Paul Writer launches Innovative Marketer Dialogue, 
Video interview series with CMOs highlights marketing best practices
Deepali Naair
Chief Marketing Officer
Mahindra Holidays and Resorts India
On Big Data, Mobile and Social and how is it being used by Britannia?
There are three things here that we will focus on – one is big data, second is social and third is mobile. How have used them and whether we have found them useful. Let me first talk to you about big data. Big data offers us an opportunity for us to do better analytics and do better micro-segmentation, we have specifically found this useful when we have used this for our member database. We have 1.7 lakh members who are going to be with us for years to come. We offer a 25 year product and therefore the rich data that we have from them on their holidays, on their holidaying pattern offers us an opportunity to make relevant offers to them just before they want to holiday. We know where they want to holiday, with whom they want to holiday, with their family members? What are the kind of things they like to do for their holidays?
To tell you the success of this program, I must share with you that we have open rates on our emails to the level of 22-25% and that is quite unheard of in the financial services industry where I spent 8 years earlier. Firstly, this has only happened because holidays is a matter of interest to everybody. Secondly, we offer them specific opportunities for them to holiday with us without offers, discounts or contests and still our open rates for emails has been very good. Therefore we feel big data and analytics is a great opportunity for us. For the youngsters who want to get into marketing there is message here; other than brand, apart from marketing concepts that they learn, they need to up their data interpretation skills, they need to up their analytics skill especially if they want to make a career in services marketing.
Now lets look at the other two trends which is social and mobile. Social is a brilliant trend for us because the one thing that people like to talk about in social media today is their holidays and that is a great opportunity for us. We have also found and have been able to do a match up to understand more than 50% of our customers are on Facebook where we have the Id’s and other information available. We use FB customer audiences extremely well.
“Social is a brilliant trend for us because the one thing that people like to talk about in social media today is their holidays and that is a great opportunity for us. We have also found and have been able to do a match”
We’ve also looked at our data space which comes from social to see that 90% of the comments that we get actually are from Facebook in India as of now so that’s the one that we focus on. The other great thing that we managed to do in social is the online reputation management piece where we have a close relationship with our customer service team and our social media team and within minute during working hours we are able to respond to customer’s mentions and enquiries within minutes and that has truly delighted our customers even when they are complaining. There are opportunities even when they complain and this has been a real remarkable thing for us. Of course we track sentiments, negative mentions, and positive mentions as well but the closure that we manage to get within minutes on social media is an opportunity for us to demonstrate that collaboration through the organizations is what will take you through in social media in future.
Mobile is going to be a trend in the future for us and we truly recognize that. This year we are actually evaluating how to increase our customer’s usage of mobile when they are interacting with us. This is another factor we are going to focus on.
