Radical Marketers are missionaries who have changed our lives in ways unimaginable due to their own passion for making the world a better place. Radical Marketers develop a deep connection with their audience and are able to understand the customer’s needs very well. They focus on providing better products and services instead of just profits. They do not need large scale marketing expenditures. They have a deep connection with their product as if it is their own child and expect their customers to feel the same way

Radical Marketers have 10 commandments which are their identity and they are followed religiously:

1)      The CEO must directly supervise the marketing function. The CEO must know his customers, their needs and their product.

Eg . Shailesh Mehta, CEO at Providian Financial

2)      The Marketing Department must stay small and flat to minimize complications and ensure smooth transfer of valuable information without any distortions.

Eg. Providian has integrated marketing into all its disciplines instead of having a separate exclusive marketing department.

Jim Koch at Boston Beer, who redefined Beer Industry, had no marketing department for the first 10 years of its operation.

3)      The CEO should be in close, regular contact with customers. They prefer direct, first hand data in place of second hand data.

Eg. Jim Koch of Boston Beer used to informally visit bars to interact directly with his customers

4)      The Marketing department is used only to supplement his own intuitive understanding of the market and not as a substitute for genuine customer understanding. The problem with Marketing Research is that it that it generalizes everything and explains it in terms of averages, but in life everything can’t be around average. People may like the things having extreme qualities.

Eg. People either take hot water or cold water for a bath; you wouldn’t find them asking for lukewarm water generally.

5)      The few selected employees of Marketing Department must be very enthusiastic about the Company’s philosophy and product. Since the number of employees in Marketing Department is small, they are directly recruited by the CEO.

Eg.  Boston Beer’s first employee was Koch’s ex-secretary, who was young enough to know the local bar scene and who shared her boss’ enthusiasm for the product.

6)      Customers must be thought of as individuals, not numbers. One must figure out how they can be served better. Customers must be respected.

Eg. Relating it with India we can use Mahatma Gandhi’s words “A customer is the most important visitor on our premises. He is not dependent on us; we are dependent on him. He is not an interruption in our work. He is the purpose of it.”

7)      Striving to create a community of customers which are unified by a common thread i.e. Brand Identity. The one thing that shouldn’t be missed is to publicize the community. If you search for “user group” (with quotes) at Apple’s site, you get 112 matches. (The same search at Microsoft’s site yields 16,925 matches).

Eg. Apple has unpaid, raging, thunder-lizard evangelists for Macintosh and Apple II as their Group Users.

8)      Rethinking the Marketing Mix is a good idea. We all have the 4P’s of Marketing (Price, Place, Promotion & People ) embedded into our brain but can we adopt a different approach.

Eg.  Thought leaders like Bob Lauterborn, Philip Kotler and Koichi Shimizu have argued for years (since the mid-90s) for a customer-centric model known as the Four C’s: Customer, Convenience, Cost and Communications.

9)      Admiring and encouraging the much uncommon quality: ‘common sense’. Establishing a structure of generation of Fresh and Creative Marketing Ideas.

Eg. Take example of Barista vs. Café Coffee Day. Barista provides the same coffee and experience across its outlets and gives you a feeling of familiarity as opposed to Café Coffee Day

10)   Being true rather obsessive with regard to sustaining Brand’s Integrity and Quality. Taking utmost care that the Brand shouldn’t get diluted and its image should be preserved.

The Radical Marketing concept is not new to India. Traditional Indian Businesses like Handicraft and other artistic products have been doing it for ages. They didn’t have any established marketing structure, rather they established a personal rapport with the customers and the quality of their products spoke for themselves. Maybe the newly evolving Indian Business can take a cue from them and adopt some of their practices to survive in the ever changing Marketing scenario.

By: Harsh Shethia and Utpal Khardenavis, NMIMS, Mumbai