The minority of touch points actually deliver majority of impact: Soumya Mohanty, Kantar

The exchange4media Group hosted the third edition of the MarTech India Conference last week in Gurgaon under the theme - "Driving Digital Transformation Through MarTech". The day-long summit saw top industry leaders share some key MarTech insights. 

Soumya Mohanty, Managing Director and Chief Client Officer - South Asia, Insights Division, Kantar, spoke on “Leveraging new touchpoints and communication in a changed customer journey”.

She explained how marketers could maximise the use of touch points in a seamless way in the ever-evolving digital world. Mohanty affirmed that digital was going to explode in the next three to four years with increasing internet users and more households adopting smart TVs.

“We are expected to reach 900 million internet users by 2025, while we are about 622 right now. So that's exponential growth. Over the next three or four years, we are expected to touch 500 million, which is higher than the population of us, that's about 48% growth. So these are real big numbers in terms of how digital is going to explode. By 2025, 50% of urban homes will have smart TVs, it's just 30 million households right now that have smart TVs. What that means is our number of touch points and the way those touch points are going to interact with us is going to absolutely balloon.”

Speaking about digital strategy, ROI and the challenges of the changed customer journey for marketers, Mohanty shared, “The fact is digital strategy works within an overall marketing strategy. And your budgets are linked to how much the overall marketing budgets are. The questions on marketing budgets are going to become even more important as we go forward and 5G is going to provide the infrastructure, which will create an absolutely connected digital environment. So from my Kirana store, to my television, mobile and everything will be connected. We talk about a lot of these social listening stacks, etc, but the fact is that the walls are going to become bigger and bigger. There is no process today that can actually follow a consumer through the entire journey because you will always hit a wall. 

“Amazon, Facebook and Google will have their own data, odd players will have their own data. And you will have to choose which truth to believe. So that single source of truth that the Holy Grail is not going to happen. In fact, it is going to become even more difficult to have that Holy Grail. And that's where it's important to have a consumer in view of this entire complex landscape. The minority of touch points actually deliver the majority of impact. So about 20% of the touch point delivers the maximum impact. So it needs to do a few things, but to do it very well is extremely important and therefore the need to be very judicious about where you invest your money is going to be extremely important,” she added further.

Earlier, the customer journey, being a linear one, was easy to understand as compared to the non-linear journey of today due to the digital outburst, she said while citing an example of a beauty consumer. “There used to be a very linear journey for beauty consumers earlier. There was consideration to buy something, followed by an evaluation phase. For instance, if I want to buy a skin cream, I will evaluate multiple brands that are available. There is a purchase moment and post-purchase experience whether I'm happy or I'm not happy. And if I'm happy I'll probably buy the same brand again. If I'm not happy I'll switch brands. It was much easier to understand and follow this journey. Now this journey has completely changed. This journey today is extremely non-linear. So it actually starts online. I discovered a trend and I had some ingredients that got spoken about in one of the communities that I'm a part of. And then I go deeper into it and discover something else. I end up on Nykaa’s Page, learn something more and search for it on Myntra and I just go on and end up still buying it offline. So I may not buy it online, but in nine out of ten cases that journey is getting influenced in some form or the other.”

She further highlighted that the impact of digital touch points has actually increased from 36% to 49% in 2017 to 2021 while sharing that the balance between inclusiveness and receptivity is extremely important. “That's the scale of increase of the impact of digital just for the different touch points. Also, the span of attention has gone from 12 seconds to eight seconds now. So that is the kind of time frame that you have to actually make an impact. And this is an interesting point, which comes from a global survey that we do which is called ‘The Media Reaction Survey’. What it does is, it meets marketers across the world and tries to understand how they see the equity of various online platforms. What that means is that the consumer is positively or negatively predisposed to that platform in their view. And so this shows that the more intrusive advertising is, the lower is its equity, the lower is the equity that it delivers, but inclusiveness is needed for part two. So that balance between inclusiveness and receptivity becomes extremely important.”