‘Marketers are only caretakers of the brand, it Is owned by consumers’

Social media is definitely something that brands and marketers take seriously but the data and insights of social listening are equally important. At the e4m Martech India Conference 2022 on Strategies to Make Social Listening Work for Brands, panellists gathered to discuss the difference between social listening, analytics, and intelligence; the tools and technologies for social listening; what to measure and how to use social listening data, among other things.

The session chair for the discussion was Ruhail Amin, Senior Editor, e4m & BW Businessworld while the members of the panel were Sarthak Seth, SVP, Chief Sales & Marketing Officer, Tata Realty; Ashish Tiwari, CMO, Home Credit India; Lokendra Saini, COO, Ease my Trip; Gagan Arora, SVP Brand and Marketing, Pristyn Care and Saurabh Agrawal, SVP Analytics and CRM, Lenskart.

Opening the session by talking about how consumers are strengthening the brand, Seth shares: “Social listening is a necessary evil today. Two decades ago, the best as consumers, at maximum we could have influenced at a ratio of 1:50, but today, every consumer can influence between 1000 to 50,000 people. The impact itself is humongous. As brands, none of us can deny what the consumer has to say about us across channels. One of the most important things is to categorise and understand what the consumer has to say and to implement that.”

Adding on to this, Saini added, “As a B2C focussed e-commerce brand it becomes extremely important to understand the consumer sentiments about your brand. The job becomes really tough when you do not have an USP - at the end of the day we are selling a flight ticket which is also being sold elsewhere - so how do you build that differentiation becomes important and for us; it’s only consumer experience. One of our invaluable insights and findings is the brandtalk that happens without mentions of our handles or hashtag.”

Building on this with insights from the healthcare industry, Arora shared that healthcare is a sensitive domain and social listening is like a room full of mirrors where one can not switch off the lights. He added “As a healthcare brand we have to be gentle while hearing and I know that this is my character but this character has been aligned with my consumer and this social listening validates that. It is also important to justify our brand values and social media channels are the feedback on that.”

According to Agrawal, Lenskart as a D2C brand has a different perspective on social - having data coming from these platforms is a good source to understand shifts in patterns. He added: “There is communication that the brand does on different platforms and we measure the feedback on this by engagement. Then there is user-generated content that comes in and a lot of this has helped us understand what people want in a low-repeat category like ours. We are trying to create communities out there where we can expose our product.”

Talking about the brand story he represents, Tiwari shared: “Social media is only about enabling 500 Mn media houses out of people giving them an outlet to speak. Platforms on a honeycomb model have different characteristics. The way I look at it is in three parts: Man, Matter and Machine. First, marketers are only caretakers of the brand and it is owned by consumers who are talking about it on social media. It's not about social media, it’s about processes. People are manipulating your brand in various ways than you can imagine and the marketer needs to start looking at that the thing is there is no tool to monitor that.”