Strong brands deliver even during turbulent times: Anand Parameswaran, Kantar

At the exchange4media India Brand Conclave 2023, held in Mumbai on February 28, Anand Parameswaran, Executive Director, Quantitative & Co-lead (West), Insights Division, Kantar, gave a keynote address on 'Brand Building in the Face of Adversity'.

Appositely starting the conversation around what concerns consumers around India, and farther afield, were facing, Parameswaran noted that while the world had passed through the gauntlet with the Covid crisis, people were now concerned about issues such as the war in Ukraine and inflation.

“There is a potential for recession around the world, but not so much in India, which only may see a very small slowdown in terms of GDP numbers. Nearly 92% of consumers have said they are worried about inflation. A recent survey done by Kantar around the time of the Union Budget showed that consumers saw inflation as their biggest concern in India, and this is reflected in the FMCG volumes, which have come down,” he said.

Parameswaran said that brands had some key questions they were asking institutions like Kantar, namely: inflation and consumer perspectives; pricing during inflationary times; going media dark and the impact on the brand; the growth of digital advertising; and whether India and Bharat need differentiated strategies. He then went on to further elucidate each pointer.

Asserting that the tenets of brand building don't really change, Parameswaran referred to the Kantar BrandZ report, published out of India and 30 major markets every year. “We look at strong brands and what we've seen is that strong brands continue to deliver even during turbulent times, they go down less and tend to bounce back much more strongly. So investing in brand building is absolutely critical irrespective of the times we're in currently.”

Looking at equity of brands, he observed that “Equity is a function that drives overall evaluation. We've done studies across multiple brands over long periods and we've seen that brands that improved in their equity have seen a 98% jump in their total brand valuation.”

Two pillars are critical in this: saliency and meaningfulness. While the former referred to the mental availability of the brand in how quickly and easily it came to consumers' minds when they were making a purchase or usage decision; while meaningfulness referred to the extent to which brands can build a clear and consistent emotional connection with their consumers and be seen as delivering their needs.

“Across multiple and reports from around the world, we see that the state of the economy and inflation are in the top three concerns for people. Covid is no longer in the top three. So while people are still spending on essentials and household goods, they may be cutting back on big purchases like new cars. And in India, the situation is still better. This is because in India, there are still only 22 cars per 1000 households, and there is a huge opportunity as this number has risen from 12 only a decade back,” Parameswaran stated.

That being said, even among essential purchases, there was discretion being practiced, whether consumers were using less oil, switching to lower priced brands or even non-brands in certain FMCG categories, meaning brands have to change up strategies to keep up with the evolving needs of consumers.

 This especially applied to digital marketing, with Parameswaran quoting reports of 900 million Indians having regular internet access by 2025, and there would continue to be a large increase in both daily usage of the internet as well as the amount of time spent on it.

He noted that as brands and agencies continued to turn to digital solutions, especially in the realms of Artificial Intelligence, Kantar had developed Link AI, a bleeding edge tech platform “that reliably predicts an ad's in-market success all in under 15 minutes, and is built on the Link database, from 230k+ tests, 10+ years of data, and 35MM+ human interactions, and running on perpetually updated models.”

You can watch the full address here.