MAM
Indian marketing pundits dwell over changed paradigm
NEW DELHI: Business modules and branding experts need some serious stock taking if business has to be conducted in the changed environment of today, when consumer democracy via the Internet and blogs, along with a huge range of choices, has radically changed the paradigm within which business is still being conducted.
This was one of the key points at the first ever Indian Marketing Summit that opened here today. Along with that, Indian media needs to take stock also of how much knowledge is being created in this field in India.
The session started with Dr S Neelamegham saying that Indian media is already getting into its own model and not aping the west. He pointed out that in the products market, out of all the brands available, the top 20 belong to Indian companies and along with some brands that belong to the Indian MNCs, the major share of the brands market in India is of local origin.
But he pointed out that India and China are both “growing younger” compared to the US or Europe, and their attitudes are changing and marketers need to understand that. “Studying the young purchasers’ attitudes, and also regional and regional variations is a must,” Dr Neelamegham said.
He gave the example of Coca Cola being able to make a real dent into the Indian market, especially rural market, from the moment it went desi: “Thanda matlab Coca Cola”. He said rural markets are not a problem, so long as the companies understand the needs of the intelligent rural buyer, just as Pepsi went to villages the moment they reduced the price by decreasing the size and changing the shape of the bottle, he argued.
Dr Neelamegham, however, pointed to one bane of the media here: the companies have done a lot of heir own research and changed and adapted their strategies, but do not share their experiences to be made into research papers that can become case studies.
Dr Sharad Sarin from XLRI, didn’t quite agree with Dr Neelamegham, pointing out that while Indian media is rich in context, it is poor in concept, and that there was nothing unique being offered by the country in terms of original research that could be quoted globally.
Dr Sarin said that US influence is ubiquitous and that it is and will remain the foremost global knowledge powerhouse, and the rest of the world will be a borrower.
On a more positive note, Dr Sarin said: “Indian companies have a tremendous capacity of managing their own affairs successfully, something that a 100 Bill Gates perhaps would not be able to do, given the mind-boggling diversity in the country and the corruption. But then, lets bring out what they have done and how they have done this.” Sarin concluded by calling for developing an inventory bank of all of Indian intellectual property.
In the post-lunch session, on “Brand contact points multiplying geometrically: are brands keeping pace, Santosh Desai, till recently McCann Erickson India’s president and now slated to join as marketing head of Pantaloons, talked about whether with the tremendous proliferation of contact points, should we try and address all of them?
Desai basically held that the proliferation of contact points of touch points (newspaper ads of yore, TV, Internet, mobile phones, and so forth) has not changed the basics. “They have merely increased the bandwidth of possibilities. But that has not changed anything fundamental.
He criticised the approach of brand managers for treating customers as an entity distinct from the brand, and treating the brand as real estate that belonged to the companies.
“Brand and life have got separated. Brand managers hate conversation, in fact, they hate people. They are scared to talk, which is why they use surveyors as an intermediary between themselves and the people.”
But those practices would have to change, he averred, especially in the age of Internet and blogs, which have given tremendous democracy, real democracy, not the notional political democracy of voting once in five years, Desai said.
There has been the paradigm shift because of two developments: the emergence of the trained customer and the plethora of new public platforms of conversation. “With that, the difference of the two worlds, brands and people, have been eradicated. This is the age of democracy of desire, the world of transient pleasures. There is the new democratic relationship, with a community of shared interests aligned around axis of interests of individuals.”
In this changed environ, Desai said brands have to promote conversation, even with the rabidly critical segments, and stop fearing criticism. Brands have become organic parts of society, and “They have to listen visibly,” he suggested.
Dr Amitabha Chattopaddhyay L’Oreal Chaired Professor of Marketing Innovation and Creativity, from INSEAD, France, talked about the problem of minimising costs and yet, finding out indexes for expenditure-benefit ratio.
What marketers are doing is counting the CPM, or cost (of a particular promotional activity) per million persons. “But this assumes that all contacts are equal,” He critiqued and said talked of the ‘fragmented manner of functioning of brands’.
Not only has the contact landscape changed, but the people have also changed. This is the new customer, with whom the old rule-of-thumb does not works as a strategy.
Those marketing exercises survive that are informative, attractive and credible, Chattopaddhyay stated.
“What drives the market is the consumer’s brand perception driven by marketing activities. Certain brands own certain contacts,” he held, adding that today, the customer has t be asked how he would like to be reached.
Chattopaddhyay spoke of the formula of Brand Experience Point, which gives the ‘share of voice’. Stating that there is a high correlation between this Brand Experience Share, BES and market share.
MAM
Publicis Groupe India launches data-led influencer platform ‘Influential’
A new platform, a seasoned hire and an ambitious plan to bring discipline to India’s booming but chaotic creator economy.
MUMBAI: Influencer marketing in India is big, messy and, for most brands, maddeningly hard to measure. Publicis Groupe India has decided it has had enough of that and is moving to fix it.
The advertising giant has launched Influential, its global creator marketing solution, in India, pairing the rollout with the appointment of Diwaker Chandani as managing partner for Influential India. The brief is blunt: drag influencer marketing out of the spray-and-pray era and into one defined by data, accountability and results that actually show up on a balance sheet.
A fragmented market ripe for disruption
India’s influencer ecosystem has scale in abundance. What it lacks is maturity. Measurement standards are inconsistent, creator databases are riddled with duplication, and brands remain dangerously hooked on organic reach, a strategy that flatters vanity metrics while delivering uncertain commercial returns. Chandani, who brings nearly two decades of experience across digital platforms and media, puts it plainly. “The ecosystem has scale, but not maturity,” he says. “By combining data-led audience intelligence with creator ecosystems and media amplification, we aim to build a model that delivers measurable and repeatable outcomes.”
It is a diagnosis that Publicis Groupe is staking serious infrastructure on. Influential is anchored in the group’s Connected Identity system, which maps consumer profiles to enable more precise audience targeting and creator selection. Layered on top are the Captiv8 platform and Influential’s global creator network, giving brands the tools to plan, activate and measure campaigns across the full funnel, from awareness down to commerce, rather than treating each influencer post as a standalone act of faith.
The hire
Chandani is not an unfamiliar face in the industry. He has held senior roles at Meta, Zee Entertainment and the Network18 Group, working across creator partnerships and content-led media strategies. His mandate at Influential India is to integrate data, creators, media and commerce into a unified framework and to build the team and client roster to scale it.
Anupriya Acharya, chief executive of Publicis Groupe South Asia, frames the launch as a response to a market that has grown faster than its own infrastructure. “The channel has reached scale, but lacks a unified, data-led foundation,” she says. “With Influential, we are moving from a creator-first approach to a cohort-first, identity-led model powered by Connected Identity.” The integration of creators, media and commerce, she adds, will enable more precise and scalable outcomes for brands.
Why now
The timing is deliberate. Influencer marketing in India is expanding rapidly, fuelled by cheap data, a vast and young social-media audience, and brands increasingly willing to redirect budgets away from traditional media. But growth without governance has created a market where consistent returns remain elusive and accountability is largely aspirational. Publicis Groupe is betting that the industry’s next phase belongs not to whoever has the biggest roster of creators, but to whoever can prove, with hard numbers, that those creators are actually shifting product.
The old model of picking a popular face, posting a reel and hoping for the best is running out of road. Influential is Publicis Groupe India’s wager that the future belongs to the spreadsheet as much as the selfie.
