“Little Bit Marketing In Everything”

There is a little bit of marketing in everything we do, across the organisation in every department.” Shakti Upadhyay, the Head of Marketing and PR at Kia Motors India believes that from recruiting new people to collaborating with vendors to aftersales team communicating with customers, marketing is in everything. In this chat with BW Businessworld, he speaks on generation perennials, trends to watch out for and even the existential crisis of marketers per se.

Excerpts:

Marketing may be victim to buzzwords culture but is there anything you have recently come across that you believe is something to look out for?

The days of targeting media and products at people, based on their age, are over. Perennials are not defined by age but by mindset. This group crosses generations and is categorised by attitude. Now is the time that we champion ‘perennial’ targeting with its original definition as a route to business success. Our industry has been guilty of continuing a historic trend of targeting younger consumers and making it sound radical. While this might have worked in the past, this is a dangerous approach in the world of addressable media. From a media perspective, we should be targeting our most valued consumers at scale. We should be producing the right content based on brand purpose to optimise the experience of audience across their journey.

What are some To-Dos that you think marketers of today must have in their agendas?

Today, a consumer has multiple channels for engaging with a brand. This has the advantage of connecting at every stage of their purchase journey. But it also demands consistency. A consumer has about eight seconds of attention span. A marketer needs to ensure that the communication is engaging, relatable and consistent across platforms. Consistent feedback from the consumers and analysis of the behaviour has become crucial, and with digital channels, marketers have the liberty to fine-tune marketing messages based on observed behaviour. This helps brands to design effective share-of-wallet strategies to understand the amount of business from a potential or existing customer.

As marketers, we should look to build integrated frameworks by investing in inbound marketing techniques and develop content with the intention to in- spire audience.

What do you see as the biggest concern of marketing in a digital era?

The digital era has made brand loyalty, fragile. This has become one of the biggest issues that we face as marketers. To tackle this, it is important to anticipate the customer’s journey and thought process. We are now engaging with a tech-savvy and digitally connected audience that have abundance of content access. To be relevant, I focus on being unconventional and persistent in my communication. Observation and pre-emptiveness is the mantra.