Marketing Association of Pakistan (MAP) will hold the Sixth Marketing Conference in Lahore on 13th-14th March, under the title of MARCON ’17, (not to be confused with international Maintenance and Reliability Conferences, also abbreviated to MARCON).
MAP came into being in 1967 in Karachi, and its Lahore chapter was established in 1987. Since then MARCONs have been taking place every two or three years alternatively in Karachi and Lahore. This conference will be the twelfth in the series and the sixth to be held in Lahore by the Lahore chapter.
The conference is themed ‘Breaking Barriers’ and is intended to focus on some of the key areas of the current economic and marketing environment of the country. Local and international speakers belonging to a range of businesses and economic sectors will share their marketing experiences and deliberate on issues like CPEC, needs of the modern digital age as well as the bottlenecks for Pakistani brands in entering the international market.
Chairman of the conference, and one of the founding members of the Lahore chapter of MAP, Nasir J. Chowdhry (N), and the Secretary General Malik Amer Salam (S) are quite hopeful of the success of the conference despite some unexpected changes at the eleventh hour, including the refusal by some of the key delegates to come to Pakistan in wake of the deteriorating security situation in the country.
Here is what they had to share about MARCON, MAP and the economy of the country in general:
Q: To begin with, can you explain the difference between selling and marketing for a layman?
(N): Selling is where a product has a price, you pay that price and get that product. That ends there, no more concern about the product being good or bad. For the buyer it is relevant but not for the market anymore.
Marketing is whereby the product’s perception is created. Why would you prefer one brand over another? That happens because a certain perception has been created in your mind through marketing. Marketing exploits all aspects of the brand depending on the target customer. The perception is built according to the customer. The success of marketing is gauged by the sales of the product.
This doesn’t mean that marketing can make a low quality product successful by perception only. Customers may buy the product once but they won’t go there again if they don’t like it. The product has to satisfy the customers if it has to remain an attractive brand. So there are both factors involved, but even a high quality product needs the right marketing to be successful.
Q: Tell us about the MARCON 2017 and what are your long term and short term aims and objectives out of this conference?
(N): In the short run, we want our members to get to know the latest trends in the marketing field. One of the things coming out of this congress will also be the solutions to the problems of new market trends. This would come through the experience of some of the speakers who have gone through these challenges and know exactly what they had to do to overcome them. Secondly there will also be input from the audience. There is a question and answer session in which some of the answers will come out for doing things.
Q: Will this conference have a panel or one-by-one speakers?
(N): It will be one by one format for presentations concluded by chairman of the session and then the house will be thrown open for questions and answers. There are two main objectives here. One, we wish to do something different and out of the box every time. It is always the aim to bring something new. And second, here we will also be concentrating on how some of our members or speakers were able to do things and go exceptionally better.
Q: Is there any particular agenda on the table for this conference or speakers are allowed to talk about whatever they like?
(N): We have predetermined topics but although it is very difficult to limit the speakers, we try to do it in a way that speakers can say what they want to say but we put certain limits. We don’t want them to break barriers in that sense.
There are five to six topics for the sessions. The program has been formulated but it is still tentative. There is a session on marketing communications which is always very interesting because it is related to advertising. In this session, we try to bring good speakers and share with the audiences the marketing techniques that they used and the background of the strategy in coming up with that marketing technique.
Q: There are international speakers in the tentative program but no international participants. Why is that so?
(N): This conference is intended for our local marketeers, because we are trying to bring our own people to know these rules and trends. We do have international speakers, but not audiences. Some of the international speakers have also dropped out. What happened in the past few days has scared them, which is very unfortunate. We did not expect this to happen because the people through whom we tapped them have their own businesses here. But things become different when the travel advisory becomes involved. So the guest lineup might change, we have received a couple of refusals already.
One of them was from Coke, who was a very important person coming from the region. He has backed off. The travel advisory suggests that if someone is going to a certain country, there will be some potential concerns and this is what they need to cover them against, in terms of insurance, security etc. If the incumbent decides to travel to a country against the advisory, then he has to make all the arrangements himself and the expenditure also becomes their own responsibility. And no one is going to stick their head out for something like this.
(S): As for as international audiences are concerned, since we have members all over the world, in Europe, Canada and several other places, we are giving live streaming of the program. People will be able to watch the proceedings, they won’t be able to participate in the discussions but they will be able to listen to the speakers and the discussions.
Q: There are different levels and types of marketing for different sectors. How does MAP hope to cater to different sectors or levels of management at the same time?
(N): I am in Pharmaceuticals and we are completely different from the consumer market. For us there are three factors to consider, company and product perception, the actual product that you are putting on the market and the marketing itself because our products don’t have an open market. Our customers include doctors, nurses, paramedics etc. and it is limited to them. Also we cannot advertise openly as others put up open billboards. We have to remain within prescribed norms.
(S): Our members belong to several sectors telecom, textiles, FMCGs, pharma and many others. What we do in different seminars is that we invite gurus from different sectors. They come and deliver lectures and then attendees get to ask questions openly. Sometimes those questions sessions are extended to half an hour and people ask about their problems.
Behaviour of every sector is different and that leads to different norms for each sector too. A couple of years ago there wasn’t even a lot of knowledge of branding. But now there is. The Q&A session helps in narrowing down the problems and solutions to particular sectors.
Q: What do you think are the biggest challenges for the local industry in the modern day?
