Do you remember the famous ‘sell me this pen’ scene from the 2013 film, ‘ The Wolf of Wall Street’? Not shockingly, the protagonist is compared to a wolf. It was universally understood and accepted that they are the ones who have a sharper acumen to prey on the public to get richer.
If you are a brand custodian or a marketer in any capacity, chances are that you are educated in several famous case studies of brands that carved a big share of a pie for themselves against all odds. The maid odd being that the target audience didn’t see value in your offering, right away. Stories of how brands made product set-backs seem like an advantage or made largely ordinary features as compelling needs have impressed us with its sheer genius.
It always seemed like great strategy when businesses and brand builders succeeded in making it impossible to distinguish wants from needs. What’s good emotionally and what’s good physically. Marketers are expert line blurrers. However, this system of affairs did not make actual consumer needs disappear. They remained and grew stronger and stronger to the point of a whole generation of independent entrepreneurs taking matters into their own hands.
A new wave of enterprises have been mushrooming and thriving in the evergreen forests of giant, legacy household brand names. These mushrooms have simply listened to the audience and cared to R&D ways to cater to those needs. Needs such as cutting down on sugar, catering to indian complexion and curly hair, hailing a cab through your mobile phone with agreed upon costing of clean baby food companies, 10 min home delivery of daily groceries. comparison of costs of any service be it travel, courier or life insurance. These are businesses that also are built for profit. The difference is that they see buyers as allies as opposed to sitting ducks to hunt.
This revolution is caused by the enablement of the end consumer with choices, information and convenient facilities to verify. Also people are equipped to start commerce using their computers and an internet connection. Suddenly the convenient view of the general public as vulnerable, emotional fools was smashed. The desire of the larger public is not the same as that of the handful of business tycoons. The latter is fundamentally motivated by profiteering at any cost. The former simply wants to live and let live. The latter is never truly able to understand the simple motivations of the former because of how different they are in their very nature. However, now that ratio between the tycoons and the people is shifting. The new generation of businesses are built for good. They will still make profits and get rich but by fulfilling actual needs, which there is no shortage of.
Born in 2013, Wow Skin Science, currently is a bestselling brand on Amazon India and the USA. The brand’s success is attributed to not just delivering what the consumer was looking for but also for leveraging new age ways of connecting with them across all tier cities. Wow offers new-age ingredients previously unheard of giving the fatigued consumers something exciting and arguably effective. There are several other brands that have captured the audience advocacy with research founded, zero-gimmick, innovation led brands such as Dr. Sheth, Minimalist and Ordinary strategically packaged as premium but fairly accessible to a wide cross section of socio economic backgrounds.
On the other hand, ed tech company Byju’s formed in 2011 that operated like traditional profit hounds lost favor within a decade.
Every new age brand that succeeded in the last 2 decades be it Oyo Rooms, The Whole Truth, The Wellness Co and several others don’t appear like ‘wolf’ companies. And yet, these are legit, profit making entities. Employee wellbeing is a matter of continued scrutiny and if trends are to be relied on, we are witnessing a definite shift in that area as well. Perhaps the coming years will unfold further the profitability in running businesses with a lamb approach – good, clean, harmless and genuinely helpful.
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