IMPACT Annv Spl: K Ramakrishnan on learnings from CCD

You can market without big monies
It is actually possible to market with little, and sometimes, no money. In previous assignments, I was always blessed with copious budgets and I confess to working overtime in justifying them and relentlessly fighting for annual budget enhancement. However, at CCD I was suddenly faced with a scenario where there was nothing called a marketing budget. That’s not to say we do not spend money. All the signages, collaterals and digital presence do call for monies. However, we believe that we can spend only what we earn. Here, I am not talking about A to S. For the first time, I hear of a marketing income from which we spend what we have to. We generate this income from brands that pay us to reach out to our audience. All we do is to make sure that the brands are in line with our value system and in some way add value to our consumers. Wonder why other brands and businesses cannot explore means of generating their budgets?

Who owns the brand?
Several passionate brand managers talk about brand ownership. I have furiously thrown this term around myself in many discussions. In my early days at CCD, I met a group of regular consumers casually and tried to detail to them my glorious plans about how I want to treat the brand. The reaction nearly blew me to pieces. This bunch of youngsters turned around and asked me who was I to tamper with their brand. They did not want any of my nonsense. This was truly their brand. I guess a successful brand is truly owned by its customers.

Responsible marketing
I’ve learnt what it means to be responsible as a brand from CCD, which is among the largest aggregators of youth in India. While this is a huge power in itself, it brings with it some serious responsibilities. Most of our customers are in their teens. Millions of parents across the country trust us as a place and do not hesitate when their daughter or son says “I am hanging out at CCD”. We take this fact very seriously and hence take extreme care in choosing the cases and brands that we associate with and the nature of products and messages we put our consumers through.

How do you stay young?
To market to the young, you need to be young yourself. And to remain young, there is no better way than to keep your thoughts young. At CCD, we do this by making sure that we are among the youth always. Not only do we spend endless hours talking to the young and observing them, we seriously believe in recruiting young. The company is replete with individuals who handled an entire function or spawned off an entire discipline at a seriously young age. We trust that if we show them the water, they will figure out how to swim on their own. We do not always douse freshers in layers of hierarchical systems, but have mentorship programmes for young recruits.

The power of the viral
We are blessed to enjoy a huge following - in terms of social networking, you may call them fans. After all, CCD is all about social networking for real. The benefit of such a large following is the power of the viral that helps you. CCD has over 800,000 fans on its Facebook platform. This number and the power of its viral help us keep the brand from getting hijacked by vested interests. Every decision gets weighed by the whole group and that delivers a balance to the brand. On one occasion, there was mention about a cafe having bed bugs in its sofas. This information spread really fast and there was quite a bit of flak for the brand. We swung into quick action and replaced the entire furniture in the said outlet. When we went back to the network and spoke about this action, an even larger positive response for the response came on the social network.

Being true to your cause
On principle in CCD, we do not disturb customers, even if they have sat for hours and ordered very little. There have been several occasions when our cafes are fully packed in peak hours and there are still some seats firmly occupied for long durations. We have always resisted any urge to suggest to customers to order more or allow us to accommodate other customers. We are about enabling conversations much more than selling our wares. It is vital to be true to your cause, no matter what the pressures to deviate.

When you screw up, own up!
Above all, I have re-learnt my childhood lessons on honesty. When you willingly allow your consumers to co-create your brand, they deserve all information in absolute honesty; more so when you have screwed up.

I have learnt that the best way to handle a screw-up from our side is to come clean and own up. On the many occasions that we have done this, we have earned kudos from the biggest source of strength we have – our customers.

I guess this makes for a list of seven.

Like I mentioned earlier, these are merely my lessons. If in any way, some of these seem to make sense to you, dedicate your next coffee to us.

(K Ramakrishnan is President - Marketing, Café Coffee Day.)