Guest Column: How not to let Consumer Engagement turn into entertainment: Sriharsh Grandhe, EVP, LinEngage
How did a sophisticated and mature science like Consumer Engagement, which itself is quite a vast subject, take a not-so-good turn?, mulls Grandhe
“Everyone in the Bank thinks of ours as the entertainment department…” That’s how a recent conversation with a potential client began. While it was a good icebreaker and helped start with a few good laughs but the seriousness of this wasn’t lost on both sides of the table. How did a sophisticated and mature science like Consumer Engagement, which itself is quite a vast subject, take a not-so-good turn? For the purpose of this PoV, let’s cover Activation and Experiential Marketing as the two focus Consumer Engagement models.
The basics
Let’s begin with some basic tenets. Engagement is really possible when either or both of these two counts are met. First, when a significantly valuable problem of the consumer is solved by the brand. Second, by offering a never-before experience.
Let’s solve a problem
Identifying a significantly valuable problem necessitates a deep grip on consumer behaviour understanding and an ability to view those findings with a media agnostic lens. Today with technology playing a significant role in CX, there is so much of data collected or generated. It is very interesting to imagine the kind of possibilities in engaging with consumers interestingly and relevantly. Consider this situation. It’s again a recent conversation I had with a Building Materials client that centered on a well-designed education program targeted at people who have just taken home loans. There is this segment of IHB’s who begin the arduous journey of home building with so much trepidation. Can a brand play the role of a trusted advisor?
Yes, today it is possible to identify new home loan seekers and with technology, an engagement program is cost efficient, measurable and therefore effective. Let’s consider a retail service business. While the brand studies are usually national, a quick web crawl will be able to identify perceptions and realties for each centre and it’s quite obvious that this is not going to be consistent across the country. But how many of us come across customised activation programs designed to address the differences in each region or a segment? This again is intelligent use of data and effectively solving a significantly valuable problem. In the lack of such approaches, typically most activation programs end up overtly relying on clever ideas to engage with the consumers, which end up looking like entertainment.
Experience matters too
Designing a never before experience requires lots of insights from both the brand and also the consumer. It’s also very important to measure the objective so the ideas can be sized accordingly. A careful approach to experience design can lead to a compelling experiential marketing program. When the desired output is customer delight, it makes it worth the while to invest in a studied experience design to get the timing right for an intervention. This could be a major contributor to making an experiential marketing program great from good. Getting the timing right requires an in-depth study of usage behaviour more than the user behaviour or consumption behaviour rather than the consumer behaviour. When the right ‘timing’ opportunity is identified, the opportunity will define the right media vehicle. Sometimes, the media could be an innovation. For e.g. What is popularly called the roti idea. To remind people to wash hands before a meal, rotis being served in Kumbh Mela langars were branded with messages by a personal hygiene brand. Now whoever would have thought of rotis being used as an advertising medium!
Getting it right
Hyper local activation programs designed with the help of data driven insights can help create meaningful interactions leading to effective consumer engagements. With careful selection of appropriate channels, it may well become the medium of choice to create brand love, solve real consumer problems, engage with consumers more meaningfully and save consumer engagement from turning into some loose entertainment act.
(The author is Executive Vice President at LinEngage, the experiential marketing & activation agency of MullenLowe Lintas Group)
Disclaimer: The views expressed here are solely those of the author and do not in any way represent the views of exchange4media.com.
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About 60% Instagram influencers in India have fake followers: Report
As per a media report, influencer marketing platform KlugKlug has found that only 2.48 million profiles out of the 8 million have ‘high-quality’ followers
Two of three Instagram influencers in India have more than 60 per cent fake followers, a report by influencer marketing platform KlugKlug shows.
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Share15% consumers enhance their user experience through virtual assistants: Kantar report
According to Soumya Mohanty, Managing Director & Chief Client Officer- South Asia, Insights Division, Kantar, less than 1% of ads get tested due to lack of time
Marketing data and analytics firm Kantar has unveiled a report that studies the burgeoning AI market to dish out actionable insights for marketers. Within AI, virtual assistants are the fastest growing segment. The report noted that 15% consumers enhanced their ‘user experience through virtual assistants’. This segment is the fastest growing at 27% YoY.
According to the study, while ‘fitness’ and ‘social media’ apps are amongst the leading categories, driving AI adoption (with an average of 2.3 AI led features embedded in these applications), segments like ‘BFSI’, ‘job search’ and ‘short video’ apps are relatively slow in AI adoption, with an average of 1.2 features each. Entertainment apps, digital commerce and pharmacy apps stand somewhere in the middle with 2.0 & 1.8 AI features being adopted, respectively.
Additionally, the report said that while 90% of marketing and sales leaders think their organisations should be using AI “often”, 60% said their organisations “rarely or never” do. Speaking to exchange4media, Soumya Mohanty, Managing Director & Chief Client Officer- South Asia, Insights Division, Kantar highlighted that currently there are a lot of organisations who know that there is something called AI, but haven’t yet figured out how it could help them holistically.
“A lot of the AI just gets used for efficiency purposes, so repetitive tasks get automated,” Mohanty pointed out. Data also plays a big role in why certain organisations are struggling with how to use AI.
For instance, Mohanty explained that in segments like D2C, telecom etc. there is a lot of primary or first-party data. So being able to leverage AI also gets easier. “It's the traditional large sort of FMCG type companies where data sits in silos. You don't really have one single source of data where it's a little difficult to use the full power of AI, because the full power of AI also needs a lot of data sitting in a structure that you can use,” she added.
So, can AI help marketers have a unified view of data? No, says Mohanty. “AI does not help marketers get a unified view of data. Once you have data in a unified way, AI can help you do a lot more with that data.”
According to her, organisations today need to have good, strong data warehousing. “It needs to make sense because a lot of the silos are also because everybody owns one part of it. A lot of people have their own analytics teams internally, so there are a lot of agendas and stakeholders. And then we say data is in silos because fundamentally, when you're doing something internally, different people have different stakes in it,” Mohanty added.
Puneet Avasthi, Senior Executive Director, South Asia, Insights Division, Kantar shared that most organisations are now heavily investing in creating first-party data sets. “Companies that have first party data about their consumers and transactions or interactions that they have with the brand are going to be able to leverage that more effectively to create sharper profiles for the brand as such for the consumer and build relevant recommendations at the right moments.
Panning out she also highlighted how AI can be leveraged to enhance market research and make it more accessible, a part of which Kantar is itself involved in. “A lot of times people say that we can't test an ad because we don't have time. So less than 1% of advertising gets tested and just gets put out. Does it work when it gets put out? It is the question the audience should answer, because so many times, it backfires,” Mohanty shared. Apparently, digital particularly doesn't get tested because organisations just do a/b testing and leave it at that.
Speaking of preferred use cases of AI, Avasthi added that various businesses and brands are looking at creating an experience for the brand that is in line with the brand's architecture and progress across all touch points. “That is something that the AI engines that are working behind can ensure, that all such interactions are consistently delivered across different virtual assistants or chatbots that are available to the consumer,” he said.
The other use case, according to Avasthi, is ensuring that there is greater visibility for the brand in the digital sphere as such, through various recommendation engines, when a certain need is being looked for and to throw up the right kind of information about the brand so that the brand message is amplified in the mind of the consumers.
Among other insights from the Kantar AI report is that 88% consumers used AI based algorithms which analysed their preferences, behaviours, and interests to create personalised recommendations for tailored experiences. This segment grew at 6 % YoY. At 21%, ‘smart home automation’ is a smaller segment but growing at 25% YoY.