MAM
Can creativity and consumer protection go hand in hand? Industry experts weigh in at Goafest 2022
Mumbai: Goafest 2022 kicked off with a bang after a two-year pause at Goa’s Grand Hyatt Hotel on Thursday, featuring some of the industry’s brightest minds along with the industry awards felicitating notable creative thinkers from South Asia. This year marks the advertising, media and marketing symposium’s 15th edition.
The day one of the adfest saw an interesting mix of panels and speaker sessions with bristling conversations. There was also a knowledge session in partnership with the Advertising Standards Council of India (ASCI), wherein the ministry of consumer affairs & food distribution secretary (CA) Rohit Kumar Singh spoke with Ogilvy India chairman of global creative Ogilvy and Worldwide and executive chairman Piyush Pandey on consumer safety. The panel discussed the importance of consumer protection and the responsibility that we have as professionals. The session was moderated by ASCI chairman and BBH India CEO Subhash Kamath who asked some pertinent questions regarding brands promoting and marketing misleading information, bait advertising, and those compromising consumer interest.
“Conceptually, creativity by its very nature doesn’t like boundaries, constantly looking at pushing the envelope and thinking out of the box,” observed Kamath, kicking off the session. “And yet consumer protection does require some responsibilities and boundaries to reign it in. So can creative ideas and consumer safety coexist and go hand in hand?”
Singh spoke about how the keyword is that creativity is not “misleading ” the consumer and taking him for a ride, adding that the moment it crosses that line “we need to intervene.”
“Creativity should raise the bar without crushing or at the expense of someone else’s life,” weighed in Pandey. “If you cannot show any piece of communication to your family then you can’t show it to anyone else’s family.”
“Now, with the CPA 2020 (Consumer Protection Act) in place over the last few years, what are the priorities of the government from the consumer protection perspective, what are the things that you would really keep your eye on.”
Singh spoke about firstly focusing on brands making tall claims and leading the consumer with false expectations and the second is on bait advertising. We have to impose penalties on such brands who try to fool the vulnerable consumer with misleading claims.
He explained how in the new paradigm that has emerged in the past few years, there is a mad race for Customer acquisition and valuations, what is getting compromised is probably “consumer interests.” “And that is the only thing of concern for us, whether you are compromising consumer interest?”
“While there is increased consumer awareness today, there’s also an increased risk of vulnerability with the consumer’s data, because their entire data is now available to marketers,” observed Kamath.
“When they shop, what they do. The data that comes out is mined and those insights and that mining of those in favor leading to performing targeted marketing so is there something that we need to look at for protection from targeted marketing with data mining as well,” Kamath maintained.
Singh said that unless a customer has permitted you to use their data, one cannot use that data. “The Data Protection Bill is before the parliament. And that will define the boundaries of what data can be shared, and widely covers all. You cannot share my data without my permission,” he emphasised.
Singh also called out the taxi aggregators Uber and Ola on their unfair pricing algorithms. “Just last week, I personally issued notices to, I said your algorithms, cancellation charges, and the way you calculate fields are not fair,” adding that here it is literally about taking the consumer for a ride! “If we don’t look out for consumer interests, who will?” he asked.
Singh also spoke about making the grievance redressal system more robust. The national consumer helpline gets over 4000 calls every day and over the last four years, analytics showed that calls pertaining to e-commerce have grown from eight per cent to 44 per cent. “Now, that means there’s something wrong somewhere in this rat race for customer acquisition. Something is going wrong somewhere,” he asserted.
Appreciating that the administration was trying to have a dialogue with the rule violators, Piyush Pandey said it is heartening that the government is trying to have a more robust system in place by guiding and cautioning, rather than by ruling with fear. Speaking about creativity in advertising, he said, “Creativity is about touching millions of hearts, sometimes in three seconds. The consumer is not a moron who can get influenced easily.”
Digital
GUEST COLUMN: How AI is restructuring distributor and retailer motivation models
From incentives to intelligence, AI is redefining how brands engage channel partners
MUMBAI: Artificial intelligence is rapidly transforming how brands engage with their most critical yet often overlooked stakeholders: distributors, retailers, and last-mile influencers. For Abhinav Jain, co-founder and CEO of Almonds Ai, this shift marks a fundamental departure from traditional, transaction-led incentive models toward behaviour-driven, data-intelligent ecosystems. In this piece, Jain examines how AI is enabling brands to decode partner motivations, predict engagement patterns, and deliver personalised, scalable experiences—ultimately redefining channel relationships from transactional exchanges to long-term growth partnerships.
Across many sectors, there is increasing recognition that motivating those who bring products to market (distributors, retailers, last-mile influencers) poses a growing challenge.
Brands continue to invest significant marketing and digital resources to consumers, yet in many countries and the vast majority of emerging economies, these types of consumer-focused investment areas have had little impact on ultimate product delivery. Rather, it is still the case that traditional retail continues to make up most products sold.
So why is it that the systems built around motivating these channels have yet to evolve?
For decades, distributor and retailer engagement revolved around static schemes – quarterly targets, volume-based rewards, and occasional trade promotions. These programs were designed around transactions, not behaviour. The assumption was simple: if incentives increase, performance will follow.
Now, with the advent of artificial intelligence, the definition of performance is being challenged.
With the development of artificial intelligence, businesses can move beyond simply creating loyalty based on transactional-based models and toward models built on behaviours, the behaviours of channel partners that are intrinsic to their motivations in engaging with particular brands. As a result, the means by which businesses develop relationships within their distribution network are starting to evolve; thus, ultimately changing how brands interact with those within their distribution network.
