No Money Marketing

Posted by: Steve Hamm on October 27

Over the past decade, India’s top tech outsourcing firms have transformed the global IT services industry. Giants such as IBM, EDS, and Accenture had to adapt or face extreme consequences. One of the keys to the Indians’ success was their low-cost labor, of course. But another advantage is that they’re frugal in most everything they do.

That includes marketing. Unable to match the global brands in advertising clout, they came up with creative ways of getting the word out about their capabilities on a tight budget. Now one of the leading practitioners of this art, Jessie Paul, chief marketing officer for Wipro Technologies, has come out with a book, No Money Marketing, that tells how it’s done. Her book is a great primer for upstart companies in emerging markets, but also provides useful ideas for people in large, established companies at a time when the Internet and globalization are putting big cracks in traditional marketing orthodoxy.

Here are some of the ways that Wipro spread the word on a tight budget:

—The company (and the other leading Indian outsourcers) took advantage of the network of more than 300,000 people of Indian origin that worked in the US tech industry. The company’s executives, sales people, and marketers tapped their contacts among university alumni and former employees and colleagues to find allies in US corporations who helped them connect with decision makers.
—Because of the Internet, Wipro saw that it shouldn’t attempt to segment and differentiate its marketing messages by type of customer. Instead, communicated mainly via the Web, its consistent marketing messages reinforced each other rather than clashing with one another.
—Corporate leaders were hungry for information about offshoring to India, and the operators of industry conferences needed experts to make speeches and sit on panels. Wipro came up with a pool of experts that it offered up to the conferences—and got a ton of free publicity.
—Rather than putting on huge and expensive user conferences, Wipro stages annual “Mandala” meetings of top executives at its clients. There are no sales pitches, just lots of big-think talk about management and technology issues, but the situation frequently yields new pieces of business.

Paul worked for Infosys, iGate, and Ogilvy & Mather before she went to Wipro, and her book has examples from those companies and more. One of her insights that interested me most concerns Infosys. She writes about “core branding” and “surround branding.” Core branding is the work you do to communicate about the quality and benefits of your offerings. Surround branding is the work you do to create excitement about the brand and give it credibility. Early on, the leaders of Infosys decided to differentiate themselves from the competition by becoming world-class in each of the surround elements. They accomplished this by creating a strong ethics policy and financial transparency, for example. But surprising things mattered, too. Co-founder and longtime CEO Narayana Murthy noted that India had a reputation for being dirty and backward, so he insisted that the Infosys campus in Bangalore would be ultra neat and clean. In fact, he was known to personally supervise the cleaning of the cobblestone pathways with toothbrushes.

It worked. I can remember my first visit to Infosys, years ago. It was startling to leave the chaotic and gritty reality of Bangalore for Murthy’s haven of calm and cleanliness.

India’s big tech companies have successfully bridged the chasm between the emerging and the developed worlds. They did it in part by turning a disadvantage, their relative paucity of resources, into an asset—and some really innovative marketing techniques.

Read and learn.

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