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CII Marketing Summit: Innovative ways to reach Indian customers
How are media habits changing? What would be the impact of these changes on traditional sources of media and advertising? With opportunities to access and manipulate content and services, how will marketers attract the time and attention of consumers? Experts discuss the new ways in which the Indian consumer needs to be reached
Reaching consumers was a much easier task in the 1980s than it is now. At the time, the marketer’s best bet to promote a brand was to advertise on the television serial, ‘Mahabharata’. But the days of Doordarshan’s monopoly are long gone. Today, it’s all about speed. Consumers have evolved and marketers are clueless as to which media is the best method to reach out to them. TVC, print and outdoor are still the safest bet, but the tilt is now towards innovation on the Internet, the mobile or some new experience. Plenty of new options are open and media agencies at work need to look beyond the usual.
Speaking on the topic, ‘Changing Media Habits’, Gowathaman Ragothama, MD, Mindshare; Punitha Arumugam, Group CEO, Madison Media; and Madhukar Kamath, MD and CEO, Mudra Group, put forward their views on how we can reach customers in a more innovative manner.
“For an advertiser, India can be classified into global India, aspiring India, destitute India and struggling India,” said Ragothama. Talking about the new techniques, he cited community blogs, advertiser funded programmes, in-film placements and merchandising and interactive opportunities as ways of reaching all four Indias.
Arumugam went a step ahead and talked about seven campaigns that should inspire marketers round the world to think out of the box. Among these were the Scream TV promotion in Canada, the X-Box 360 campaign in the US and the McDonalds campaign in Japan. “We need the buzz, technology, common sense, creative medium, dialogue, focus and insight to reach out to customers,” she said.
Kamath talked about how customers have become media grazing sheep. “As consumers, we don’t rely on any one medium, say, newspapers or TV, we need a bit of everything – TV, radio, newspaper, Internet, mobile, magazines, etc. From 20 channels contributing as much as 80 per cent eyeballs in 2000, we have come to a point where 40 channels don’t get us 80 per cent eyeballs,” he said.
To back his claims, Kamath revealed that the average time spent per day per person has gone down from 28 minutes to 18 minutes for print, from 78 minutes to 67 minutes for television and from 23 minutes to 20 minutes for radio.