Today, we will share our learnings on how to be a pain in the a**e of your customers. After all, your brand is above all and no matter how much your customers resist, you must shove your brand down their throat. It is imperative that you prove your worth as an MBA by suggesting and implementing marketing techniques that irritate the hell out of the very people who are the reason for your survival.

Technique 1: SMS Blast

This is by far the most effective marketing technique to harass your customers. When done strategically (i.e. 6 smses per day for 30 days as prescribed by Dr Butt-ra), it ensures that your target of making 6 Lac impressions has been met. It is immaterial whether the sms-es are being deleted without being read – it is still counted as an impression thus contributing to your KRAs. In fact, your efforts, combined with that of the banks and telecom companies, ensure that all sms-es starting with AD-, TM-, etc reach your customers inbox by the dozen and they are prompted to activate DND. Irrespective of the result of this activity, you will sleep peacefully with a sense of accomplishment.

Technique 2: E-mail Blast

This technique is not as effective as the SMS Blast since the number of internet users (using e-mail) in India is much less than mobile subscribers. However, this technique is normally used to reach out to the “corporates” and quite rightly so. The average IQ of a corporate office-goer is less than Paris Hilton’s and they clearly have no sense of segregating spam from genuine mails. Also, Google’s algorithm is outdated and cannot differentiate between the two. While you, the marketing stalwart, would normally delete promotional e-mails from unknown parties promptly from your inbox, you are right in assuming that the dumber ones out there don’t do so. Here are the results of a survey we conducted: 1. 95% of respondents devote 1 hour at tea-time specifically browsing, categorizing, archiving and sharing all the promotional mails sent by you and several other brands. 72% of them are also willing to sacrifice their personal time for this activity. 2. 87% said that they can’t figure out from the sender’s name and subject that the mail is promotional in nature. 3. 79% said that they do not know how to “Report Spam”. They have been trying to trace the button for ages but haven’t been able to do so. Clearly, people love your e-mail blasts. Continue the good work.

Technique 3: Weekly Newsletters

This marketing technique is used more as an engagement tool. It also serves as a reminder that the brand exists. Most of the content in such newsletters revolves around how to plan your weekend, best shopping deals, etc. Clearly, people out there have no idea on how to plan their weekends. What would they do without your newsletters? It makes perfect business sense to hire 3 people to create a newsletter which has an average impression time of 0.2 seconds per viewer. An additional recommendation from our side: Please hire 1 techie to create a force field around the newsletter which can penetrate spam blockers. It will ensure that the balance 90% users also get to see the newsletter. In fact, you along with other “weekend guides” offer multiple ways to plan weekends and it offers your users a gamut of choices to select the one that will go to the Trash Folder.

Technique 4: Pamphlets

This technique should be used so that we do not lose touch with our Indian Culture. It is important to continue certain traditions so that our coming generations can see how marketing was done before the internet came into being. People love collecting pamphlets. In fact, our survey revealed that more than 90% of people actually stack them in their living room to show-off to their guests. To our surprise, we also discovered that in 80% of these households, the homemaker or the housemaids were running a conspiracy to hide the pamphlets before they reach the reader terming them as trash. We interviewed few of them and they admitted that these pamphlets usually slipped out of the newspapers and fell on the ground where the sweeper would simply sweep them away. The ones who did get these pamphlets, would throw away the poor quality ones in the trash and save the ones which looked attractive. However, after a few hours, they could not recall where they had kept the piece of paper! And this is the most shocking result of the survey – 76% percent of male respondents said that they hide the pamphlets before it reaches their wives because most of them carry attractive shopping offers! We’ve only listed a few of the techniques which will help you gain stardom. Please feel free to add to this list so that us marketers can achieve marketing nirvana. [For the clueless, this post is pure sarcasm ;-)]