Assessing engagement: Transitioning from transactional- to behavioural intelligence
Traditional loyalty systems refer to transactional activity (sales data). Although this data is valuable and important, it only provides a partial view of engagement across the channel partner.
For example, a retailer may have a high frequency of sales of a product, but their lack of engagement with the manufacturer would not reflect that they have true loyalty toward that brand. Conversely, a retailer who actively participates in training programmes, acts as brand advocates, and is engaged in learning with the supplier would exhibit more profound levels of loyalty but would have been invisible based on historical incentive programmes.
Artificial intelligence allows for the identification of behaviours that help to address this gap. Brands are able to use a variety of engagement data points, participate in learning programs, respond to communications, redeem behaviour and track platform use behaviour in order to identify motivation through behaviour.
McKinsey has stated that companies that leverage advanced analytics for their sales and distribution functions can achieve as much as a 15-20 per cent increase in productivity due to increased awareness of their behavioural trends throughout their networks.
This visibility of behavioural patterns within channel ecosystems can be transformational to brands as they can now view how partners engage on their path to purchasing products, instead of just measuring the sales revenue generated by those purchases.
Predicting motivations, not just measuring performance
Possibly, the largest contribution of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to helping brands engage with partners via channel ecosystems is its ability to predict future engagement versus simply measuring past performance.
Traditionally, brands only realised that a partner was disengaged (not likely to purchase products) once their sales performance had already declined. By then, the brand would have to use significant amounts of incentives or aggressive promotional activities to recovery their partner’s engagement level.
AI models can help organisations to detect early signs that a partner is becoming disengaged, such as declining participation in learning modules, declining interaction via the platform, or slower reward redemption rates. These indicators can help organisations to proactively engage with their partners before their sales performance begins to decline.
The practical application of AI and predictive analytics gives brands the ability to re-engage with their partners prior to their sales performance declines. For example, instead of developing and implementing broad-reaching incentive programs that provide a “one size fits all” incentive to all partners in an ecosystem, brands are able to develop targeted, engaging re-engagement programmes. This is how personalisation can be done on a large scale, such as across global distribution and retail networks.
The vast majority of distributor and retailer channels have thousands, if not millions, of individual channel partners. Historically, providing personalisation to such a large number of businesses has not been feasible.
However, with the advent of AI, personalisation at scale is becoming a reality.
Brands can now create tailored engagement journeys for all their partners, based on their partner profiles, through some combination of machine learning models and behavioural segmentation. For example, high-performing distributors might receive higher levels of leadership-based recognition and greater incentives to continue to grow. Emerging retailers, on the other hand, might be supported with training, onboarding rewards, and measurable performance milestones.
The shift towards personalisation of partner engagement echoes the direction that consumer marketing is already moving towards.
According to Salesforce’s report, over 70 per cent of customers expect personalisation in the way that brands engage with them. As such, there is a growing expectation for B2B ecosystems to have these same types of expectations from their channel partners.
Gamification and continuous engagement
AI is also radically changing how brands will engage with their channel partners through the use of gamification.
Many traditional incentive-based contests and leaderboards would spark temporary engagement among their participants, but they struggled to sustain engagement over time. With the use of AI, gamification mechanics are evolving dynamically based on historical and evolving participation patterns by their channel partners.
Challenges, rewards, and recognition structures can be modified continuously in order to sustain engagement with all of a brand’s partner segments. This will provide a greater opportunity to move away from episodic campaigns towards ongoing, continuous engagement experiences.
When channel partners receive motivation as part of their daily business activities through recognition, learning, and tracking their performance, long-term loyalty will be achieved.
Aligning motivation to broader impact
There is a growing trend within the channel ecosystem to integrate sustainability and socially responsible behaviours into the channel partner programmes of brands.
Increasingly, brands are motivating their partners to use sustainable practices in their operations, participate in sustainable practices like sustainability-related knowledge programmes, or promote products that are in line with their sustainability objectives.
Brands can use AI to monitor and measure these types of behaviours and incorporate them into their incentive frameworks so that brands can align their commercial objectives with broader social and environmental outcomes.
A shift in the way brands view their channel partners
AI is having the most significant impact on the way that brands are now viewing their channel partners, as it relates to the underlying philosophy of those fundamental relationships.
For the past several decades, many brands have viewed their channel partners as intermediaries in the supply chain. More and more brands are now beginning to view their channel partners as key ‘partners-in-growth,’ and their actions can have a direct impact on market performance.
In fact, all the channel ecosystems are using behavioural engagement platforms to design new models that reward not just transactional behaviour, but also create continuous engagement journeys for their partners, where their partners can receive recognition for their participation, learning, and continued engagement, thereby reinforcing long-term loyalty to the brand.
The future: Intelligent channel ecosystems
As we consider what the next phase of channel engagement may look like, many believe that it will be based on intelligent ecosystems, using AI to continuously monitor and adjust the engagement strategies used to engage their channel partners, in real time and based on the behaviours of those partners.
For brands operating in complex distribution networks, the ability to perform well will be determined both by whether products are available to their customers, as well as by the enthusiasm, expertise, and loyalty shown from each channel partner that represents the brand each and every day that they are working on behalf of the brand.
While AI clearly does not eliminate the human aspect of a brand’s relationship with its channel partners, it does allow brands to better understand and nurture that relationship.
In markets where the last mile will determine whether a sale is made, how one leverages the intelligence gained by using AI will ultimately be the difference between gaining a new, sustainable competitive advantage versus losing one.
