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    Crack the Marketing Case and Interview Like A CMO
    Crack the Marketing Case and Interview Like A CMO
    Crack the Marketing Case and Interview Like A CMO
    Ebook191 pages2 hours

    Crack the Marketing Case and Interview Like A CMO

    By Nitish Rai Gupta

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    About this ebook

    Crack the marketing case and interview like a CMO' is intended to help students and working professionals in their marketing case training and interview prep. It shows you how to acquire and become expert at skills required to solve any marketing case problem and successfully crack your marketing interview (personal and technical).
    It leverages Nitish's and the cmofactory.com team's extensive marketing experience (in more than 20 countries building brands for P&G, Coke, Yum etc) to cull out the first principles that can be used to approach any marketing situation or problem you are faced with. The principles listed in the book are simple & logical and can be readily used for any industry/category type.
    The book is a fantastic tool to gain perspective on what a Chief Marketing Officer looks for and it systematically goes about helping you develop and showcase those very skills. The frameworks and tools discussed in this book have been used to train thousands of students across all IIMs & top B-Schools and have got rave reviews unanimously
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBloomsbury Publishing
    Release dateOct 18, 2016
    ISBN9789386141446
    Crack the Marketing Case and Interview Like A CMO

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      Book preview

      Crack the Marketing Case and Interview Like A CMO - Nitish Rai Gupta

      author

      Chapter 1 The Case for Marketing – A Preface

      The big guns in marketing - P&G, Unilever, J&J, Samsung, Coca Cola, etc. have proven that organizations focused on marketing in their top priority, tend to create greater consumer and shareholder value in the long run. Therefore, we find more and more companies around the globe today being restructured with marketing as the core. This has had huge implications in the marketing talent recruitment and development process - whether for individuals fresh out of university or for seasoned professionals.

      The marketing field has witnessed a big change, with the interview process becoming more scientific and technical to ensure that the recruiting organizations are able to identify candidates with the right sets of skills (personal and technical) and motivation. Key outcome of this has been the move to structured marketing interviews where the interviewer, through the help of marketing conversations as well as life cases, tries to evaluate the candidate’s fit for a career in marketing.

      Over the years, marketing has gained significant relevance because at the core of any marketing plan is the consumer – wherein the brand identifies an unmet need that it can address better than the competition can. On the basis of this very insight, the proposition is developed which addresses the need meaningfully. On this proposition, the complete go-to market plan is developed including the product/service features, the channel strategy, the promotion strategy, the pricing etc. All of this is done while keeping in mind the competitive landscape (direct and indirect) in which the brand will be competing for consumer attention.

      The fundamental principle, thus, remains the same for any industry, though different aspects of the go-to market execution might have varying relevance depending on the product/service type. For instance, for marketing a toothpaste brand, ‘top of mind’ awareness and immediate availability might be more important whereas for marketing a computer, recommendation from the sales assistant at the store might hold greater importance. However, both the brands will need to identify relevant consumer insights that they want to tap into and suitably arrive at a proposition which the marketing plan then brings to life at relevant touch points.

      Let me share a few examples to show the applicability of core marketing principles across industry types. Let’s start with the technology industry, where Michael Dell took on IBM by differentiating his offering in the market place. The key for Dell’s success was the fact that it tapped into a relevant consumer need and came up with a differentiated positioning, providing its consumers with the choice to pick and choose the features they want in their computers. Further, the go to market plan brought this strategy to life when customers could order their specific computers on phone and the final product was couriered to their homes. This application of basic marketing principles enabled Dell to take on a big playerlike IBM in its own meaningful way.

      Now we’ll look at the retail food service industry. The brand in question, Dominos, identified an unmet consumer need (on-time delivery of food) and galvanized its system to bring this proposition to life via a concerted go-to market effort. This included developing a system that helped Dominos to make pizzas efficiently. For instance, using mesh trays to cook pizzas in ovens instead of conventional wooden or stainless steel trays to enable faster and even cooking of pizzas. The marketing campaigns included the 30-minute-delivery guarantee which was revolutionary in the category when introduced by Dominos.

      One of the top champagne brands, Moet and Chandon has successfully leveraged influencer marketing. The brand built on its core consumer understanding and established the proposition as a brand for the upper class by seeding it among the high-society influencers across time. This go-to market plan has been successful over a sustained period of time. It started with the influencer campaign way back when the likes of Queen Victoria were seen as consumers of the brand and consequently drove its appeal across a bigger consumer segment. Even today the brand continues to hold relevance by influencing the big shot influencers like, entrepreneurs, people from the fashion industry, etc. Once people in this segment are seen consuming Moet, it builds an appeal on a broader consumer base. Thus, the basic marketing principles enumerated earlier were applied here as well.

      Another excellent example to prove the universality of the principles of marketing would be Adidas. The brand launched at a time when footwear was more of a commodity. The key to Adidas’ success was the fact that the brand understood consumer need very well and zeroed in on a relevant proposition - ‘shoes designed for specific sports to enhance the athlete’s performance’. This idea was then brought to life by products designed basis feedback from the experts in the respective sporting domain. Further, they promoted the brand by sponsoring sporting events – a relevant and engaging way to market their intended proposition.

