'Brands should stop treating data with one-size-fits-all approach'

At the recent Pitch CMO Summit, Delhi edition, a panel discussion on 'Brand Love: Going Beyond Algorithms’ was held.

The panel included-- Amit Sethiya, Head, Marketing, Syska Group; Milind Pathak, Chief Business Officer, Route Mobile; Narayan Sundararaman, Head of Marketing, Bajaj Auto; Nicholas Kontopoulos, Asia Pacific Regional Head of Marketing, Adobe DX Commercial; and Simeran Bhasin, VP - Brands and New Ventures, Licious.

Sharing her thoughts on how marketers can look at building emotional connect in a data-driven world, Simeran Bhasin underlined that we have to look at numbers as a story and fathom the human emotions behind them, else one will be reading the data wrong.

“The world of brands is something that cannot work without human connection. When you look at any data, you need to understand the human connection and the human emotions behind the numbers. All the numbers tell us a story, however, if you miss on that story, you will be reading the data wrong.

Simeran also underlined that brands need to look beyond the reams of data and proactively seek customer satisfaction by reaching out to them irrespective of what data says at times.

When asked about how to bring data and emotions together in any marketing strategy, Narayan Sundararaman of Bajaj Auto said that we need to stop treating data with a ‘one size fits all’ approach.

“We are inundated with data and in my experience, a lot of this data is a lot of noise. In addition, data at the end of the day is a set of signals. However, we need not broad brush it and believe one size fits all. I think relevance is very important. For example, e-commerce platforms and social media platforms thrive on data, but in sectors like ours (auto) I don’t think we need to get overwhelmed with data”, explained Sundararaman.

When asked about the rise of emotional algorithms to understand customers better, Sundararaman stated that he does not see an algorithm replacing all aspects of the marketing system. He called it “realm of fiction” which would fail at understanding the complexity of human emotions and messaging.

While there is no denying that big data comes with big noise, however avoiding that noise is what effective marketers have to look at.

“We are swimming in a pool of data and there is so much around it. The challenge today for all of us is how we become that signal which helps customers. Technology alone will not solve your problems, though delivering a personal messaging at scale is now possible by using technology but the human connection will always remain the most important one in filtering the noise in data”, stated Nicholas Kontopoulos.

Amit Sethiya of Syska spoke about combining data points to make emotional messaging possible. In his view algorithms at times can give marketers some unwanted assumptions apart from the valuable insights about their customers and it is the task of the marketer to differentiate between the two.

“We marketers make things complex at times because we believe we have done something very meaningful. The fact is that data can give you insights but it can give you assumptions as well which may not be the true picture of the customer. There is a need to differentiate between the two. Also, right now marketing as a function is stressed because we are chasing RoI. Everybody wants results to happen in no time, and with this nature of engagement, our approach has become transactional, I think we need to look beyond it.

Speaking about the future of algorithms where it can read human emotions better than what it does currently, Milind Pathak, said that despite the advances in technology and the improved emotional quotient of algorithms, the human connection is here to stay.

“Human interventions will never be removed but certain tasks becoming robotised is a reality which we have to accept”, shared Pathak.