Category: Strategy

  • 2020 (1)

    First published in Adgully

    It’s technically a new year, but as the quip goes, it does feel like December 93rd 2020. More like a sequel than a new movie. Familiar characters and themes, with some new plotlines. And hence the title, for a short take on learnings in 2020, and the trends expected in 2021. 

    In light of the pandemic, what narratives are good for the brand?

    The consumer’s needs might not have changed, but the relative priorities, ways of achieving them, and expectations from brands most definitely have. At least in the medium term, health and safety (physical, mental and financial) will remain important themes. That would explain why many brands have attempted to hop on to these narratives. While it works easily for say, water purifiers, it might be a threadbare argument for mattresses and shirts. But yes, Ayur is arguably the most powerful four letter word in business now!

    The abruptness of 2020 has also given us time for reflection and recalibration. One of the related changes has been increased participation in societal issues. But a brand pursuing cause marketing because everyone else is doing it might result in some caustic feedback!

    What has also changed are rituals – commute to family time to entertainment and so on. The narratives might not have changed yet, but the contexts have. Social screening (movies) and Zoommates are all adaptations to these contexts. But soon, radical redesigning of products and experiences will lead to narrative shifts as well. 

    With chimeras all around, how do we frame it better?

    Many aspects of our life are chimeral now – still retaining their individuality, and yet to find the balance of a hybrid. Think about it – working from home, but recreating the office online. Digital transformation, and craving physical interaction. Learning new skills, while trying to avoid burnout at work. This operates at societal levels too. On social channels, we talk about being more empathetic. But we also have mobs that seem to have been born outraged! 

    These chimeral contexts have an impact on segments and personas, as well as how narratives can be delivered. If we go by Superbowl ads, humour is making a comeback, but we aren’t LOL yet. Brands are still playing Minesweeper because they, and their endorsers are susceptible to cancel culture. Even a logo needed to dress up because one person insisted we all share the perception! Narrative control is a chimera, an illusion. I expect brands to soon have influencers on stand-by to combat trolls and bots! 

    And if the action is everywhere, where is the narrative best delivered?

    “There is no mainstream, there are many streams”. With mobile screen time continuing to rise, and OTTs having a dream run, both branded content and product placements will spike. Even more immersive is gaming – you can have an epic life in Fortnite, and (ironically) join the war to save reality! But we are un-screening too. From podcasts to the ambient, and omniscient Alexa. Does your brand have an Alexa Skill yet? 

    Newer platforms offer further scope for narrative renditions in all forms of reality – mixed, augmented, virtual in addition to our normal agreed upon version. And as digital transformation accelerates, marketers are being empowered with automation and no code tools to deliver these. But the tech landscape is also rapidly changing with impending regulation, and privacy concerns. 

    We’re going through an era of institutional realignment – political, societal, financial and so on. The points I have made are more possibilities than spoilers. We might think we have seen this movie before, but we should wait for the release. Multiplex or OTT, you think?

  • Brands, Activism & Morality

    A while back, someone had joked on Twitter that by 2025, babies will be born outraged. But in 2020, the joke, at least in Indian advertising, is that when the Tanishq brand manager begins to think of a campaign, #BoycottTanishq starts trending. When I was writing the article on brands and empathy for Business Insider, I realised it would need a lot of effort for brands to go beyond signalling.

    However, with inequities becoming even more of a pressing topic, and the expectation from brands to be active participants in society – activism to action, is there an inevitable movement that we will see? And hence, this post on brands through the prism of activism and morality, from the perspectives of a consumer and a brand marketer, and the safety of an armchair.

    “We are living in an era of woke capitalism in which companies pretend to care about social justice to sell products to people who pretend to hate capitalism.”

    Clay Routledge
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  • Can brands be truly empathetic?

    Originally published in Business Insider

    This Diwali, brands that didn’t need festive-offer advertising to light up their sales figures used a sound strategy instead – empathy. From Facebook’s Pooja Didi to India’s first-ever hyper-personalised ad (this claim is disputed) by Cadbury, brands used the travails of a Covid-hit society to maximum effect. Health workers, local businesses, parents, domestic help, dabbawalas – everyone was at the receiving end of a psychological hug. However, it’s hard to distinguish between moment marketing and actual empathy these days. A mini primer on empathy helps elaborate my concern. 

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  • The future of Fintech marketing

    First published in ET Brand Equity

    Fintech is one of those small words that contains worlds. Just like marketing. While the former could be payments, lending, insurance, wealth management, neobanks etc, the latter includes brand management, digital acquisition, marketing automation, social media and so on. A combination of the two makes for a complex mix. It also means that crystal gazing has its limits and there really is no common answer. Having said that, let’s try our hand at “how it started, how it’s going to go…”

    Audience & Access: India’s digital economy now boasts over 700 million connected users. As per RBI data, the number of digital transactions are expected to make a 12x jump from 125 million a day in 2020 to 1.5 billion by 2025! Fintech has made leaps over the last 10 years – starting with personal finance products such as banking accounts and deposits, moving on to mobile payments and e-wallets, and finally leading to a full bouquet of financial services including trading, insurance and wealth management. But the pandemic has been a force multiplier for digitisation in many sectors, including personal finance. This audience avalanche means that marketers have to revisit their segmentation and personas, and deal with different cohorts of digital audiences at different levels of maturity. What are the new user segments, what financial products and services would they like to access, and what are the new use cases that will emerge?

