We must change the focus of marketing education. Marketing is too much identified with consumer goods. It ought to change. We need to have more of B2B marketing, for this is one of the fastest growing areas today. Secondly, it’s too much identified with products. It must also change. It has to make larger room for services marketing as the share of product marketing is coming down drastically.