Marketers, adjusting sails to steer through a progressive Sri Lanka

With the dawn of the New Year, there is hope amongst many of us that positive fortunes will flourish in our lives and the time spent stuck in city traffic will ease. Whilst the curious minds will wonder at the speed at which the last 365 days disappeared, the excitement and energy of the first month of the New Year remains refreshing. 

Post-Budget tensions continue, and little do we acknowledge the wider tensions of the world that impact our own country. 2016 will prove to be another challenging year in balancing the country’s political ambitions with the goal of accelerating economic growth towards a 2023 framework.

As a country with great untapped potential, today we see many efforts being made to boost the Sri Lankan economy towards exponential growth. Every forum addressing the topics of projecting Sri Lanka as the next economic hub, repositioning the country to attract high spend tourism, and increasing the yield of core exports, is music to the ears of marketers around the country. 

In fact, there has never been a better time for marketers to have the opportunity to play a central role in leading the country to growth than now, when we, as a nation, are at the cusp of economic rejuvenation. In the efforts to accelerate progress greater emphasis will be on affirmative action ensuring that we are walking the talk.

Marketers’ many roles

Marketers have always played many roles in our respective industries, and these roles have provided us with both the opportunity and responsibility to create positive change in our society and our business. We are given the lofty aim to induce behavioural change in our target demographic on a short-term or permanent basis. We are the bridge that connects our business to the consumer and as a result, our actions have a direct impact on sales and the bottom line.  But while we have ambitious long-term strategies, we are often slaves to quarterly projections and monthly commitments. In this environment, we are often saddled between delivering short-term gains and creating long-term sustainable growth, which distracts from the core task of building brands. While I do not discount target delivery, we must eliminate compromising efforts that hinder the long-term sustainability of our efforts. 

It is these different roles that give marketers the very unique opportunity to drive a society’s wants and needs towards creating positive economic output, enabling GDP growth and building up our nation to the next level. Building on this, I believe that there are three key focus areas that marketers must explore, which will help challenge the status quo and establish our society in this modern knowledge based era: last mile connectivity; intuition-based decision making; and collaborative rural market development.

Last mile connectivity 

Last mile connectivity is the last portion of transit between the delivery centre and the consumer’s doorstep. During recent years this last mile has changed with evolving economic realities, changes in lifestyles and the shifting retail landscape. For a sale to be made consumers must have ready access to the products in the locations they frequent, either virtually or physically. 

For this we have to identify and address the changes in consumer lifestyles and the retail landscape. This will help us identify evolving consumer needs and where products should be made available, which requires a better informed market approach and supply chain management through consumer data and feedback. 

For example, digital e-commerce will be a strong shaper of the way we market in the future. Marketers need to focus on infrastructure and back end resourcing, and integrate digital behaviour in our thinking, rather than resort to digital activity driven campaigns. Short term investment into building capability and infrastructure will prove key for success in digital marketing.

In this vein, it is critical that we make sure that the strategies that we conceive in boardrooms are 100% translatable when reaching through the value chain to the consumer, ensuring that the connectivity stays strong right up to the final step of that last mile. 

Intuition-based decision making

This brings us to our second area of focus, intuition-based decision making. If we want our country to reach a higher base in GDP per capita, then we need to take more risks in creating it. We have to improve data collection and interpretation to better forecast business building trends, and then use our intuition to formulate inspiring strategies based on this data. 

As marketers, we might fear the failure of these strategies, however, if we are able to adopt a mindset where we realise that failure is simply an opportunity to further explore and experiment then we will be liberated to take intuitive, innovative, ground-breaking action. 

Collaborative rural market development 

The final piece of this puzzle is collaborative rural market development. I am sure that we all agree in this respect that rural markets need to be developed and that a larger consumer base from which to draw upon, as well as a more informed marketing plan, will result in growth, both for industry and economy. 

Following the end of the war, the entire country has opened up for us to market our products but we still focus most of our efforts and budgets in the Western province, even though it only consists of 29% of the population and contributes 42% of the GDP. This leaves 70% of the population as a largely untapped consumer base and developing these markets would only be beneficial to us marketers. 

When looking to develop rural markets, we will also have to overcome hurdles such as cost of reach, spend per person for media reach, sharper portfolio and pricing, and effective distribution models. Then we must focus on creating strategies that will stimulate the purchasing power of the rural demographic into an effective demand for specific products and services. 

In most cases what would have worked in the urban market wouldn’t appeal to the rural market. Marketing plans, communications, and promotions have to be adapted to the customs and behaviour of the rural consumer. For this, it is crucial that we construct our plans with stronger consumer insights, allowing us to customise our messages to our desired target groups, rather than following a blanket approach. 

A tough challenge

However, developing these markets will be tough challenge. One point to consider is if organisations come together in a previously unprecedented way to collaborate in order to uplift rural Sri Lanka. This will need collective resources to be pooled, along with private-public partnerships to turbo-charge rural economic, infrastructure, and lifestyle development. This will largely enable collaborative ways of working to enable growth.  

Marketing is a business function that works best when there is an open and constructive dialogue, with strong alignment and synchronisation amongst all stakeholders, which is critical to boosting business and economic growth in a sustainable way. As marketers we must integrate the changing retail landscape into our plans and bolster the upliftment of rural Sri Lanka to the next level with every organisation pooling their efforts and collaborating at a grass roots level. 

This level of collaboration will be mutually beneficial, allowing organisations to remain competitive in the boardroom while increasing the GDP of the nation. This is key to the role of marketers in enabling value growth in a progressive Sri Lanka. 

William Arthur Ward once said, “A pessimist complains about the wind, an optimist expects it to change, but the realist adjusts the sails.” This is something that we marketers do every day. As the realists of our industry, we have to adjust the sails according to the prevailing market sentiment in order to guide our businesses towards greater consistent, competitive, profitable growth, while steering our nation to socio-economic progress and development.

(Makshoodh Meerasaibu is the Marketing Director for Home Care, Foods and Water at Unilever Sri Lanka. Beginning his career at Unilever 11 years ago as a Brand Manager, Makshoodh has since then held senior management positions across marketing, retail sales, and customer marketing, including a regional marketing operations role in the South Asia region. He holds a MBA from the Cardiff Metropolitan University, and has over 19 years of experience across the consumer goods (FMCG), consumer durables, and advertising & leisure industries.)