Omnichannel builds a lot more brand love: Shuvadip Banerjee, ITC
The Chief Digital Marketing Officer of ITC Ltd. spoke at the Pitch CMO summit about creating an omnichannel experience and why it was important for brand building
Omnichannel is a great strategy, asserted Shuvadip Banerjee, Chief Digital Marketing Officer, ITC Ltd, at the recently-held Pitch CMO summit in Bengaluru. “We have consumers at the centre and whenever consumers are at the core of any strategic decision, it always yields a significant quantum of positive outcomes.”
Banerjee was speaking on ‘What is omnichannel experience and why is it important for brand building?’
According to Banerjee, because there is an angle of relevance, consistency and seamlessness, it's imperative that it will have a significant effect when it comes to brand building and commercial outcomes.
So why is omnichannel as a marketing strategy great? Banerjee explained that some statistics portrayed that some shoppers come back a number of times, average bill values being higher and there's a lot of advocacy that keeps getting built when it comes to an omni-channel way of working as well as the propensity for a consumer to get retained and hence the angle of loyalty.
He said, “When brands are trying to engage with them at every touch point in the journey, it's likely that you're going to build a stronger brand with a lot more brand love. Having said that, as an FMCG brand like ITC, not like a retailer who has an end-to-end view of the consumer, is it really an easy task when it comes to creating an omni-channel strategy?”
According to Banerjee, it's great in theory. “The engagements that you do with your consumers are not really very easy, especially when there are broken links. As a brand owner, you have an ability to influence and also harness information data to influence further is not always seamless as the word omni channel talks about. It talks about being a seamless consumer journey. So, at ITC we have actually imbibed the concept of omni-channel in various places. We have looked at omni-channel from a consumer care and consumer interaction perspective, commerce and content and brand building.”
In the overall traditional way of understanding consumers, there are a plethora of streams of information that are coming into any organization for that matter for any brand. “It's about how we synthesize and how do we utilize that further to take those important decisions to impact the consumer and hence your business through the journey.”
Further speaking about ITC’s D2C platform he explained that it has a multitude of touch points. For instance, ITC stores have their own website, it's also on ONDC, and on Amazon and Flipkart.
“Now all these touch points for a shopper with respect to ITC and its brands would send enough signals, which we would harness as customer data and will reutilize these in order to achieve acquisitions, retention experience and engaging with consumers even to the extent of building loyalty with the consumer.”
