Question Hour: Uncertain media moments

Uncertain media moments

Does social media ruin traditional media?

Kolkata

The first point to appreciate is that marketing is a discipline. This discipline is one that uses and acts upon consumer’s inputs. Consumer input is harvested through insight. Insight is harvested from a quantitative exercise of a consumer probe that then evolves into the qualitative and holistic probe. Good marketers and marketing companies use this input to put together their product, their service, its packaging, its pricing and indeed its advertising, as well as its brand needs.

In comes social media and challenges it all. Social media disrupts marketing, as we know it. It does it quick and fast. It does it in, really.

Social media brings with it a fair bit of noise. Marketers are unable to weed out the noise from the basics. This causes knee-jerk marketing responses that translate into creatives and visuals and approaches that are good to look at but totally confusing in their output structures. Traditional marketing and advertising is to that extent ruined and disrupted. And as is the fashion, one is quick to desert the old ship. It may be big, it may have lasted all these decades, but its very efficacy is being questioned. This causes the knee-jerk action. Wait, then, for a very uncertain marketing future. As uncertain as our very own lives.

Indian companies acquire foreign brands and just let them be. They do not bring them to India even. Why?

New Delhi

John, it is all a function of focus and approach. Most Indian companies that acquire overseas entities prefer to keep their portfolios separate and focused. The clear point is that the mother company may have existing brands in India, which it might not want to undermine. In many cases, where one is talking of the same category of products, there is always a risk of a more expensive overseas brand eating into the hard-earned market shares cobbled together by the domestic entity. Therefore, companies prefer to dabble with different sets of brands in different markets.

Yes, there are times when companies decide to bring brands in as well. They do this selectively, though.

And further still, companies tend to segment geographies for their brands. A Tata Global Beverages could do this with some of its global beverage offerings, just as a Jaguar Land Rover may decide that certain models are best kept outside for now.

I work in the NBFC space for rural markets. How have traditional banks evolved in this space?

Rohtak

Rohit, banking in rural markets is a slow business. A business that has taken its time percolating. The last year has, however, been frenetic in the opening of new bank accounts. Every bank has a target and is running helter-skelter to achieve it.

Villages are, however, slow to accept banks. Aadhaar has been successful in getting people to open accounts. Filling them with everything people have is yet to happen. Rural folk are tentatively experiencing banking inclusion. This will take time. I am not excited by the numbers banks tout today though. Yes, from a pathetic base of inclusion, we have grown. The true test of inclusion is when these bank accounts morph from being mere numbers that include more width to the numbers that can boast of depth of savings and depth of lending as well.

Harish Bijoor is a brand strategy expert and CEO, Harish Bijoor Consults Inc. Mail your queries to cat.a.lyst@thehindu.co.in

COMMENT NOW