At Goa Fest 2019, Amazon India’s Director – Mass and Brand Marketing, Amazon India discussed the 7 seminal shifts in the marketing landscape and the need to be customer-obsessed in todays’ complex brand environment.
I caught up with Desai on the sidelines of Goa Fest 2019 for a brief chat about how Amazon creates catchy taglines and campaigns such as ‘Aur Dikhao’ and a lot more.
Amazon’s brand phrases resonate with any and everybody and that’s something which all of us use on a daily basis. On the process of the creation and curation of these phrases, Desai said, “customer obsession is what really goes behind creating these phrases. We work really hard to correctly capture the right Indian customer insights. We see how we can marry the brand insight to the message that needs to be communicated.”
“If you look at the communication ‘Aur Dikhao’ the insight is right there for everyone to see. You probably saw us do ‘Apni Dukaan’ as part of our campaigns last year. That campaign was also rooted in the insight that every Indian family has this kirana store they trust and have grown up with. Our most recent campaign ‘Kitne Main Mila’ was also rooted deep in the values and habits of the Indian consumers who are seeking great quality at great prices.”
On Amazon’s media approach, Desai said, “As far as media is concerned, we have approached it in objective backwards. Every form of media has a role to play depending on the context of the campaign. The base level awareness about the sale is created on the mass platform whereas the more individualized and personalized platforms, mostly digital and the various forms of digital are used to speak to customers directly.”
On Amazon’s main source of growth, Desai said, “We are seeing millions of customers adopt Amazon as their first choice for their online shopping journeys. Not only shopping but also for Amazon Prime Video we are seeing millions of customers getting hooked onto the service. We have seen Prime customers engage with Amazon across the various touch-points.”
When I asked Desai if the communication needs to be differentiated and personalized for metro city audiences, he said, “each individual customer needs are very different. Understanding those needs and communicating them in the right way helps the customer make the right decision.”
On Amazon’s performance in the year 2018, Desai said, “2018 was a fantastic year for us. We progressed on building the right kind of customer experiences on the services front, digital benefits front, and the selection side. We probably had the best collection for Diwali in 2018. The Great Indian Festival had almost a 170 million products and more. It had 300,000 sellers active on our platform. All of these metrics are looking healthy are growing on a day to day basis.”
