The focus now is on building mental & physical availability: Ajay Dang

It's critical for any brand to understand who their customer is, what they want to achieve, and what the medium can do, said Ajay Dang, President, Head of Marketing, Ultratech - Aditya Birla Group. He was speaking at the e4m TV First Conference on the ‘The Power of TV in Sports’. 

Dang stated that the world has shifted away from a little salesmanship and selling a unique proposition to as many people as possible at the lowest possible cost.

He stated that consumers to whom brands are speaking are human beings, not just wallets, and that when dealing with humans, there are a few facts to be aware of regarding how they make decisions, as this is what brands are attempting to encourage from a business standpoint. 

“A lot of these consumers use not very hardwired excel sheets analysis in terms of making decisions even the most complex decisions in life,” said Dang.  

According to Dang, the current thinking focuses on two major components: building mental availability and building physical availability. Those are the two most important things to consider, rather than the USP, and the efficiency piece is something to consider.

“Most business leaders and marketers forget that you're always dealing with human beings and those are the people that you're trying to nudge. The biggest search engine that you have as consumers is your mind, tap the Google screen later.” 

From a television standpoint, Dang believes three things stand out as strikingly different, which is supported by some numbers and science. The first thing is attention, the second is emotion, and the third is fame, and all of these things are extremely important in terms of increasing mental availability and building the prompt of brand and category when the consumer thinks of a specific problem.

"As attention rises, business results rise as well, with both top of the funnel and bottom of the funnel numbers rising. If you are trying to communicate with humans and build mental availability, attention matters quite a bit.” 

According to Dang, in terms of building long-term brand building, we need to go to media, which is slightly more long-term and more attention driven. “The worry is that on digital less than 85 per cent brands don't cross that two- and a half-a-second threshold in terms of attention span, and therefore that's something that brands have to keep in mind from the objective that they have.” 

He went on to say that brands have been enticed by FOMO, free eyeball staff, having something to talk about with our CFOs, and saying that we have instant measurement that comes our way, and as a result, I believe a lot of advertising has shifted towards short-termism.

“We have focused largely in terms of efficiency rather than effectiveness and harvesting rather than sowing and doing the long-term brand building.”

He further talked about big events like the IPL and said that while there are 22 men playing on the field, you've had almost 200 million people enjoying that same communal experience at the same time, which only a medium-like television can do and therefore television builds a huge amount of fame.

“These three principles - attention, emotion and fame - are embedded into the medium itself.  While numbers might go up in terms of penetration or come down, I think because we are dealing with human beings and because we are dealing with a medium those principles remain the same. Therefore, for the right reason in terms of long-term brand building, there doesn't seem to be an equivalent comparison to television as of now.”