The marketer’s playbook for 2023

Leading marketers share their top learnings of 2022 and plans for the coming year.

These are the most interesting, as well as challenging times to be a marketer. With each day bringing in a new dimension to marketing, marketers of today need to be abreast of the dynamic needs of their professions. 

A trend today quickly turns into a fad later. While all brands try to jump on a few of the seemingly important trends, it is essential for them to keep the larger business objectives at the core while devising new marketing strategies. 

All marketers are seen tackling the challenge of the non-linear consumer journey, measuring the effectiveness of media channels and the ever-narrowing attention span of consumers. 

While dealing with all these challenges in 2022, many brands ended up taking a mickey out of themselves. Some were seen teasing consumers to garner eyeballs, and some others called their campaigns a ‘joke.’ While we are not sure about the tangible results these campaigns or rather marketing gimmicks resulted in, the conversations around the brands sure left the audiences entertained.  

afaqs! spoke to marketers across different brand categories to know their top learnings of 2022 and how they see the year 2023 pan out for their respective brands and categories. 

Here is what they had to say:

Shivani Behl, Chief Marketing Officer, Plum

There is no one right formula when it comes to marketing. Preferences and behavioural patterns keep evolving over time and to stay ahead of the game, brands need to constantly interact with their target audience to stay in touch with ground realities and evolve. 

People are now more informed and hence are consuming a lot more content with every passing day. Hence, it is important for a brand to convey the important messaging through short and concise content pieces. Video is certainly the future especially short-form video content for this purpose. 

While there was a short lull, offline retail is here to stay and physical stores are very much on their way to normalcy. Hence to grow, product-specific brands need to think of an omnichannel approach as a way forward. 

With data analytics and measurement gaining more importance across platforms, it is essential to put this to good use to better understand customer preferences and their journey and map solutions as necessary.

With Plum’s series C funding coming in 2022, the brand’s efforts have been towards bringing in more salient communication, growing its omnichannel presence and onboarding high-quality talent with a focus on investments in marketing and technology. With a host of launches, expected in 2023 across our skincare, haircare and makeup categories, Plum would be looking at increasing its overall marketing spending in both the online and offline space.

Paramjeet Singh Mehta, head of marketing, ASUS India

Marketing is more dynamic than ever with digitisation and the convergence of multi-party consumer data. One of the key lessons from 2022 is product discovery and research that has drastically shifted from web search to e-commerce app search.

Another aspect is how the increase in OTT and connected TV viewership has added another ATL dimension to digital media buying. Also, we observed that the brand ambassador concept has seen a shift to requirement-based influencer collaborations.

As marketers get ready for more cutting-edge innovation and competition in 2023, some of the key marketing trends to watch out for will be artificial intelligence and short-form videos. 2022 was a year of distraction on account of Metaverse, Web 3.0, NFTs, etc, and similar upcoming trends, therefore ‘No Magic, Only Basic’ will be an important asset.

At ASUS, the focus will be on fundamentals giving prominence to create a delightful customer experience as the buying journey has become complex from individual sales channels to online to offline (O2O), reverse O2O and D2C. Therefore, for each unique route that the customer takes, the brand will build consistency in communication during customers’ research and purchase decisions.

Varun Ganjoo, co-founder and chief marketing officer, Baazi Games

As the gaming industry continues to grow, the horizons for marketers in the space have also broadened. Technological developments, especially in artificial intelligence and machine learning, have helped brands become hyper-personal and engage with their consumer right from the top to the bottom of the funnel. 

As brands become more aware of consumers’ varied interests, it will make them drive non-endemic campaigns. The changing trends of lifestyle post the pandemic will require brands to reassess their targeting and vehicles of delivery. Further, content marketing is going to be one of the key strength pillars for 2023 which is also getting challenging by the day as one needs to break out of the clutter.

The post-pandemic era has brought in a culture of revenge outing which has seen people move out of their homes even more than what they ideally would do pre-pandemic. While this does bring in more avenues and opportunities for brands to capitalise, the important thing to realise is how quick people have become to adapting to any change. Hence, the learning for marketers is to keep evolving and adapt to the changes quicker. 

Abhijeet Sonar, head marketing, India & Surrounding Countries, Hansgrohe India

Now, the emphasis is more on having an intimate thought process in terms of connecting with the customers. Customers are willing to spend on quality-conscious products. So, marketers should definitely work on campaigns that amplify or emphasise on product capabilities which emphasise on sustainability.

There has been a very progressive and aggressive approach in each kind of business. Every brand just wants to be there and grab every opportunity. In this race, it's important for brands to first introspect into what their brands stand for and also the customer needs.

The learning is to understand the target audience and what they are going to be communicating to them. It is important not to be everywhere but to ensure that you are present at the right place at the right time with the right communication.