The CII Marketing Leadership Summit 2022 organised by the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) in Mumbai on 20 December 2022 saw a panel discuss the theme, ‘Decoding the Rise of India’s Creator Economy and Lessons for Marketers’.
The session was moderated by Ranjani Krishnaswamy, General Manager – Marketing, The Titan Co.
Panellists included Vijay Koshy, President – Content, TVF India; Sharan Hegde, Founder, Finance with Sharan; Shubhranshu Singh, Vice President – Marketing (Commercial Vehicles), Tata Motors.
“The generations that are now ahead in terms of understanding this environment are incredibly young. When we sit on a table making marketing decisions it’s quite likely that the person who is most empowered to take decisions actually knows the least. This ecosystem is organically developing, there are huge challenges but it’s here to stay,” noted Singh.
He noted that in Tata Motors’ (Commercial Vehicles) experience, as one goes down to the level of micro and nano influencers, the level of engagement, credibility, and followership in terms of interest to brands tends to go up. This shows, underlined the speaker, that deep into Tier 2 and Tier 3 India, influencers are thriving across languages and verticals.
“They actually know the guy, he lives down the road so they can react out, meet and complete that workflow circle and there is no doubt that there has been a massive jump in this phenomenon during the pandemic. So now not only was D2C growing, content in many facets grew and this included the serious business of due diligence. Nobody wants to go and buy anything without searching features, comparison videos on YouTube, asking friends or social networks and equally importantly word of relevant mouth in their social network or in its immediate circle. They don’t want to listen to somebody who is a proven expert but not in their ecosystem,” added Singh..
The speaker pointed to a challenge for the content ecosystem in its inability to monetise.
He explained that every brand is chasing the English-speaking population and influencers, creators and musicians are filling the need gap by effectively reaching other audiences.
Singh noted, “But I don’t think they are able to viably commercialise their offering, because when they take their offering to a platform, the platform takes a disproportionate share of what they have as earnings and that needs to change.”
During the launch of a pickup in Hyderabad, Tata Motors had about 75 influencers from across the country in attendance. The company gave them a two-day exposure to the vehicle in all its facets and features, revealed Singh. A similar exercise was also done for trucks.
“We are trying to bring the influencer right down to the last mile whether it is in real live locations or our dealerships and show people what the product can do. Very few people understand the full gambit of services that we offer,” noted Singh.
He added that the company neither prescribes the scripts for influencers nor attempts to plug its brands.
What makes content go viral?
The question on everyone’s mind was discussed at length during the session.
Hegde, who has amassed 2 million followers in a span of two years, outlined some ‘pillars’ for the same. He explained:
Social Currency:
Inner remarkability: Classmates notebooks were very expensive even though it was cool to talk about having them. Why it really became famous is because the last page of the book had lots of interesting facts, riddles. There is a new category of influencers called Finfluencers. Anything can be made cool. I may start a video with, ‘Excuse me, can I get a 5cr loan?’ The inner remarkability factor is number 5cr. It gets the audience’s attention.
Game mechanics: Relative metrics are way more powerful than absolute metrics. In Bangalore there’s a restaurant called Plan B. They created a challenge. If you finish the bucket of 12 piece wings in 15 mins you get it for free but the more important fact is your name and photo goes into a hall of fame; now it is famous among restaurants.
Make them feel like insiders: People like to be part of something exclusive, Cred did this wonderfully. They said people who have more than 800 credit score can join this app. People who got into this app couldn’t stop bragging about it. I have an edtech platform where I sell personal finance courses. Whenever I upsell that personal finance course I say only those who are in the top 50 who purchase that course get exclusive access to me, to talk and send messages whenever they want. Within 15 mins, 700 people purchased the books and this is not a cheap course, it costs Rs.6,000.
If you can nail down social currency, if you can make people feel cool by watching your content, you inherently become viral. Social media platforms rank sharing has the number one feature.
Trigger: A trend is there for a short period of time and more often than not you are late to the trend. When you do it you don’t have a reputation for yourself. You lose your personal branding a little bit.
There are two other ways of building this trigger.
Incorporating frequent events and aspirational events in your content. If I were to ask you what you think is more talked about the brand Cheerios or Disneyland, the answer is Cheerios because we have our breakfast every single day and Cheerios is a famous breakfast cereal. But Disneyland even though it has that inner remarkability, the cool factor, it’s not talked about a lot everyday, it happens once or twice a year. If frequent events are incorporated into scripting or video making, it has higher chances of going viral.
The last one is aspirational events. Many are thinking about the next vacation, about buying a house. Putting these in videos make it go viral.
Emotions such as humour and anger spread much faster than any others. All of us have seen these videos by NGOs asking to donate money to a person with medical complication. How often do you share these videos with family or friends? We don’t because it makes you feel sad. Sadness as an emotion does not make things go viral. Comedy videos are viral because they make us laugh.
I combined comedy with finance, something which was never done before on a platform like Instagram which was initially ruled by stand-up comedians and models and I reached 2mn followers. If a video is purely comical, even if it gets a lot of views you won’t get a lot of followers. If after watching a video someone feels like s/he has learnt something new, it has helped their life in some way or the other they are more likely to follow you.
Connecting yourself with already well-established products or brands can help. I use iphones as props in my videos because it has already done the heavy lifting of positioning itself as a premium brand.
Storytelling is the most difficult thing to crack. Insurance is one of the boring sectors in finance and I was the first one to talk about it. Don’t get right to the point, package it with a very nice storytelling format. Obviously this cannot be learnt easily, it comes from trial and error and practice.
Brands need to create their own communities
Koshy outlined the challenges faced by marketing with premium audiences behind paywalls, ad-blockers and ad avoidance and hence the need for branded content.
“Brands should create content to educate, to talk about features; we personally respect and admire is Red Bull. They have been creating content for the past 20 years, true to their brand speak, philosophy, DNA. So much so that now platforms are willing to pay money for their content because it’s so entertaining,” he said.
Moderator Krishnaswamy pointed to the world of brands creating content and content creators becoming brands by themselves, and asked if a hybrid model would play out.
Hegde responded, “Brands have not been paying attention to creating a personal branding for themselves. Most brands in India today do not have a strong individualistic character driving the way forward. When you are scrolling through Instagram and come across a content in which the name of that profile is a brand name that you know, you are most likely to skip it because you know that they are trying to sell you something; but when it’s a person you are more likely to watch it and even if there is a brand integration happening somewhere in the middle you already invested in the video. If you have their first 3 seconds they are most likely to watch the end of the video.”
“Brands definitely need to create communities of their own. What exactly they want to do is crucial for them to understand – do they want to educate, engage or entertain? From our experiences the consumers are looking more for the former. As far as creators are concerned they automatically have a larger base to start with, if there is a synergy between what you want to say and the story that the creator brand is talking about, then there is a possibility of a collaboration,” noted Koshy.
The speaker underlined that the brand needs to be clear about the reason for taking the content route.
Singh concurred that if a brand attempts to scale by the rate card following the cost-per-thousand reach model of television, it would not work in the content space.