    Brands & Behaviours: With new segments emerging, education and awareness will need to go hand in hand with acquisition strategies, and nuanced, personalised communication for different segments. While financial products on digital platforms may not be completely new to many consumers, brands will still need to earn the customer’s trust. This is especially true in the context of an unfamiliar investment product or service, and might require a revisit of customers’ needs, barriers and opportunities.

    This is crucial because we’re now living through a kind of liminality, a period marked by the uncertainty between an old normal, and what emerges next. Even more than before, marketers will need to have an empathetic mindset. Channeling this into communication will be necessary to build trust. Beyond actual trials, different consumer segments would have different surrogates for trust. And old wines and new bottles have challenges. Take celebrity endorsements, or its (relatively) poorer cousin – influencer marketing. Or “cause marketing”. All of them are susceptible to social media vigilantism and cancel culture, even as manufactured word of mouth thrives.

    The pandemic has forced us to relook our lives, and maybe even did a Marie Kondo on our lifestyle choices. “Experience shapes memory; memory shapes our view of the future.” What is the impact on the spending, saving and investing habits of your existing customers? What behaviours will we continue, what will we drop? Whom will we trust on money matters, and why?

    Cords & Cookies: We’re in the era of the second screen. After all, some people still use the television when they want a large screen experience. But seriously, though cord cutting may not be mass yet, such has been the rise of OTT and digital consumption in general that the erstwhile second screen is practically the first. This has a huge impact on the media mix, especially because of the range of customisation that’s possible on digital media. Of course, you might still be an IPL sponsor if you’re a mass brand, but it’s definitely possible to build brands with digital as the primary medium. Not that it’s without challenges. Some level of precision targeting will continue to be an option at the top of the funnel, but privacy concerns are making a cookie-less world imminent. Even as adtech is scrambling to find a replacement for cookies, (I believe that) first party data and a non-cookie cutter approach is something brands should focus on. Codeless designing, chatbots, and the ever increasing tools of marketing automation allow the digital marketer to create custom journeys using demographic, behavioural, and other parameters. Content marketing using multiple formats is still a great way to build domain authority and trust. Podcasts have seen quite a lift during the pandemic. In short, we have moved further from mainstream to many streams.

    Data & Delivery: The common theme in all the above points is fragmentation – of markets, messaging and media. And this is essentially what the future looks like. The challenge for the marketer is to ensure narrative cohesion. This requires us to get comfortable with collecting and analysing data, and being able to deliver this understanding via communication and channels. The other kind of delivery we’ll be responsible for is ROI. This will require us to find new ways to measure both effectiveness and efficiency across campaigns, channels and market segments.

    In closing: The “new normal” is unlikely to be the normal we knew. Especially for marketing, because even after the pandemic goes away, the uncertainty will linger in consumer minds. Despite the abundance of choice that customers have, there is an opportunity for brands. As Scott Galloway has astutely pointed out, “Choice is a tax on your time and attention. Consumers don’t want more choice, they want confidence in the choices presented.” In the race for wallet share, trust continues to be the best currency. Building a trusted brand in a fragmented world takes time and a growth mindset. It’s good to remember that there are no perfect solutions, only conscious trade-offs.

  • The business of brand

    It used to be that a brand manager could run 3-4 campaigns a year, negotiate heavily in media buying for efficiency, and roughly correlate effectiveness to quarterly brand health data and sales performance. With VC funding-led rapid scaling, digitisation,  real-time data, and polarised social media, this version is being rendered obsolete. The changing business context also means that looking at a 30 sec ad purely through a consumer lens is only half the story. Two recent examples made me reflect on the dynamics between brand, social media, and business.  I do realise that my commenting on them is a bit like the Nobody – Me meme, and delayed at that, but that’s one of the perks of having a blog.

    Cred: We’ll begin with the Mad Men perspective, but after a short detour. Brand building for VC-funded startups has a template that actually works. Rational benefits with emotional storytelling. Flipkart and Myntra both went through a learning curve with “Granny and Mouse” and “Where fashion comes together” respectively, before they cracked it with “kids as adults” and “Real life mein aisa hota hai kya?“. It works because in addition to building the brand promise, it also has a tangible effect on business. And that’s why it’s often followed by many others across categories – Pepperfry, LivSpace, Khatabook, or even an extended approach like The Whole Truth. This is assuming that distribution, product, customer service etc are at least on par, and the execution is done well.  In that context, Cred’s recent ads, after readability issues in the first print ad, and the lengthy Jim Sarbh ad, were most definitely clutter-breaking. By not following that template.  (more…)