(S): There’s one important thing to consider, which is when a brand is introduced to the market, it grows by 14-18 per cent annually. If you look at just textiles for example, a plethora of brands has sprung up over the past few years, there has been mushroom growth in that industry. So this means that there is a lot of potential for growth in the Pakistani market. This begs the question that why our brands can’t go international. Our MARCON is also focused on removing that barrier in the minds of the people about our brands not having the potential to go beyond just the Pakistani market.
One of our key speakers is going to address this very issue. We asked him that we haven’t been able to understand that why do we hedge ourselves behind other brands. We had a very interesting gentleman the other day who is exporting rice. He said that Pakistan’s perception in the international arena isn’t good in the first place, and the bigger issue is that we ourselves badmouth our own country and our own people.
So when it comes to the profile that forms about exporting, these things matter a lot. If four Pakistanis are sitting, at least one of them is going to say something bad about the country in front of other people. We just can’t project ourselves in a good way. So we will explore this and other issues that have become hurdles in our brands going international. So far we only take foreign products and produce them and export again, but we haven’t been able to go beyond that. So we will be discussing this issue in detail and drawing out solutions as well.
Q: How have you been marketing this conference and how is this going to be financed?
(S): We have made a joint venture agreement with Jang Group and they are giving us a quarter page or half page advertisement in the newspaper and also special placements in their Geo channel. They are one of our main sponsors. We are also getting sponsorship offers from big companies like Coke, Unilever, Telenor etc. They wish to advertise and affiliate their brand with MARCO. So far we have six main sponsors and six co-sponsors. However, the overall expenditure and security details are all confidential so we won’t be sharing that.
Q: MAP has patronage of the Pakistan Government. Is there any financing coming from that side and is there any agenda on board by the government?
(N): No, we don’t have any patronage. MAP is an independent body and we don’t need patronage from anybody
(S): From Karachi side we might do it , because we are a chapter of the Karachi MAP.
(N): We don’t want to be associated with the government. I personally feel that any association which has the patronage of the government means that it is being dictated or being run by the government. We don’t even let any government official in. The only government person invited as a speaker for the conference is only with regards to CPEC, otherwise everyone else is from the private sector.
The government people come with a mouth piece to push the government’s agenda. We don’t want to be associated with the government whatsoever because of the kind of disposition that they have. We like doing things our own way and without any influence because there can’t be any influence on marketing, you have to do it on your own, whatever you need to do.
Q: What’s MAP’s own process to stay updated with the marketing trends around the globe and is there any RnD department for the association?
(N): We, as an association, aren’t directly involved in the process. But the speakers we invite for such sessions bring in the updates for the industry. They share their experiences regarding how they were able to disrupt the market or came up with something new in the field. We only provide a platform for the exchange of ideas but our responsibility concerns with what kind of people we invite as speakers. For instance the modern times are of a digital age and we have a session wholly dedicated to this.
A very interesting man from Teradata will be speaking on this occasion. He is the CEO for Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and several other regions too. He was an accidental discovery for us but this guy was so good that we made him a part of this immediately. He is a very eloquent speaker and knows what he is talking about and he speaks in depth to which many speakers can’t even reach.
Q: From the point of view of a marketer, what are your opinions on the changing economic environment and CPEC in particular?
(S): Some say that CPEC is a game changer and it will be a huge deal, while some are of the opinion that when the Chinese will come here, they’ll take control of our industry. make their own decisions and create unemployment as well. To cater to this we have invited two speakers, one from the government’s side, Ahsan Iqbal, and one from the private side, from an investment bank, to cover both aspects.
(N): We intend for them to tell us the perceptions where we could go wrong and to also highlight the red flag areas that need to be looked into before we become an economy of China here. Because there is a likelihood that once the Chinese come here, and there is still such criticism as far as I am aware and we will be discussing it in detail in the conference too, that the Chinese companies are not coming here in the form of equity but they are coming in the form of loans. Two-thirds of the Chinese companies are coming in loans. This means that once the money comes in and development takes place that money has to go back too.
Take a private enterprise for instance, if I am going to enter into a partnership with someone, I’ll ask them to invest if they wish to become a partner otherwise it doesn’t make sense. We are providing them a corridor which is going to benefit them and their strategic position will also strengthen, so I think that we should have demanded their participation in the project and they should have come in with the equity rather than just giving us soft loans and binding us for the next twenty years, where we will continue to pay taxes to repay those loans.
That is the reason we have positioned two people for this topic. One of them has the mandate of the government who is going to blow the advantages of CPEC out of proportion. But the outfall of this project and the downstream implications on industry, trade and businesses also have to be considered and someone from the private sector needs to interpret them and place it in front of the government official. Then there will be a debate between delegates and speakers and we hope for some synthesis to come out of that.
Q: At the end of the day even if you make a resolution, how much convincing or bargaining power would you have to make the government adhere to that or implement that?
(S): We are a body that can give suggestions and how many times can you do that, once or twice. But that’s all we can do.
(N): I understand exactly what you are saying. The fact that there is a government official [Ahsan Iqbal] sitting there and he is a very high powered person, at least he will hear all the discussion and be made aware of it. If he wants to do it or not, at least he’ll know what are the potential downfalls.
He will be made aware of those concerns, and hopefully if he is a sensitive person, I’d like to believe that he is, I’m sure he will like to incorporate those points.
There is a positive criticism for your policies and if you are a person who wants the policies to actually work, since these policies are eventually going to transform into public, and if the policy ends up in negative effects, the government will be bashed at the end. Ultimately people will blame the PML-N for spending so much for so little gain, the same way that people’s sentiments changed about Motorway, now they are in reverse. So the first thing is that he will take note of those points. The second thing is that someone pushes it down the throats of the government, which is not possible in this case.
