Customer loyalty as a concept needs to be relooked at: Ashwinder R Singh, Bhartiya Urban

At the inaugural e4m Pride of India Brands - The Best of South conference held on Friday, Ashwinder R Singh - CEO-Residential, Bhartiya Urban, spoke on the topic ‘The New Frontiers of Marketing.’ 

Starting with a humorous disclaimer that he wasn’t a marketer and more a leader of companies, Singh said that according to him, marketing was all about communication, over multiple platforms and in different languages, and that the rise of the internet has led to a democratization of both communication and information.

To set the context of these new frontiers of marketing, Singh enumerated the latest consumer findings from a report that highlighted the following: In India, more than 200 million internet users are Gen Z (up to 85% of them only want to shop online); in the past 6 months, 67% of consumers have tried a new brand (and so customer loyalty as a concept needs to be relooked at); and 9 out of 10 offline purchases that happen first go through an online search for the products.

This led to Singh diving into the world of omni-channel marketing, noting that omni-channel didn’t mean just marketing on different channels and platforms. “That’s just multi-channels. Omni-channel means having consistency in the messaging and the experience for the customer allowing them to seamlessly move between one of your platforms to the other. Starbucks does a great job of this, by encouraging you to claim points and getting discounts by moving from online to its physical stores,” he said.

“If a company doesn't have an omni-channel setup, it is very hard for it to take a leadership position in its segment. Omni-channel is not about capital expenditure or marketing budgets; it's about execution. You need marketing budgets to create multi-channels but you need talent to deliver a great omni-channel experience to your clients and target groups,” he added.

Further, speaking about the role of hyper-personalization, Singh said that what we love most is our name. “We concentrate so much on the technical aspects of marketing, using the correct jargon, and putting the right ‘processes’ in place, being little aware that we are already messing up the process in a very basic way: the impersonal nature of our marketing.”

Noting that India is a very emotional country, Singh said hyper-personalization was critical to cracking the Indian masses, something many big international companies had failed to do, despite their immense capital and resources. He added that this hyper-personalization is only possible through the accumulation of data.

Singh also discussed other vital components of modern marketing, such as moment marketing, while wryly observing that due to the delay between getting creatives ready for a campaign and waiting for approval for the same, brands often fail to strike when the iron is hottest and so miss out on what fantastic opportunities to connect with consumers.

While reiterating the importance of data in creating marketing opportunities and solutions, Singh also pointed out that privacy and the collection, retention, usage, and removal of data was becoming a vital issue, with marketers having to be ready for the new permissions that brands would have to take, in order to retain data and install cookies on their clients devices and purchase points.

“Google Analytics has been deemed illegal in Austria, Netherlands, and France already, and it could happen in India at some point. It is important we innovate and use data, create data lakes, and build our own analytics engines. It is analytics that gives us insights into our entire strategy and engagement with clients, and if Google Analytics becomes illegal, we have to have our own in-house solutions,” he concluded.