The pandemic has brought about notable shifts across industries, and the case has been no different for marketing. Today, digital marketing has become a crucial aspect in order to acquire new customers and retain existing ones. In our weekly BrandWagon Ad Talk series, industry experts highlight what has changed over the past two years and more importantly, are these changes here to stay. Prasenjit Roy, CMO, NTT Limited in India, talks to BrandWagon Online, about the dos and don’ts of digital marketing, best marketing campaigns, and more.
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What is the difference between launching a brand in today’s digital era versus earlier?
Today, the whole process has become agile, faster, interactive and inclusive. The concept of co-creation is on the rise as it enables engaging the audience from the word go, and making them involved with the journey of a new brand or a product launch. For instance, webinars are extensively used by technology companies and gadget brands. Metaverse is there, and through influencer marketing as well as AR/VR tools, brands are now prompting customers to experience and buy instead of buy and experience.
Performance marketing has entered the scene in a big way, and gone are the days when marketers would sit and review campaign performances after a promotion ended and then plan the next one. Today’s AI dashboards, and insights offered by digital marketing platforms facilitate real-time campaign measurement, allowing greater flexibility than ever to optimise outcomes. It has become a lot more exciting as well as competitive than it was even five years ago.
What are the recent best marketing or advertising campaigns you have seen and why?
Smart usage of advanced technologies and tools in digital marketing campaigns has become a key need for audience engagement. This is where the Valentine’s Day campaign by Bharat Matrimony stood out for me.
About ten days before Valentine’s Day, they created a virtual persona whom they named as Aaditya Iyer (the initials A.I.), by using Generative AI tools. It was a virtual character that appeared to be a very handsome, highly educated and stylish Indian young man. The character posted photos, and stories highlighting all aspects of a man that modern girls would like such as love for animals, compassion, poetry skills, penchant for travel and so on. The creators used ChatGPT to create thought-provoking long captions to imagery that was also created using AI tools. The experiment hit home and thousands of girls started following AI in the build up to Valentine’s Day. Even several micro influencers declared him to be the perfect guy. On the occasion of Valentine’s Day, the company smartly revealed how the ‘dream boy’ was only a ‘dream,’ and emphasised on the importance of being ‘choosy’ while selecting a partner, but ‘careful’ to avoid fakes.
Which brand in the last year has made the best use of digital and how?
Among the diversity of brands that I have observed in India, Titan stands out as a brand that has managed to perfectly leverage digital. When we leverage digital platforms, there are a multitude of options with diverse audience preferences that need to be addressed effectively. This is where it becomes important to ensure that despite the uniqueness of the messaging, there is a consistent, high-quality communication of the brand’s ethos, its value system, and the care it has for the customers. That’s where Titan’s ability to create stories that amply reflect the above aspects, and establish a strong emotional connection with the audience, that stands out for me. At the end of the day, it isn’t just about how good your products are or how creative the campaign is, but how effective and relatable the messaging is. It is this ability to integrate technologies with the ageless practice of emotional storytelling that has been the perfect recipe for Titan’s brand resurgence in the last decade or so.
Alongside that, Titan has also leveraged advanced technologies such as AR that enables customers to virtually try on timepieces or jewellery items and get detailed product information. Similarly, the brand leverages the reach of social media influencers for its fashion products, and has a thriving online presence. Thus, with every interaction, one can expect a more personalised, engaging and enriching brand experience.
In a post-Covid world, what are the dos and don’ts of digital marketing?
In the post-Covid world, messaging is becoming concise, compelling yet more transparent and reliable. Virtual technologies such as AR/VR have impacted product exploration in a big way as people continue to prefer digital experiences wherever convenient. Another key focus area for the marketers has to be consistency and seamlessness of communication. There shouldn’t be any variance or disconnect between what is put out on one channel and the message that goes out on another. These discrepancies can hurt brand perception.
Influencer marketing was nascent before the pandemic, but today, it has become a highly impactful and engaging channel. Companies need to find better and more efficient ways of crunching data, and generating precise as well as actionable insights on audience behaviour, product performance, and the market trends. AI analytics tools that automate data collection, segregation and analysis, are becoming popular by the day.
Most of the enterprises are now leveraging Generative AI and other advanced forms of AI technologies to create Avatars or Assistants that are characterised by a persona, name and ability to hold lengthy as well as realistic conversations with their customers. With such tools being available on digital platforms, this approach is bringing about an unprecedented audience engagement in the post-Covid times.
One recent bad case of advertising you have seen, and why?
Irrespective of the brand or the campaign, there is no effort that can be regarded as bad advertising. Marketing has become multifaceted, complex and technology-driven. Each brand undertakes significant market research and analytics of customer preferences and sentiments. These inputs are leveraged to create campaigns that strike a chord with the audience, and often turn out to be memorable and establish strong brand recall. In certain cases, it is also seen that in a bid to highlight one aspect of public preferences, brands might overlook other sensibilities or responsibilities which could lead to failed campaigns. For instance, the rapid proliferation of last-mile delivery aggregators in the food and groceries segment has also put immense pressure on delivery personnel to meet almost impractical timelines such as ‘under 10 minutes delivery’ for groceries, and ‘under 30 minutes delivery’ for food items. A number of delivery personnel end up driving rashly, wary of the penalties that the delay could cause, and that’s a flip side of such marketing promises. The need of the hour is to balance the brand promise with the practical needs and realities of the supply chain and last-mile delivery components. When this balance is achieved, we usually see great marketing campaigns.
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