- Almost half of the Indian population have a strong idea of which band they will buy.
- Investing more in the priming stage will have anywhere between 5X to 9X returns on the business.
- Partnership between a newspaper or a magazine, or an OTT player you can unlock humongous value.
- Media is not just a deliverer of audience instead he is a business partner .
- Brands that advertised during slow down recession period have gained significantly.
Kartik Sharma, CEO Wavemaker, South Asia gave Five Principles of Unlocking Growth at SIMS 2019.
Read on as follows.
The first one, advertising is largely and even today,we spray and pray.We do a lot of advertising, we create good copies, and we hope something happens.But if you really want to see the bottom ofthe chart it will become the consumer purchase journey.It’s like a circle, right? It’s nothing but priming.
A priming means people have made a thought, a mental thought of the which brand they want to buy or engage with, even before advertising they started coming in or some influence of advertising. Then some trigger happens, their natural purchase happens, they are actively looking for it.We at Wavemaker run a very large service globally, we have till date about 700,000 consumer journeys and this year will cross about a million. The largest consumer purchase journey data in the world followed by McKinsey. What we see across this study which we do globally, including India is that 49% of the people, almost half of the population have a strong idea of which band they will buy, even before they have moved out of their place.
What we are seeing in sector after sector, is that if you invest more in the priming stage, you have anywhere between 5X to 9X returns on your business, depending on what sector you are, say if you are in services, it’s a 9X explode possibility for durable consumer packaged goods. So investing in brand,even in periods of a slow down or a possible recession don’t lose hope keep investing, you will see that it’s like exercise, you go to the gym every single day, you will not lose weight the first 10 days. But magically, after three months, you will start seeing all the hard work that you’ve done, you lost a few inches and you start doing it for a year. Everyone says ‘hey, look, you look great,’ you look fitter you start doing it as a period of time it becomes part of your lifestyle. Advertising in some sense, and investment in advertising works this way.
The other one you will notice is that the consumer journeys can be long or fat, short or thin. By this what I mean is there are two axis. One is the number of actions, which can be high or low, or the number of these. For example, I’m planning to go on a weekend with my family and decide today and I just have two days. I can do lot of activities between now and choosing my travel, I could go to a website,talk to friends, I could get influenced by TV, Lot of it happening in a very short period of time. Different categories sit differently when one does this research therefore again, media plays a different role. It can be a long Journey; it can be a short journey, and understanding that is of valueto the brands.Again, I would urge that for your own categories, even if you do not have a research start thinking about it intuitively.
Brands that are meaningfully different in the local context grow in value by a huge margin 223% this data is from BrandsZ which is a part of our parent company WPP, which gets published year on year. We had a challenge to grow penetration of Cadbury Dairy Milk in Tamil Nadu. We had a creative agency but when we spoke to partners, Hindu they came up with a brilliant idea to increase the consumption of chocolates in a market which is kind of stagnated.
The Campaign was about how you can make a local sweet using Cadbury chocolate, a very simple idea, powerfully done with local influencers with the local content, huge impact on market share which grew by 20% to 25%. Localized knowledge with the power of media is something that you can still do you don’t need to spend a large amount of money for this.
The other one is media has been always been thought of as a deliverer of audience. Right, I have X number of eyeballs or readers. But what if media is actually a business partner, There’s a case study from one of our clients, which is an FMCG,the task was simple, the brand was not growing in pure awareness, and awareness in these categories are tend to help business growth. So we tied up with Star Jalsha, where it was not about GRPs or reach, we said we will give you more money if you help increase our awareness. So the first month we advertise, not much happened but in a three month period resulted in a six point increase in awareness. As a by-product, there are not much other advertising that we are doing a 32% increase in appeal we got from June to September.
A lot of media companies have started doing this. So locally here in South, this is both an opportunity for marketers to explore for agencies to explore and media partners also to come forward and clearly demonstrate you’re not just a deliverer of audience that sounds very low in my kind of hierarchy of things, but actually a true business partner. And there is a kind of a slab thing that you could do,the more results you deliver more money you get. I don’t think
marketers would mind that. It’s a really interesting model.
Number four, is unleash the power of data. I think enough has been spoken about internet. But today, it is just not that Google or the Facebook or data partners, each one of you here are running a business. Imagine you are a travel company you are sitting with tons of consumer data yourself. What if that were to come in partnership with, say a newspaper or a magazine, or an OTT player, what you can unlock in value is a humongous. There are early signs of this happening even in India. But I think each of you is sitting on tons of data. And if you’re not using that data, I think you’re missing an opportunity. So I would encourage a lot of brands,not just to think of a one way where you can only get information from a media owner or agency, but also how you can use your own data. Of course, all the data protection laws have be the bare minimum that you have to cross. But today in this day and age, it’s not that difficult. In fact, as a company, we follow the strictest GDPR laws. So but I would urge a lot of you.
The Last but not the least is Rome was not built in a day. So our long term brands which are advertised during slow down recession period have gained significantly.We have tons of studies or hundred studies published globally, I don’t think we need to re-establish that fact, for many marketers and agencies, what if we were to go to a media partner and don’t do a monthly deal? What if you were to do a three year deal or a five year deal? Yes, there is a risk involved. And you can mitigate that risk, but the returns that you’re going to get in so for some of our clients, we have started doing a three year deal. These are massive piece and today, when a slowdown is happening, I think many of our media partners here would also like to get that money, you can get fantastic value. If you were to wear the hat of a business partner on top of this, I think value unlock is going to be humongous both sides. So as I said, there are maybe other hundred other ways to do this but the idea is to just kind of start this thinking process in mind. And by no means this is an exhaustive list. I would urge that barely break boundaries. The potential of South India everybody out here knows. Most importantly, collaborate if we know this, I’m sure we can get here.We can collectively grow. If you think we are headed towards the desert,I can promise you, you will see a lot more flows.
