Parminder Singh, managing director for the South-East Asia, India and MENA region of social networking giant Twitter says the future belongs to three forces — real, rapid and relevant. He points out to the case of car wash companies in Argentina. In that country, people preferred to keep their cars spic and span. But car wash makers were finding that business was dropping. The culprit – technology. Every time people caught the weather forecast and found that it was going to rain, they postponed their car wash.

He says that every time a person tweets, marketers have 65 data elements to capture. Many companies globally have been able to use this to make product improvements. For instance, a cough syrup brand found many customers complaining about feeling drowsy and mentioning the brand in the same tweet. Using those findings the brand improved its formulation and came up with an improved tonic that did not make users sleepy. Another case in point was that of cell-phone services provider T-Mobile. Using data from Twitter the brand identified disgruntled customers and came up with solutions for their problems. The result was that the brand managed to reduce the number of disgruntled tweets and reduce customer churn by as much as 50 per cent within 90 days.

He says that non-ownership of talent is the key to owning the future. There is a cognitive surplus of one trillion man-hours which companies such as Uber are using to their advantage. The taxi aggregator gets anyone with a driving licence to earn extra income in their spare time.

Full-time engagement

Singh insists that, “Real-time engagement online is not a filler for offline inaction.” He says that online conversations that are generated by tweets result in “emotional fulfilment” for customers. Companies must strive to become a part of that loop, he says. The case in point is of the dress which captured the fancy of millions across the world. The catch was whether the dress was white and gold in colour or blue and black in colour. As discussion about the colour of the dress went global and ended up in teams being formed on Twitter depending on the colours that one saw, brands soon became a part of the action. Dunkin Donuts, McDonald’s and Snapple jumped on and used it as a marketing tool while the hype lasted.

Similarly, there is the case of Oreo which used the blackout during the telecast of Superbowl to its advantage by releasing a timely ad which told consumers that they could always dunk Oreo cookies in the dark.

According to Singh, many marketers are moving beyond the holy grail of ‘target markets’. The new rule is “target moments”.

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