The revelation of the Fortune 100’s marketing secrets

By Cassandra Mascarenhas

Following the success of the visit of marketing guru Philip Kotler last year, the Sri Lanka Institute of Marketing (SLIM), the national body of marketing in Sri Lanka, matched this by bringing down the revolutionary high level marketing consultant Keith Chambers to address the marketing community in the country and share his secrets to success with them.

The PULL Forum with Keith Chambers saw the renowned consultant integrate with a vast audience and through several interactive sessions and concluded with a panel featuring some of Sri Lanka’s top marketers who discussed the key points brought up by Chambers and offered their own insights into marketing with a Sri Lankan twist to it.

“One of our objectives is to uplift the marketing fraternity in the company and improve the efficiency and effectiveness of marketers and by inviting personalities like Keith Chambers, we hope to drive these objectives forward. We brought down Philip Kotler last year and since then wanted to bring down similar professionals and give the marketing fraternity in Sri Lanka global exposure,” stated SLIM President Thilan Wijesakara.

He added that to further said objectives, SLIM has tied up with the Indian School of Business this year which has access to some of the best marketers and professionals around the world.

How to create a pull

‘Pull’ was the title of Chambers’ book and that was what he focused on at the start of his session with the large audience.

He explained that a creative marketing consultant is paid to do one of the many marketing functions and essentially all of what marketers deal with are in documents and papers out of which they create a strategy and a creative consultant would take one step more and deliver the execution of that strategy as well.

Drawing upon the time he worked for global healthcare leader Merck & Co., during which he worked on the ‘Claritin’ brand, he stated that he first created a document on the brand. The document had a strategy in it and he also created how it should be executed.

“I tied the two together and that set me aside from the competition, and that is what we should all constantly be trying to be doing as marketers. It’s twofold – develop the strategy and execution of it.”

3M is one of his clients and five years ago, they came to him with a new technology for sanding.

“We were talking about a $300 million brand and which was about to be restaged based on the fact that five years ago, people purchased this product completely by the seat of their pants. We staged it so that it was based on work tasks and was not just a generic product for all activities,” Chambers said.

“We launch and we restage – today I want you to do that with your business, I want you to think about it and I’ll show you how to do it. It’s very fundamental but seems to escape the minds of most of the clients that I work for.”

Chambers added that he has worked with 163 brands – the most significant thing about this is the people that he worked with because the marketers that he worked with were graduates from the best universities of the world. They rise to the top of the marketing departments in their companies and he works for them.

“What I’ve had to do for 25 to 30 years is reinvent myself constantly which gets exhausting after awhile. How do you separate yourself? I’m an entrepreneur. What I did was create a process, call it a fear of failure which I think we all have. What I’ve done is not only reinvented myself but also invented a technology.”  

Success: two requirements

“I’ve noticed that one must do two things in order to be successful. I’m talking about this in a marketing realm and you must do both of these. You must first create a compelling selling proposition, a sales message. It has nothing to with sales,” he explained.

Chambers noted that an adequate number of exposures to the target need to be created which is essentially promotion and advertising and chose to concentrate on the selling proposition which has an impact point. An impact point can be print ads, TV spots, billboards, homepages etc., and this is changing all the time particularly with digital marketing.

The secret to his success, he said, was the process that he developed. In the old days when he got an assignment, he would go back and create around seven concepts on marketing the product and would make a presentation. The client would then pick the best ones and he would refine and go back and forth until the best one is chosen. “That’s old school,” he said dismissively.

“If you break down a sales message, you can break it into 16 different elements – which of these elements do we want to explore to develop a marketing trigger? It’s an exploration into 16 different communicative elements which will trigger the consumer.”

Taking the generic descriptor element, he went on to say that they would then go on to create different descriptors for each of the elements after which they get 24 target consumers and over the next three hours, step by step, the target consumer reassembles the elements. As a result of this process, by the time they present concept to the client, it always scores well on biometric research.

“Over time, I have come to identify not only where the value is in each one of these, but I’ve identified relationships between the different elements.”

Positioning elements include the brand, sub brand, generic descriptor, benefit, physical attributes, performance attributes, negative attributes, tag line etc.

Where do you grow your business?

Most businesses look to grow their business via product, advertising and promotion and the selling proposition. He took the example of the leading brand for headaches in the US and Canada, one that he had worked on developing and marketing. “The number one selling variant is extra-strength but it must be noted that the normal strength never existed. Another variant was one for migraines. Which of the two do you think had more of the active ingredient in it?” he asked the audience.

“They are exactly the same. The only difference is in the instructions. One of them says take two and the other says take one because migraine sufferers have a tendency to overdose so they recommend one instead of two. I find this absolutely crazy.”

The other growth opportunity is around advertising and promotion but Chambers pointed out that he never worked on a brand that had been continuously advertised as no one can really afford that.

The remarkability paradigm

This is one of the first things he figured out and the competition didn’t have a clue, he said. The paradigm is what has occurred over the years and Chambers watched what happened and saw what works and literally over a three year period of time, this paradigm manifested itself.

“Your target consumers hang out in the past because it’s where they are comfortable. They are not comfortable at all with what comes at them from the future. We handle what we are comfortable with differently to what comes at us from the future. Products in the past are unremarkable which means it’s unlikely to stimulate the consumer because they are familiar and comfortable with it. What that means is that they are not likely to respond newly to it,” he explained.

The future is remarkable. Remarkability then becomes a goal – how can you infuse remarkability? It is the target consumer who will decide on the remarkability. There are two opportunities – product or service. You could change the offering in a way that it is extraordinary. The second is the selling proposition which has more opportunity and is more cost effective and what one should look for are remarkable triggers.

“There is something that happens to human beings. As soon as we launch something we perceive as remarkable, they pull it to the other side. When that occurs, the pull clears the future for me to put something else there. Another secret is being in action and creating new triggers. Everything in our lives that shows up as remarkable is pulled over to the past. Now the big question is what is it that you add to a selling proposition to drive it over to the future?”

It’s all about character, he stated, defining character as anything that’s either physical in nature that target consumers will develop a relativeness to. The generic description is pretty general but you can add character to make it remarkable.

A member of the audience then asked him if creating triggers is an ongoing thing and if that is the main thing to do to keep your business alive.

“Yes absolutely,” Chambers asserted. “If you created a trigger you thought was pretty extraordinary and you incorporated it into your sales message, you got a reaction and if you see an increase in sales, you better be thinking about what’s next. My clients have a tendency to sit on their hands when sales are good but I say don’t do that,” he said.

If you are causing what is happening in your category, you can drive your competition crazy, he added, using the detergent brand Tide as an example which he said keeps evolving. It is driven by a lot of other brands owned by Procter & Gamble and by watching trends.

“Look at parallel categories and see what’s happening there. If you wait and you sit on success, somebody else will create it in your category. If I was a supervisor and I had marketing partners under me, every three months I would ask them what is new in the sales proposition. It’s more about a change in how you characterise your product more than changing the product itself.”

 – Pic by Upul Abayasekara