Tag: consumer behaviour

  • 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.

  • Product Life Cycle and Consumer Life Cycles

    One of the social web’s by products er, products, are “shiny new objects”. (new services that launch and send us enthusiasts into a tizzy. All the web 2.0 greats were shiny new objects at some point in time)  There were a couple of wonderful posts I read in this context. The first is Rex Hammock’s excellent post on how we obsess over these for sometime, and then move on. Yes, I know you know that, but its the next part that’s interesting.

    Then one day about three years later, you notice people who aren’t obsessed with shiny new objects are talking about something four-or-five shiny new objects ago and you wonder: Why is everyone obsessed with this?

    This happens to me occasionally, the latest example being a few guys tweeting about the Baba Ramdev- Chrome ad that was circulated around quite a few months back.

    The second post was great, right from the title – The Loneliness of the Early Adopter, and when i shared it on Friendfeed, at least a couple of guys liked it. I confess I’m more at the borderline of early majority and early adopter, (refer this ) but I could empathise with a lot of that post.

    Now, a long way back, Jeremiah had an awesome post on Applying a social computing strategy to the entire product lifecycle. As the title suggests, its about listening to consumers, collaborating on product development, filtering out the right consumers, learning from them and supporting them and in essence, utilising the social web in all parts of the PLC. Here’s another great post in Social Media Explorer on the same theme.

    Twitter and more so Friendfeed (as this Mashable article explains) and Facebook (commenting on status and other elements of the newsfeed, the ‘Like’ feature) are great examples of how the product/service is evolving with the consumer and his preferences. Increasingly consumers are ‘creating’ a use or finding a way to fulfill a need gap from a basic service.

    The question is, who is the consumer? I’m trying to juxtapose the Product life cycle with a consumer life cycle. Are the tastes and preferences of the early adopters markedly different from that of the late majority? As the adoption of various social media services rapidly increases, who would a service target, and will it be at the cost of another segment? Different consumers, located at different points on the Roger’s bell curve will use the service at the same time. How can these possibly different sets of expectations be met? Will there be variations of the same service for different categories of users? I don’t see the issue being addressed a lot now, that possibly explains why a lot of people leave say, Twitter after a few tweets/days since they can’t figure out what’s happening? Would a ‘nOOb version’ have helped? Social media is about customisation too, and this might be something that needs to be answered soon, as these services become mass.

    until next time, handling a cycle on a curve 🙂

  • Emotional Brand Stories (1 of 3)

    Last week, Afaqs had covered the Asia Brand Congress 2008, which throws some light on how marketers and agencies view brands and their relationships with consumers. You can read a few reports here. The first link is the rationale behind the campaigns of Zapak and Dainik Bhaskar, both using 360 degree media – one for its launch, and the other for repositioning, with a new brand ambassador. While Zapak’s execution certainly seems to be better, neither are earth shattering revelations.

    The second link is a discussion on how brands need to understand the psyche of consumers, and use ideas that would engage and inspire them. The example of ‘Idea’ brand was taken in this discussion, and as I have written before, I fully agree with the thought. The subtle thought that was communicated in this discussion was that brands should go with the flow, and go easy on the rigid structures that they build around themselves.

    The third link has discussions on different communication for brands at different steps of their lifecycle, and takes examples of Naukri, Cadburys and Coke. The last link explores Saatchi’s concept of Lovemarks,a nd speaks of a paradigm shift – from “You->Your Brand->Consumer” to “You->Consumer->Their Brand”. I found this the most interesting of all the concepts I came across (read), since it also talks of the fallacy of the 360 degree approach and the advertising wars to get the consumers’ attention.

    Before we start on the relationship between brands and consumers, here’s a long, but interesting read on the mind of the consumer. It talks about how the brain uses different structures for different brands, and is the beginning of a research in the field of neuromarketing. It is well known that the emotional relationship with a brand affects the rational purchase decision of a user. Usually brands dwell on the positive perspective of this and try to ‘attract’ consumers. What if the mind relies on the negative perspective, and is more tuned to avoid brands that it hates? Wouldn’t it be more profitable to channel campaign money into making consumers hate rival brands? The brain apparently demarcates the loved and hated brands very clearly. Should marketers be rewarded for shifting the relative position of their brands in this mental make up? Such are the interesting questions this article throws up. 

    Chris Brogan recently wrote about the book “Branding only Works on cattle” by Jonathan Salem Baskin, and his major take outs from the book. One good point that came up was how the core idea of the brand and its context (Starbucks – third place) was more important than the consumer remembering the logo. As this article correctly points out, brands should be great story tellers that weave themselves into the context of our daily lives, at consious and sub conscious levels. After all, the major portion of our ‘story’ is a sum of the brands we use. 

    Amidst the multi crore advertising blitzkreigs that brands continually unleash on their consumers, it is important for them to understand the importance of the emotional connect of consumers that affect their purchase behaviour, and perhaps dwell a little more on the core value they offer to consumers, and how they can bring it into the context of the consumers’ lives. This is specially important in an increasingly connected world, in which WOM plays an important part.

    until next time, show me some emotion, you big brand 😉

    PS. Have two more posts that take this thought forward – shall post that on Wednesday and Friday.