Spice Mobility's Sapna Sharma on mobile marketing and technology

With the buying decision having moved from the marketers to the consumers today, marketing has become a challenge for decision makers. Marketing has evolved into an ever changing dynamic function – there is always something new happening or someone is always trying out new strategies to attract the buyers. In such a scenario, one can only survive and grow if he she enjoys the marketing job.

Agrees Sapna Sharma, Head - Marketing, Devices, Spice Mobility (S Mobility) and says, “Marketing is always changing, thus challenging; there are always techniques to learn, cases to study, and strategies to research. The dynamics of consumer behaviour is highly volatile.”

Her’s is a tough task. Her company operates in a fiercely competitive industry where consumer is spoilt for choice from handset marketers of all types. Charting out the Annual Brand strategy and Promotion plan for S Mobility taking into consideration what each player is upto is not an easy task. Yet she has been doing it since the last three years, since 2010. Sharma’s previous experience at Nestle, L’oreal, Sony India, Voltas, Hugo Boss, Coca Cola India Ltd, Domino’s, Max New York Life & PCRA has benefited her immensely in understanding the consumer behavior and knowing what he wants.

Adgully recently spoke with Sharma on the market scenario and shared her views on mobile marketing and technology. Giving us a sense of the overall industry scenario with regards to brand and marketing communications, Sharma said, “Brand and marketing communications is going through a trough as far as creativity is concerned. Brands are facing challenges in terms of slow off-takes, piled up inventories along with rising deficits and dollar bills, all of which is pushing brand building communications to the back burner. This is only leading to more functional advertising with little focus on creativity.”

Known for its innovation, S Mobility is a pioneer in introducing innovative technological devices including the Dual SIM phones – across GSM, CDMA, Triband & Touch Screen PDA & smart devices on the Android platform. It was the first company in the country to introduce a 12 mega pixel camera phone with optical zoom and has won Golden Peacock Innovation award for India’s first 3D phone.

With business operations spanning across India, Nepal, Bangladesh, Uganda, Tanzania, Zimbabwe and Sri Lanka; S Mobility is expanding its geographical presence from Indonesia to Ivory Coast. The company has been in the forefront of ushering a revolution of Indian mobile phone handset brands, challenging the established players in the business. In recent years through its customer centric approach, it has captured a market share of nearly 4-5 per cent and has a customer base of over 15 million customers. The company has an annual sales volume of over 6 million devices.

However despite being in a strong position, Sharma knows that this is ever shifting post. Yesterday’s leader in the handset market has been replaced and pushed down by new players who were not in the reckoning a few years ago. Sharing some of the challenges the company faces, Sharma says, “Today, the buying decision has moved from the marketer to the consumer. The market has changed from being marketer led to the current consumer led. No more do the consumers want what the marketers offer. It is the other way round. That gives one an opportunity to adapt oneself according to the changing environment which is an exciting challenge. It gives one the first hand view and understanding of the market. And keeps you a step ahead. At the same time, it gives one the opportunity to constantly innovate thereby setting benchmarks,” she stated.

She further feels creative mediocrity and rendition of the same emotion over and over again in all product creatives is turning out to be a real challenge. So the softer aspect of kids’ persuasion or the naughty man-woman interaction plays on the emotional audience psyche and that becomes the norm for all others to follow.

According to Sharma social media is still the most over hyped but under-utilized tool of communication. While a layman equates social media to Facebook (and also Orkut for some early starters) it is way beyond Facebook. The evolved user of social media is omnipresent across Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr, Youtube, Pinup, Myspace, Friendfeed and BlogSpot. She says, “The coming year will see the evolved user becoming more aware of the platform’s usage in communication and only healthy social listening and reactive approach won’t help.Like most evolved brand custodians, we also have lined up a detailed approach to social media. The approach will become platform agnostic and only a complete online reputation management proactive strategy will work.”

Looking at the growing mobile market Sharma said, “S Mobility will aim to ensure focused approach to marketing, basis the business imperatives. As of now the focus of the entire industry is growing towards smartphones, and we will also craft our plans focused on the market need.”

To a question on how according to her can marketing take advantage of the changing media, Sharma replied that ‘Paid to Owned to Earned Media’ is the mantra. The changing landscape offers enough options to have owned media but that still comes for a price. She feels that the challenge is for all marketers to take advantage of the changing landscape and generate earned media not only across social media but other ATL platforms.

Sharing her views on whether and where does media industry lacks behind, she said, “Despite the number of years of existence the media industry still is in its infancy as far as robust organizational structures and processes are concerned. Most of the dis-credit for this situation goes to the changing landscape that is too dynamic for the processes and systems to keep pace with.”

Sharma feels that the marketing industry is moving in a direction of becoming more accountable for its existence. From plain vanilla brand communications to 360 degree media presence, it is now moving to ROI driven models. New media has given impetus to CPMs and working backwards even the conventional media will move to CPRPs and CPTs. “With growing digitization and far more robust measurement parameters each marketer will need to justify the moolah spent – and well spent at that!! Rating point,” she quoted.

On being asked on why she chose this profession Sapna said, “Ever changing dynamics and the need to be innovative.” She is a graduate from Delhi University coupled with a master’s degree in business administration from Institute of Management Technology, Ghaziabad. Sharma’s key strengths lie in data and market intelligence, negotiation skills, strong ethics, discipline and hard-work. A brain-stormier by nature, in her free time she likes crunching data, playing the shadow consumer to get insight on consumer buying behavior and implementing marketing strategies accordingly, reading and listening to music. | By Aanchal Kohli[aanchal(at)adgully.com

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