What makes a good marketer?
a. Deep knowledge and an intuitive understanding of the economic/social/cultural milieu in which he or she operates. Marketing is often a response to these factors and an awareness of this helps. In the long run, good marketers are those who can achieve enduring differentiation for their brands and this is not a factor of large budgets and volumes of activities.
How does one sustain their brand image?
It comes down to 3 things from a marketer’s perspective:
a. Audience Knowledge: All enduring brands are built on a thorough understanding of their audiences and the ability to build a timeless relationship with them.
b. Consistency: Think of all the brands you love. You will notice that more than anything else you love the consistency you get from them – in product quality, in service, in support. It’s reassurance and is no different from any other human relationship!
c. Exposure: This has become relevant now. As media gets fragmented and platforms diffused, it’s important for marketers to be able to reach their audiences consistently through diverse channels.
Where do you think Marketing is headed?
Marketing is going through a phase of regeneration and renewal. The reasons are aplenty – rise of millennials, explosion of information and accessibility to information, attitudinal shifts, rise of a sharing economy, democratization of the production process with customers coming to the centre, disruption of traditional business models as we know them and a lot more. We see that traditional methods even though they work are generating lower ROIs compared to innovative methods. Focus has shifted from volumes to value and a more intimate engagement with audience groups and customers that is highly customized. It has impacted the profession at the level of skills required to do the job, the organization of a traditional marketing team as we know it and increasing blurring of distinction between business teams, marketers and other functions. The collaboration called for today in executing a marketing campaign is unprecedented and teams that operate in silos and give up on learning won’t last long. These are challenging times but as I say, it would regenerate and renew the profession like never before.
Do social media channels really help marketers?
They do. More so during the awareness/promotion phase than any other. This is also subject to the domain or a sector a marketer operates in. There can be no uniform way to use social media and marketers should adopt horses for courses attitude than anything else. But Social Media is great to build on your brand community, user networks and also a great listening platform which is almost like self-generated research! You cannot avoid social media, how you use it depends upon the nature of your business and your brand.
A technology that you foresee as being useful to a marketer of the future?
I feel marketers are just skimming the surface when it comes analytics. Data Science, Analytics, Predictive Modelling will force marketers to relook at their campaigns and build more discipline and rigor into what they do. We are living in a very interesting age where Technology is shaping behaviour and attitudes which in turn is again fuelling tech innovation and adoption. This mutually reinforcing phenomenon requires marketers to study more, be ever vigilant and prepare marketing strategies that are dynamic – which is hard to do in a traditional business environment forcing organizations to adopt agile teams structureless environment and become nimble. To make sense of this environment data would become more and more important and also the ability to mine more and more data will be sought after skill. What we call analytics now is only at a very superficial level, what is about to come will seem more like sci-fi now but is going to disrupt the profession like never before!
Madhurjya Kotoky is member of Autodesk Inc.’s global Business Strategy Marketing team. Madhurjya loves to create narratives that build an emotional connection to brands. In his current role, he heads the Brand & Communications function for the company’s India & SAARC operations. Besides work, nature, painting and literature keeps him inspired. He is an alumnus of the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, Syracuse University, New York.
Follow him @pubdip.
