Exclusive | Dabur India's Sanjay Singal betting big on Social Media

Most businesses today would like to create awareness of their product or services. In order to grow business it is imperative to set specific goals and figure out the strategy which is the key to success. Today Social Media plays a major role and has become synonymous with the growth of the industry. Going into social media with a laser targeted focus can make all the difference in terms of results and outcome. Hence everybody is betting big on this interactive medium.

One of the leading names in the FMCG industry; Dabur India Pvt Ltd too has been exploring and experimenting with the medium. Adgully caught up with Sanjay Singal, Senior General Manager – Marketing, Dabur India at the first season of CxO Roundtable series held by DMAi  where he shared his views on Social and Digital media and Social Media analytics.

DMAi, a 21 year old organisation, in association with SAP conducted an interactive and immersive discussion on September 19, 2013 at The Leela, Gurgaon. The aim was not only to discover, learn and share how actionable insights can spell business success but also to explore varied industries and varied experiences. More specifically the focus was to learn how social media measurement has gained currency which gives a great opportunity for leading marketers in their quest to understand their discerning customers, even better.

Speaking about his stint with Dabur, he said, “I joined Dabur a little over 3 years back as it is the 4th largest FMCG in India and has a global footprint. I manage the P&L of the Skin care business and am also responsible for the Digital marketing of entire Dabur Beauty business.”

Speaking about how he sees the industry that he is in growing and evolving with digital medium taking over all the mediums in terms of reach, Singal said, “I work on Skin Care and given the sensitivity women have to using anything new on their skin, information and search is very important. As per our data, there are 3 million searches on skin care alone and hence an opportunity for us in Dabur to help consumers with natural solutions for their skin problem/enhancement needs.”

According to him, the entire industry is becoming increasingly important not only for the regular bread and butter engagement needs but also in terms of hearing consumers and feeding our ideas/innovation/communication funnel.

On asking  how current web analytics and other digital performance reporting will interact with social media marketing analysis in the future, he stressed upon the fact that, “They will need to since this will help us to understand input output benefits of web campaigns and social media and compare them.”

Singal believes that KPI’s are going beyond Facebook fans to Engagement scores. “ROI for a widely distributed FMCG company like us is defined not as sales but engagement and usefulness of insights in marketing,” avers Singal.

To get a sense and deeper insights of the market, when asked if he has ever used Social Media Analytics for a Pilot/Test case before launching  an actual product/service he said, “Yes, for yet another skincare brand of ours called Dabur Gulabari rose water we were developing advertising and wanted to communicate the various ways this product could be used along with consumers current skin care products. Offline it would have meant a full scale quantitative research taking at least 4 or 5 weeks. We just asked the question on the brand facebook page and ran a small contest. In a week’s time we received 2400 entries. We analyzed the top ones which will feature in the new Gulabari television ad that will release on October 1.”

According to Singal, Social media is not what marketers/brand custodians make but what the user makes out of it. “So for us it is all about creating an enabling environment and letting consumers create content. Of course we do have professional moderation of all our digital assets as a basic hygiene check,” he added.
We see demos of tools very often, but sharing his views on how much importance is attributed to the manual intervention that goes into deriving actionable insights from this data, Singal said, “Human insight is very critical as it's about the emotional levers a brand uses.”

Looking at the growth of the medium, some trends that Singal sees in the coming future are: Conversion of offline and online, Consolidation of digital agency, Pressure on creative agencies to develop digital competences and Content agencies becoming very important. Last but not the least, he considers it important to give suggestions to companies (from your industry) during Crisis Management/Damage Control, when dealing with a situation.

Concluding an interesting discussion on social media and it’s analytics, Singal advises, “Be prompt on your first response and make sure to follow up. Also if you mess up, own up rather than hide things.”