      Thus, it’s evident that the basic marketing principles remain the same no matter what industry or geography one is evaluating. This is what defines the core of this book. It goes beyond the conventional marketing frameworks that are taught in B-Schools and helps you approach any marketing situation in a more holistic manner via the first principles. This helps you understand the marketing case from a practitioner’s perspective - thus enabling you to ace your marketing interview and crack any marketing case that you are faced with.

      As you will see in the rest of this book, especially in the practise cases, we have applied these basic principles in a variety of industry types, which should prepare you for all types of interviews/case problems in the marketing arena.

      While the importance of systematically approaching your preparation to successfully handle marketing interviews and marketing cases has been clarified, before we get into the details of cracking marketing cases and interviews like a CMO, let me use this opportunity to take you through the variety of marketing experiences I have gone through myself. This is what built the foundation for me to perceive the fundamental marketing principles in action over a variety of circumstances, which consequently formed the basis for this book.

      From Calcutta to Singapore

      I started my career in 2003, post my MBA in marketing from IIM Calcutta with Procter and Gamble based out of Singapore. There I worked with the beauty care business unit handling brands for a variety of markets like the ASEAN cluster, India and Australia. As part of my stint with P&G, I got to launch new brands as well as manage existing brands. From here, I got the opportunity to work in many more geographies with different organizations, starting with Heinz, for their Africa and Middle East Business.

      From Pittsburgh to Dubai

      During the 2009-10 period, I was in Pittsburgh, USA at the innovation centre for the foods conglomerate I was working for. There, as part of the consumer-immersion exercise I met some local American women who were frequent users of the pasta sauces brand our company had. The brand in question was close to a billion dollars in size and needed to innovate constantly to ensure it stayed relevant for its consumers. The key reason behind the success of this brand in the US was that it was positioned on the ’authentic / handcrafted’ platform i.e., pasta sauces that were handcrafted the Italian way. This worked because their target consumers were highly involved women who liked to re-create authentic recipes at home. This was a proposition that was relevant for the consumers and well ­differentiated in the pasta sauces category, thereby creating consumer-relevant differentiation for the brand in the US market. However, in other parts of the world, the same proposition might not be relevant. Thus when we were launching this brand in the Middle East, we had to re-think the positioning platform entirely.

      When I moved to Dubai and tested the same proposition (the authentic handcrafted Italian pasta sauce) with the local women, the idea just did not click with them. We expected it to do well since it was a successful American brand that we were trying to bring to a region where ‘Made in America’ products had inherent appeal with the locals. Surprised with the results, we dug deeper to identify the reasons. Post multiple focus group discussions, the team found that the local SEC-A women in Dubai had a fulltime help to do all the cooking and the women saw themselves more as the ’home managers’ and not necessarily as the ‘home makers’. Thus, their motivations were not really around creating authentic Italian recipes at home. Instead, they were keen on entertaining guests and showcasing their home as the best in their circle of friends and relatives. Hence the ‘homemade authentic Italian’ proposition was not relevant for them. The team thus developed a different proposition for Dubai and positioned the brand around the idea of enabling consumers to create five-star dining experience at home for their guests and themselves. This proposition was extremely relevant for the local women in Dubai and well differentiated in the pasta sauces and tomato paste category. The brand was launched on this platform with an innovative experiential sampling activation (wherein a hotel style Italian kitchen was re-created in-store across various modern retail outlets). This turned out to be mega successful. Volumes kept doubling every month for the first few months after launch. Thus, leveraging the positioning idea helped us create and launch a strong brand that found relevance in the market with absolutely no change in the basic character of the product itself.

      From Lagos to Riyadh

      Good part about being a marketer is that work helps you explore regions and territories you might not otherwise visit. During my market visits in Africa, I realized how the bigger cultural context in a city or country can be a treasure chest of insights that can help build strong brands. In Lagos, many such socio-cultural issues have enabled different players to create meaningful differentiation and hence build strong brands in the market. Milk Food Drinks (MFD) category is one such example that understood the nutrition needs for Nigerians. The fact that availability of quality nutritious milk was scarce, led various big players like Nestle (Milo), Cadbury (Bournvita) and Heinz (Complan) to come up with relevant and differentiated positioning to capture the market in Nigeria. The key to success for this category was the fact that mothers could now add these MFDs to plain water and were happy that the nutrition needs of their kids were taken care of even if quality milk was not available. Thus, a very relevant proposition of nutrition in a situation where there was lack of quality milk- enabled these brands to successfully grow in a relatively under-developed market.

      From Lagos, let me take you to a very different culture when we (the marketing team) were working on building and turning around a famous ketchup brand in Saudi Arabia. It was critical for us to understand what the trial barriers were for the brand (because of which it had low single digit share in the market). As any diligent marketer would do, the first step for us as well was to understand the consumers. This came with a lot of challenges. Saudi Arabia being an Islamic country had a very strong culture of moral policing and it was difficult for us (non-local males) to talk to local women directly. Through the use of local agency and moderators, we ended up talking to more than 80 Saudi women from different socio-economic backgrounds. The upshot of these

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