The Art.

The Science.

It’s not easy you know!

Business or Marketing is not as fluid or creative as everyone thinks it is nor it is a perfect science as some ‘experts’ would like you to believe. It’s about the right strategies, right tactics at the right time on the right people. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is The Art Of Science for business and marketing.

know why

It’s Art!

In Marketing (and thereby the Business) the key is to be different from the others. Whether its in the product/service or the messaging. You cannot hope to say the same thing as others and wish that customers see you more. So whether it is about doing new things or doing the things in a new way, you need to be creative in your communication, tactic or even media tool. It’s an Art to be different every time and also be right every time!

It’s Science!

Where do you begin? By having an estimate of your market. By knowing the number of customers you need to target. Looking at the right media that reaches your Target Audience. Looking at their ‘reach numbers’. Determining ‘how many times’ you need to communicate before you create that ‘interest’. Calculating the ROI on your spends and before that doing the right budgeting and the right ‘opitmisation’. Yes. It’s Science at its finest!

It’s Both!

It is about knowing where to be creative in those scientific processes of the marketing mix and when to be practical about creativity.

Well you must have guessed it. Its like that joke where the repairman takes 10000$ for just tapping on a machine to work – the value is not for the tapping, its for knowing where to tap. Marketing and by extension, Business, is optimum when there is the right mix of creativity and established best practices. It is about knowing where to be creative in those scientific processes of the marketing mix and when to be practical about creativity.

About Cerebratum

Cerebratum, meaning many trees of intelligence, has been helping organisations achieve the optimisation of the blend of creativity and scientific processes in Marketing. With many a year of experience in FMCG, IT, Consumer Durable, and other industries it brings to the table best practices of Marketing along with out-of-the-box thinking that results in effective and efficient communication.

Cerebratum has been formed by professionals who have been looking at the evolution of the marketing/business function. From the days of a typical marketing department and an external advertising agency to the present where the activities are so fragmented and external arms are so niche, that it becomes impossible to have a holistic view of the requirements. Added to the fact that getting experienced internal resources within a reasonable budget being ruled out, the benchmarks of marketing have been going down. Consultants now just give powerpoint presentations, agencies churn out supposed creatives and lower level marketing executives are expected to carry out the organisation’s goals. Cerebratum is at the centre of all 3 and provides the requisite expertise, creativity and most importantly is involved in the execution of the strategy.

Marketing Services

The growth of the Marketing function has ensured that almost everything associated with ‘communication’ or that which requires messaging – both internal and external fall under this function. The fragmentation of media, the availability of different media types, the ability to be as broad-based or as focussed as needed has also led to strategies that are increasingly becoming very customised for each organisation. The differentiation in organisation sizes and also life cycle stages adds to the mix that determines the marketing strategy.

The most important aspect, however has always remained the communication objective which in turn is based on the life cycle stage of the organisation. Based on that some of the broad services would be as follows:

Starting Up

Starting Up requires a lot of fundamental work to be done in setting the tone for the business. Marketing activities would usually be the following:

Developing Brand Identity – corporate identity, logos, brand architecture (when there are many products/services), brand manuals
Positioning & Imagery – Personality, character traits of the brands for building the image that you want customers to see
Online Presence – Everything from corporate site, to onsite SEO, to social media set up
Communication Templates – base templates that contain type of messaging for different media types

Growth Phase

During the Growth Phase the focus is on communicating / creating awareness about the products / services and the organisation. Typically the activities are:

Awareness Campaigns – communication campaigns that are both offline and online (typically called a 360° campaign)
Lead Generation – specially for the service industries lead generation campaigns are important to build a database of prospects
Social Media Interactivity – it is different from online campaigns in the sense that these are interactions with prospects and customers and the investments are more in resources than money
PR – based on the type of organisation and need PR is an important media tool for creating word-of-mouth

Stable Phase

In the Stable Phase the activities would focus on creating systems, processes and ‘conveyor belt’ policies for fast turnarounds that include best practices:

