The good, the bad and the ugly: What 2022 taught marketers

From the omicron wave and lockdown at the beginning of the year to the Russia-Ukraine war, inflation and global economic downturns, 2022 has not been a good year for everyone in the marketing and media world. 

Many view the year as the first “normal” year post pandemic in which businesses and consumers sentiments returned to pre-Covid levels. It has been a year when performances of the brands that boomed during the pandemic were tested. Marketing strategies evolved quickly in 2022. Brands gravitated towards influencer marketing posing more faith in content creators than celebrity endorsers. The massive churns kept marketers on their toes.

e4m reached out to some of the top marketers in the industry, asking how will they remember year 2022, and which platform, they think, can give the maximum ROI in today’s times. Take a look at what they said.

Rajiv Dubey, Head-Media, Dabur India Ltd

After two years of Covid-19 lockdowns and restrictions, one hoped that this year would bring some relief. But that did not really happen as the year began with omicron in January followed by Ukraine war in February. The war led to inflation, resulting in lower demand for certain categories. The holiday season was tepid, and one hopes that as inflation eases, volume growth will settle into the high single digits in the coming months. However, automobile, travel, airlines, hotel industry folks laughed their way to the bank. 

Similarly, growth in the television industry in terms of viewership was negative. In 2022, the consumption of television has gone down as compared to earlier two years. Bad news for television meant that advertising on digital grew leaps and bounds and saw almost 90% growth over last year’s numbers. As more money moved into the performance side of the business, one is seeing slowdown/rationalisation of spends in app-based businesses, e-com, edutech and downfall of crypto economies. Digital business, however, is still likely to grow in low double digits next year. 

Platform giving best ROI: Influencer marketing has seen massive growth in the last few years, that’s likely to grow even bigger. While it's difficult to predict what will work better in terms of ROI, I sincerely hope that sports starts to give better ROI.

Dipali Patwa, Group Head, Brand, Digital and Community, Fabindia 

This year has been the year of the customer who is the creator. Content marketing, more so than ever before, has been driven by the consumer. The business of advertising and marketing has been and will continue to be more diverse, inclusive and connected to real customer needs. Marketing has moved beyond branding and advertising and brands are adapting building great customer experiences and engaging them for their longer term loyalty. Post pandemic, 2022 has altered consumers’ behaviours and attitudes, upending brands’ marketing strategies and plans. 

There are five central disruptive shifts that have influenced consumers’ attitudes, engagement and behaviours-digital & mobile shopping, marketing localization, experience-led retail & personalization at scale, live and conversational commerce, social accountability and sustainability and rise of the crib economy. 

Platform for best ROI: Seamless customer experience from initial interest to customer service after sale, a customer-focused culture throughout the customer journey; a business that delivers quality experience across all channels is more likely to deliver the ROI. Simply put, focus on “word of mouth” and “real life customer service” but using digital tools and data to engage the consumers in a more meaningful way and help solve their needs. Simple right! 

Maneesh Krishnamurthy, Marketing Head-Eyecare Division, Titan Company

This year, it was back to brand love. 2022 saw brand building and storytelling making a comeback. The top concerns expressed by marketers was the rising costs of new customer acquisition and over-indexation on performance marketing. Brand budgets came back after a two-year hiatus and the conversation to build successful moats through brand love became acceptable once again. 

Also, this year, brand endorsers were not just celebs. The trend of founders and consumers featuring in advertising took a big leap.

Platforms giving best ROI: Affiliate channels (PhonePe, Paytm, Jio and GooglePay) trumped social media (Google and Facebook) in new consumer efficiency. We were also surprised by the continued efficiency of SMS over WhatsApp in customer retention. 

Naveen Murali, Head of Marketing, Pepperfry

The last two years have witnessed fast-track growth in advertisements online. The rise of influencer content, short-format videos, conversational commerce has all paved a way for limitless possibilities for brands to explore new formats and engage with audiences almost anytime, anywhere. 

At Pepperfry this year, we reached out to our consumers across channels, be it TV, outdoor, digital, audio streaming platforms or others, depending on the campaign. Our Diwali 2022 campaign, ‘Pepperfry Meme Superstars’ with brand ambassadors Kareena Kapoor Khan and Saif Ali Khan was a first-of-its-kind 360-degree campaign where we brought about this amalgamation of the online and offline world, through a ‘MemeVerse’ concept. 

Platform giving best ROI: Digital should continue its bullish run given the higher visibility on returns and in general, the higher ROI. Within digital too, it would be interesting to see how brands capitalize beyond the regular SEM and shopping channels. Influencer-led advertising is also expected to become larger and at the same time, take better shape as the norms fall into place. It would also be hopefully the year where we figure out how to capitalize and monetize the newer channels better, for example metaverse. The surprise I think could be from traditional formats reinventing themselves, offering better tracking and thereby better ROI. 

Pragya Bijalwan - Chief Marketing Officer, Crompton Greaves Consumer Electricals 

The year has been both a challenging and exciting one at the same time. After two years, people started stepping out of their homes, festivities went back to pre-covid times and life returned back to normalcy. However, the Ukraine war, inflation and global slowdown weigh down overall business sentiments. Nevertheless, as an organization, we remained committed towards investing in brand building initiatives across all our key categories.

We were active on impact property in India; IPL as well as top channels on TV in key genres across India during the key summer season. We have increased our spends on digital platforms significantly, knowing that more than 80% of information seeking is happening online while a large part of the sales may still be through the traditional channels.  

On digital, we significantly increased our presence on high-reach platforms like YouTube, Google Search and Social Media to drive awareness. 

Platform giving best ROI: The number of smart TV and OTT users exceeds 1bn now. With this, the role of connected devices is increasing and advertisers will wisely use it to target relevant consumers with curated content. Data suggests that streamers spend 66 hrs per week to watch video content and 64% pay most attention to ads on streaming services (more than 3X the attention driven by video ads on social and websites). With higher engagement on streaming platforms, the role of CTV will increase and marketers will tend to get higher ROI with the right content.

Tanveer Khan, GM, Brand Marketing, Dunzo

This has been a year of firsts for us when it comes to national campaigns. Earlier, we focused on growing the brand and building the q-commerce category through digital channels & targeting, strong content strategy, and brand communication on select channels and social media. In 2022, we decide to take a step further and be a part of national events such as IPL.

The year also presented the opportunity for us to experiment and learn with campaigns like Fridgesh Coolkarni, QR Code TVC, and Bored Games that garnered success and a lot of brand love, helping us grow the category and business. Through other campaigns like Dunzo Wali Diwali and city-specific campaigns, we learnt consumer preference, shopping behaviour and intent, which we will definitely replicate and scale across India in the coming year.

Platform giving best ROI: There is a massive potential in the regional and HSM (Hindi Speaking Market) space, which is gaining a lot of attention and traction across all age groups and is bound to be a prospect for the coming years. 

The other trend is sports. While cricket is still a very popular sport in our country, other sporting events like kabaddi, badminton, and football are seeing the audience take up a newfound interest in them. These new avenues will open up new doors for marketers to find new niches.