Being Analyst means to keep questioning your friends & colleague about their company. Here is one such tale from talk.
Once there was big FMCG Company, one of the key activity of an FMCG company is advertising. If one carefully observes advertising & promotion is key part of strategy. There is substantial money spent on making those ad – hiring right models, directors, jiggle writer, travelling, music composer, etc. However most important of all this is ad agency or to be more precise “Creative”, one who actually think of ad (they are real talent of ad agency). FMCG company typically meets client servicing manager who understands what message client (FMCG) wants to convey through ads to customer (Target Audience) then goes and conveys it to creative team. Then creative team goes about thinking of what ad should be like. (In this case product belongs to ready-to-eat kind of product).
Thing about creative people and creativity is, one cannot really motivate them or stimulate it. Try being creative on purpose and chances are one would fail. Creativity comes at its own pace, one cannot simply throw money or car or chocolate or anything other materialistic stuff to induce creativity. Creativity is like making baby, one need loads of passionate love to consummate, one needs patient to carry it out around for 9 months, one needs dedication to continuously take care of it and finally probably the most important “courage” to delivery it. However many think there is shortcut, like taking 9 women and 1 man and telling them you have 1 month to make a baby (its like equally telling someone “come with idea or you are fired”)
Something similar happens while making ads, in order to make your brand stand out from others, your brand needs to communicate message that creates very specific image in minds of consumer or deliver right message that it gives certain/stands for value. However this idea on how best to do it has to come from creative person, who operates on altogether different tangent. There are tons of ad agencies in world, one can hire anybody to do the job, but it takes genius to pull out creativity from creative team. One can pay software engineer and ask him to write code on urgent basis, but cannot ask painter to come up with creative piece on urgent basis.
FMCG Company appreciates this very best, so in order to pull out best creativity from team, it arranges for visit of creative team to schools, colleges, office etc places where people discover joy of food. Remember your lunch time in office, chances are most of the time first thing one does is, ask fellow friend “tere dabbe mein aaj kya hai?” You and he get excited on discovering your favourite vegetable. So that is something that tickles or ignites creative peoples mind and makes them think. Because of such stimuli creative guys are able to come up with better idea.
This is called true way to get bang for your buck, obviously this beats all other forms 😉
This gives one real insight of how FMCG industry, ad agency and whole industry operates. However key thing is best companies truly know how to motivate and get best out of employee or vendor. Best companies/Leader understands money & fear can only motivate up to extend, one needs to truly cherish & appreciate art (regular or not so regular job) that people do on day in day out. If one observe closely one would notice idea of motivating creative, came from brand team of FMCG Company. So imagine how much effort they took in not only to understanding consumer but also creative people who work for ad agency. Now obviously these brand managers in turn were hired by HR people, so some credit goes to them who hired such a smart people. To top it up these HR guys probably put in lot of effort in hiring right people because of organisation culture, which in turn was probably created by founders & senior management of the company. So it’s kind of big circle that feeds on each other.