Brand Audits – fixed frequency audits to ensure that all communications ensure to the brand guidelines that were formulated
Sustainenance Communication – the communication objective will shift from ‘awareness’ to ‘reinforcement’ and include all media
Product / Service Reinventions – Improvements / additions / updates / upgrades of products and services that will give new ammunition to the communication and gives something new to look forward to by the customers

Engagement Models

The scope of marketing / communication services is very broad and thus calls for a variety of engagement models depending on the need and budget of an organisation. What can be outsourced is the strategy part, the operations part or both and also based on retainer compensations or project based compensations. Typically the engagement model would depend again on the life cycle stage of an organisation. Looking at all these factors, we at Cerebratum engage with our clients in 3 models: The Outsourced CMO Model, The Outsourced Marketing Model and The Project-based Model.

Outsourced CMO

The Outsourced CMO

In a variety of situations a set organisation has a marketing team, an external advertising or communication agency. But what they don’t have is the experience and expertise of a Marketing Leader. You can now have a CMO who will run your marketing organisation as if he were part of the organisation. That way you will have the benefit of experience and at a cost that will not set you back at all. Consider this, the job of a CMO is to set the organisational goal and objective for communication and control the team that is responsible. Therefore what you are looking for is someone who is able to closely monitor the team and be able to do all the course corrections without the burden of a huge pay.

The Outsourced CMO will be involved in:

Fixing the marketing / communication goals of the organisation
Managing the marketing team – both internal and external
Setting the brand tone
Be involved in matters of hiring / evaluating team members both internal and external
Align other stakeholders with the business objectives

Typically the compensation for this role would be based on the time that is required to be spent on the organisation by the Outsourced CMO. For example it could be like x number of hours per week – divided into physical presence, telephonic presence as well as strategic thinking. The Outsourced CMO would carry the same KRA/KPI as an internal CMO would.

Outsourced Marketing

The Outsourced Marketing

This is complete outsourcing of all Marketing functions – from strategy to execution of communication and creatives. It functions as the entire Marketing department. From the CMO to the designer all functions would be made available along with design and delivery of all communications. Typically this model would involve:

Senior Management supervision
Planning the marketing calendar
Design and development of all communication (across different media)
Monitoring and reporting on the different marketing activities (Marketing MIS)
Interactions with other departments – especially functions like Sales for close coordination

The compensation for this model would be on a retainer basis again but taking into account both the strategic and tactical volume of work. A fair use policy would be in force for the tactical part.

Project-based

Project-based Model

This is a time-bound model where the organisation is looking at a specific set of goals and tasks. This model will always be a combination of strategic and tactical. This is because irrespective of the period of engagement, the understanding of the organisation for giving marketing inputs remains the same. The same amount of effort is put in for knowing about the organisation, the competition, market, drawing up a strategy and so on. Hence ideally a project-based model would be ideal for fundamental activities like designing brand identity and similar.

Project-based Models could also include activities like:
Planning and designing an advertisement campaign that is across media
Implementing processes for Inside Sales / Business Development / Lead Generation
Rebranding and developing brand architecture models

The compensation for such models is a fixed fee with a fair use policy on time taken to complete such projects. Usually the delays are in giving approvals and go ahead signs and hence the milestones will always be deliveries and not so much going live.

Cerebratum’s Model

So the question is always how can there be a specialist for every type of organisation, for every kind of need with every kind of experience in a place like Cerebratum. The answer is simple. The choice is between having multiple resources and assembling teams at will. Cerebratum, based on client requirements, puts together a team of freelancers who are the best in what they do and are the most suited for the client needs. This of course puts a strain on our cost-revenue margins but this is the best model for effective, efficient and top notch work to be done.

The promise of Cerebratum is that the client speaks to only one person for the entire period of engagement – and a very experienced resource at that – after all you are paying for the expertise aren’t you? This way it is very easy for the client to keep a track of the requirements, have an experienced resource on call and best of all have meaningful conversations over the table instead of, you know, waiting for ideas to be translated back and forth between two organisations.

We have a very vast network of people who are specialists in various aspects like: