I Yahoo, I Ebay, Googling and I-Go-To-Lakme

If you look at a lot of the brands that have been created in the last 4 or 5 years, from eBay and Yahoo, Amazon, or even Starbucks, they are all rooted in some form in the notion of experiences. What is even interesting is that the whole brand is being build through experience, and I always ask people, “What is Yahoo? What is Google?” People have a hard time answering that. You might say, “Google is for search and Yahoo is for e-mail”, or some might say, “Yahoo is about news”, and I think increasingly these companies are becoming verbs. You might say “I Yahoo, I Google”. So you are doing something with it, and it is fascinating to think about it that way. And in fact for a lot of companies, especially package goods companies, like we say, “I go to Amazon”. If you are a product company, you never say, “I go to Lakme”, because you think of Lakme as a product. And interestingly enough a company like Unilever is creating for example in India Lakme Salons, so what we are actually finding is that people are starting to say, “I go to Lakme”. It is very different, because if I am a marketing person, the traditional mould, my job as a product manager has been to sell products, more Lakme beauty products, and always thought in terms of “How many people will by my product?” So when they hear a customer saying, “I go to Lakme”, they say, “Go to Lakme, I would probably just say, ‘I buy Lakme'. Big difference, right? Managers there tell me, just a simple thing like that, it is very different. It is starting with I being the consumer saying, “I go here when I want something done, like I want to look beautiful myself for a special occasion, so I go here”. And what I expect on that occasion maybe different from another. I think the challenge here is to identify these patterns of experiences, but that is also a function of what you can facilitate, because it is not static. As companies can use both technology and human competencies and create away, they are going to create new experiences and if they can engage consumers, I actually think there are infinite opportunities here. If you take this model, every company has a huge amount of opportunities.