Cracking light consumers, e-commerce and brand growth…

MediaCom India held its inaugural flagship BLINK_live event in Mumbai, at Taj Santacruz. BLINK_live is MediaCom’s bid to help its clients better understand and leverage the current media and marketing trends, insights, innovations and opportunities. MediaCom is a member of WPP, a marketing communications services group, and part of GroupM, WPP’s consolidated media investment management arm.

The official theme of the BLINK_live event was ‘decoding growth in a slowdown’, given the current economic slowdown in India. The unofficial theme of the event was reacquainting with a customer and what they really want – in real time. The event saw a detailed session on the ‘Laws of Growth’ by the keynote speaker Byron Sharp, marketing science professor and director of Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, Australia. The other speakers included Preeti Reddy, CEO South Asia at Kantar, whose insights focused on ‘identifying real growth’ for brands and Josh Gallagher, chief product officer, APAC at MediaCom; whose session tried to answer the question - ‘will the promise of e-commerce survive a slowdown?’

Commenting on the India launch of BLINK_live, Navin Khemka, CEO, MediaCom South Asia, said, “The media landscape has changed drastically, and exchange of trends and ideas globally has become more relevant than ever. BLINK_live is one such platform that helps bring global marketing trends to India and shares India’s insights with the world. I am happy to bring BLINK_live to India for the first time. We are hopeful to glean more insightful observations from the Indian team through this platform.”

Nihar Das, overall lead, Borderless WPP Team shared insights on how brands can tackle the slowdown through customized growth models. He shared data to illustrate that Bangladesh and Vietnam are ahead of India in terms of economic growth. “Now, India will be a more connected economy, in case of an economic slowdown, it won’t be as bad as 1999,” he told the audience. Das was making a reference to how the Indian economy is more globalised now and that before globalisation, economic growth had a different meaning.

He took the example of Titan and Asian Paints to illustrate how these two brands still showed considerable growth, despite the slowdown. Das told us this was possible as the brand was able to get more buyers into the category – category expansion. He also mentioned that the growth of 4G in India was a force multiplier that enabled growth for brands across sectors.

Professor Byron Sharp’s session was focussed on proving to the audience that everything marketers know about marketing – and about consumers - no longer holds true in the real world. His presentation contained multiple examples of brands that shut shop because they had the wrong brand objective or they were targeting their consumer the wrong way.

Another idea that was presented by more than one speaker was the concept of a ‘light consumer.’ This phrase referred to a consumer who was loyal in his purchasing of a brand, but spaces out his actual consumption of the brand. “Marketing today is all about how easy is your brand to buy and think about,” Professor Sharp mentioned during the course of the session.

Preeti Reddy, CEO South Asia at Kantar – Insights, classified brands as overperformers or underperformers and the theme of her talk was ‘identifying real growth’. Reddy’s talk placed overperforming brands as brands that have the ability to make a bet about the future and stick to it. “Overperforming brands are those who know how to play chess and checkers together,” Reddy told the audience. “It’s about embracing the always beautifully dissatisfied and building an ecosystem that focuses on eliminating friction. Overperforming brands always focus on the people they serve,” she told the audience.

The last speaker of the evening was Josh Gallagher, chief product officer, APAC at MediaCom. He emphasized on the fact that the longest lasting brands are those that maintain attention to light buyers. He spoke about the concept of incidental and divided loyalty. These two types of loyalties are based on availability and brand preference, respectively. He also emphasized on how good localised content (i.e. content in native languages that caters to Tier II and III audiences) is a strong influence driver for purchases, before signing off for the evening.