Lockdown gave a big opportunity to engage digitally with consumers: Suparna Mitra, Titan

The first day of the 2020 e-TechManch Conference saw marketing stalwarts share insightful inputs in the digital marketing ecosystem. One such session was that of Suparna Mitra, CEO, Watches & Wearables Division, Titan, who gave a keynote session on the topic ‘The New Frontier of Brand Strategy and Digital Engagement’.

“We are in a category that is very discretionary, totally non-essential in some ways. In many ways we are non-essential but also we are in the category that makes people feel good. The big brand challenge during these lockdown months was that how does a category like ours remain relevant and salient in an essentials only market.”

Mitra went on to share strategic intents that the brand implemented to have a strong connection with their consumers. “The first was to keep the brand alive in the consumer’s minds during the lockdown. The situation was such that while consumers were not consuming anything other than essentials they had a lot of time and were constantly on digital media. The entire gamut of human activity was online. So, the opportunity to engage digitally with the consumer was very high. But the question was what to tell them. It would be daft to tell them to then go out and buy watches because all the shops were shut. We felt that this was a great time to build relationships and to cherish and nurture relationships between the brand and the consumer. We did this by subtly placing the brand in emotional and gifting moments with audiences on social media,” Mitra shared.

Talking about the gifting aspect of the brand, Mitra said: “We realized that we are a very big category for gifting for birthdays and anniversaries. We saw that people were in lockdown they were not able to celebrate, were not able to reach out to friends and family. We gave them a lot of avenues of expression on their birthdays. These milestones that people missed were a way of connecting back with the consumers and presenting the brand in a subtle way not in any commercial sense but an emotional one. We had a few interesting occasions which lent themselves to this kind of communication, one being Mothers’ Day.”

Another interesting brand engagement that Mitra spoke about was about imbuing the brand values of positivity and optimism in the consumer’s life by using brand assets. “We are blessed in Titan to have one of the most distinctive and signature sonic brand assets which is the Titan tune. In the lockdown period, we have used it to subtly place brand values in the context of the consumer’s lives.”

She also shared another brand communication that went out and got a huge amount of social media engagement. It was a Mother’s Day piece using the Titan tune. “A lot of leading musicians came together virtually for a concert and was something that created magic. It opened up many new ways of connecting with consumers.”

Mitra also spoke about another moment that the brand leveraged, “We used the Titan tune and that was on April 14th when the entire nation was waiting on the PM’s address on the extension of the 1st lockdown. At 2 pm on that day, we put this piece of communication called ‘Time Together’. This one went viral and got the highest organic views for the year. The timing of this post was everything because it was released on the same day the news went out. The reassurance of this communication was ‘That this too shall pass and Give it time’. It was also talked about by Shobhaa De in her Mumbai Mirror column. This was a very simple creative, it was the power of the idea that struck a chord.”

Moving on to the opening up phase, late in May and starting of June, Mitra says that one of the biggest fears was that of personal safety to go out and shop. “The big barrier that we wanted to address at this point was the fear around the pandemic and to assure people of our safety standards. During the lockdown in April itself, we had worked out a very comprehensive safety procedures for our officers, factories, and stores. This was the time we felt that this was the need of the hour. All of the engagement that happened at this point was addressing this. We now have a lot of new ways of communicating with customers and little innovations that helped them overcome the fear. So things like video calling, video shopping, or browsing online instead of stores,” she shared.

Mitra further said that from mid-June the brand started working on demand generation. “We established that if we have to get the right trigger, one of them being the emotional appeal for gifting. This was something that we built onto the brand and we called this whole campaign idea: Gift A Titan Smile.”

Speaking about building brand desire, Mitra says, “Another trigger for this category is desire and desire had to be brought back to the forefront before the audiences got habituated to learn to live with less. Desire is always about how driven worthy the product is. We had one such product that had been awaiting launch since March-April and we launched it finally in August. This is actually a smartwatch from Titan it is called the ‘Titan Connected X’ and is a flagship full touch smartwatch from Titan and the launch did very well with the consumers.”

Signing off, Mitra said: “A lot of people have been holding back on their tiny purchases like buying flowers or giving their clothes to the laundry and my appeal to everyone is to let us all get into making that intent to shop like before and let’s get India ticking.”