Adgully FORUMS | It's the age of Smart CMOs

In the current times, the consumer has become more of a smart user. Technology is playing a growing role in every individual’s life, and it cuts across all ages. It has not only caught the eye of the younger generation but also of the older ones. It is responsible for making life more easier and expedient. While the consumer has the constant urge to keep exploring more, he sometimes in that process exploits the usage. It’s not a bad thing because curiosity gets the best out of everyone. Technology is something that we all love to explore, though sometimes it is subjugated.

While the panelists also were of the same view, Pradeep Dwivedi, Chief Corporate Sales and Marketing Officer at Dainik Bhaskar Group said, “The discussion that is there today is about the smart user, and yet we are focusing so much on the smart CMO. The challenge is that we have a view of the universe that begins and ends with the CMOs view of what this universe is, who its clients are, what its products are and what he or she needs to do to get to that elusive customer.”

While in the traditional days there was IMRB which did the research for us to arrive at inferences that will give us access to a lot of information, today it is more about adequately creating more number of listening posts for the customers. Dwivedi adds, “The customer today has moved away from this classical dilemma of control v/s discovery. I think as marketers you want to control our market, control the customers, control the experiences and nature and their getting what we expect to deliver to them or getting what we think we want to deliver to them. But we need to now move on to a completely new mode of thinking which is completely on discovery mode, which is to say that we have enough listening posts across digital, across non digital, traditional, non-traditional.”

Quoting an instance, Dwivedi said, “There is always someone who is complaining at his desk or complaining about something that he is not finding. How that verbal exchange then translates into the chain and how that does integrate your digital service response, your physical service response and that uniformity needs to be developed. What we as marketers can at least do is create an adequate systems and platforms that all of these listening posts are operating at an optimal level of efficiency and are able to capture all of this to take meaningful action. Because otherwise we will all always be under the cascade that we are doing everything that we can under the sun and that the customer will be happy and that’s just wishful thinking and that’s not going to happen.”

Adding on to the discussion Dwivedi said, “On the flip side, as a user when all of us are marketers and are users of various services. Our behavior as a user is very different than our behavior as a marketer. You know when I have a problem I will escalate it to the highest level in that organization because I know that as market if I get an escalation my boss is going to ride on me and say that this needs to be fixed first. It’s a matter of creating adequate number of listening posts, making sure that you are meaningfully staffing them, making sure that you have information channel that leads back to you and any platform that allows you to do that meaningfully.”

Adding on the Dwivedi, Ratish Nair, Co-founder, AdMagnet said, “Things keep changing and are changing by the day.  Taking an example of Facebook, people in the US are not using much of it these days. Teenagers are more on Tumblr. While in India kids are more on WhatsApp so therefore, things keep changing.  So if you have a Facebook strategy and then suddenly you realize that it’s not working, you need to realize that you have to have a 360 degree plan. The marketer needs to see where his audience is and then decide which platform to design his strategy.”

While Ramesh Chembath, VP Marketing Godrej Appliances added, “If you really talk about how the market is evolving, it’s evolving a lot in the digital sense. If I have to talk about my company itself, we have an entire digital system which is in place, they have chat facility, they chat with customers, there is complete ORM setup and the marketing team need not run behind it. So today if we talk about recognizing the customer as a problem I think we can go beyond that.”

Chembath adds, “If you start integrating all that it’s so easy today. You can start tracing your consumer to what he has bought, to what kind of information he has gathered by purchase and then build a relationship with him. The whole asset base is the customer base. That’s why the user is the king today.”

While Sanjay Tripathy, Senior Executive Vice President, Marketing at HDFC said, “It’s not about putting a marketing team; it’s about the entire organization that needs to be in place.”
Before the discussion took a turn, Jayraj Jadhav, Head, E-business & Digital Marketing at Tata AIG added, “Today’s customers are like superhero’s, there is no option for CMOs to be in. They will have to be the ‘Robin’ of the story. Else they will end up being the joker. The other point as rightly said is it’s not about using this medium as the advertising part of it but it’s about digitization. We talk about social media and technology, but it’s more about enabling your organization with the digital know-how.  It is important to make the organization smarter than the user because the user is already smart.”

Seeking insights from the discussion and adding her own experience, Deepali Naair, Chief Marketing Officer at Mahindra Holidays & Resorts India Limited said, “My observations as a customer, if I look at the FMCG industry, they tend to use the digital medium as an extension to the advertising medium. But the moment you move to service industry, its different there where the whole digital concept exists like in the travel industry or banking industry or e commerce for that matter. The bosses are indeed sensitive to what is happening in the digital industry and how to we get the organization ready for digitization.”

On a concluding note to the smart user discussion Sanjay Tripathy adds, “There are lot of digital ecosystems which need complete transformation. The most valued companies today are fulfilling the customers’ needs much better and are transforming the process. Majority of the online business have come not from offline business.  Eventually the online businesses will take over because they serve the customer much better than the offline ones. What is happening in India is that we are very limited as compared to other countries. They actually do their business and are not giving customer experience.” By Archit Ambekar | Twitter: @aambarchit

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