Madhukar Sabnavis: Business is emotional

Many business decisions are made by the heart. It is this one fact that we tend to fight against when looking at business.

The Cricket World Cup is formally over. But for India it ended in the last week of March, when we lost to Sri Lanka and so did not make it to the super eight. The next weeks were spent in debate on who is responsible for the debacle, whether film stars make better brand ambassadors than cricketers, or whether the media and marketers have over-hyped the game. Each is a subject in itself and so we will restrict ourselves currently to only the third question: Have marketers and the media over-hyped the game, leading to serious financial trouble for them when India exited early?

There is no doubt that so much money was put behind the game on "hope" rather than on "facts" when the World Cup began in March. India's cricketing performances in the past one year have been far from promising and it was always a fact that if India had one bad day""against Bangladesh""India could well be out of the tournament early. It's also a fact that cricket TRPs (viewership) drops astronomically for non-India matches and so all the big moneys paid for cricket were based on the assumption (and perhaps a calculated gamble) of India not having that bad day. Unfortunately, that bad day did happen and India went out""and with it the business returns of many marketers who pegged huge sums on both the viewership of the India super eight matches and the investments in cricket-based advertising promotions (remember the "ooh aah India, aaya India" commercials) that suddenly became meaningless and ironical once our team returned home. Panic buttons got pressed, the rationality of marketers and businesses got questioned and, yes, as an additional reaction, commercials featuring the "fallen heroes" were taken off the air and substituted with either ones featuring film stars or non-cricketers. This seems again irrational""it's hard to believe that consumers would not buy a product or tune off the brand's advertising only because it featured a star who had failed. This was a second surge of emotional responses""the "withdrawal" syndrome""the exact opposite of what happened before the start of the Cup when there was this huge "invest in cricket" drive. Is this all sheer madness and insanity or is it a part of life? What should we learn from all this cricket overdrive""investment in and withdrawal from the game""that we have witnessed in the last couple of months?

At the base level, marketers will wisen up and ensure in future that financial investments are linked to performance of the Indian team to guard against similar setbacks. However, dig deeper and it gives us an interesting perspective to business. Business decisions are not always made rationally. There are emotions linked to it""because ultimately the business decision makers are consumers with common human feelings. It is this one fact that we tend to fight against when looking at business because we are taught to believe that business should be more mind, and little heart.

Jack Welch says it quite poignantly in his book Straight from the Gut: "There is no formulae answer to business strategies.... The process helps you get closer to the darker shade of gray. There are rarely black-or-white answers. More often than not, business is smell, feel and touch as much as or more than numbers. If we wait for the perfect answer, the world will pass by" (emphasis is mine). Deep down many business decisions are based on "feel" and the feel is often strongly influenced by mass hysteria and madness. Remember the dotcom boom of the early 2000s?

In fact, if we were to extend this thinking to brands and brand creation, it throws up an interesting perspective. Brands are actually creative products""created by marketers. While they are about perceptions in the consumers' minds, there are people attempting to create them in the market place using the four Ps of marketing and advertising""and they are artists. Every creative product has a bit (and often a significant bit) of its creators in them. Literature, painting, music, movies""take any masterpiece and hidden within it are the life and experiences of its creators. Much as marketing theory attempts to distance brands from its creators and place them within their users (the consumers), the truth is, as Gerald Zaltman in his book How Consumers Think says, "brands are effected by the 95% unconscious of the marketing man". Passionate brand creators and custodians cannot resist putting themselves into a brand. It's quite obvious when we see entrepreneur brands like Virgin and Kingfisher, which clearly bear the stamp of their owners, Richard Branson and Vijay Mallya. But it is true for even "organisational" brands because organisations are composed of "people". Brands, in such cases, reflect the culture of the people within the organisation.

This becomes particularly more marked as we move from product brands to service and idea brands where the brand creators' role becomes more and more significant. MTV cannot be MTV without the madness of its owners. Get people with less madness into the channel and the character will change and so will the brand. NDTV is the character of its owner""Prannoy Roy""particular, articulate, understated, while CNN-IBN cannot de-link itself from the character of Rajdeep Sardesai""effervescent, passionate and aggressive. Most service brands reflect the character and personality of their owners.

Having started on a cricketing note, let me end with another cricketing quote from Ray Illingworth, captain of the English cricket team in the late 60s/early 70s, that reflects clearly the importance of emotion in leadership and decision making (the emphasis again mine): "It's a lonely job""lonely as hell. The results of one single thought you might have are going to be in the record books for all time, and figures in cold print can never reflect all the heart-searching you put into that decision. But you are there to make the decisions, and with all the good advice in the world you are still the man who has to say the word. It is glorious power, it is terrifying responsibility."

Man is an emotional animal""and this comes through whether he is a human being living every day life or consumer making a brand decision or a brand custodian creating a brand or a business manager making a business decision. Let's not call emotional business decision madness.

Something worth thinking about.

The author is Country Head- Discovery and Planning, Ogilvy and Mather, India. Views expressed are personal.

Madhukar.sabnavis@ogilvy.com