Can the ‘mod marketeer’ win the consumer

Marketeers of a different breed have emerged in Sri Lanka during the past 10 years. It’s great to see young boys and girls from top Colombo schools and international schools entering the field; some with degrees from global universities which has a positive impact on the profession.

The foundation to marketing success is to understand the target consumer and have a consistent focus on them to observe, analyse and understand the changing behaviour for continuous re-alignment of strategy for communication effectiveness. We all know that the behaviour patterns of the Sri Lankan consumer are cyclical.

Be Sri Lankan

Demographics are typical characteristics of your target market – the people who buy your products or services. Anyone can easily comprehend demographics but not psychographics. Demographics help you understand who buys your product or service, while psychographics helps you understand why they buy.

Psychographics, as the name suggests, goes beyond the visible external behaviour to focus on your target customers’ psychology, lifestyles, beliefs and attitudes. These are the inner feelings and characteristics of the consumer. Understanding psychographics takes a lot more serious effort. This requirement is fundamental to build a winning brand. Who can do this best; surely people who are close to the consumer.

For most leading FMCG companies in Sri Lanka, the target consumer base is over 10 million. So the young marketeers need to understand the psychographics of every single consumer segment from the South to the North and East to the West to develop effective communication messages, select the best media mix and to make the right communication channel choices.

'Modern marketeer’

The modern marketeer speaks fluent English but poor Sinhala; some poor or no Sinhala, writes good English but horrible Sinhala, watches satellite TV not the local TV channels, uses independent rating done by external organisations covering a sample audience, doesn’t use the channel partners and own sales force feedback.

The modern marketeer doesn’t do enough market visits to spend time with channel partners, customers and frontline sales people instead uses the information available to him in office to strategise and determine the brand positioning. So the modern marketeer’s ability to think as the consumer does, is limited. This leads to misaligned decisions thus wasting marketing funds.

Consumer lifestyle change is rapid but there can be a conflict between explicit and implicit traits of the consumer. In public the ‘mod consumer’ would eat a burger and at home he would prefer to have red rice with kiri kos curry and pol sambol.

The same consumer who swims in the pool of a five star hotel in Colombo prefers to bath in a tank in the village over the weekend. Young marketeers should not lose sight of the diverse behaviour of the targeted customer. Keeping the ear to the ground, exposure to the culture of the consumer, staying tuned to the attitudinal and lifestyle changes are key success factors for the mod marketeers.

From a business perspective, mod marketeers need to understand that if marketing is to succeed within the heart of an organisation, they must truly represent the voice of the consumer. Marketing is about shareholder value and that is the kind of marketeer an organisation needs to develop; it is about people who can have an impact on the profit of an organisation. To do this effectively, understanding real Sri Lankan consumer insights is critical.