Paul Writer launches New Age Marketing , 
Video interview series of CXO’s highlighting best practices
Atul Chand
Chief Executive- Lifestyle Retailing Business
ITC Ltd.
On the role of social media.
Social media to my mind is a two-way communication as the brands have to converse with the consumers plus the users of social media who may or may not be your consumer. While, one aspect of social media is to build reach the other aspect would be fundamentally more important as we would need to create qualitative content. So brands have to respond to what consumers are saying on the social media. We need to create content which is appropriate to the social media and various digital platforms hence being able to engage with the consumers; listening to the chatter and do something about it so that it favorably impacts your brand is imperative. One good example would be that at the last Wills Lifestyle India Fashion Week which is essentially an on-ground event we leveraged technology and gave opportunity to personalize the content that people were seeing at the fashion week. This way they were able to create their own content, place it on their social media channels thus we were able to take the event away from the confines of an on-ground event and into the digital space. Its personalisation, it’s participative, and it takes you away and out of the confines of on-ground kind of an event. We have also done things like having a Wills Face like Gul Panag and Farah Ali Khan during the Fashion Week to create conversations. The whole thing is to be able to feed into digital platforms in synch with what consumers are looking for and then it makes it more participative and inclusive.
“While, one aspect of social media is to build reach the other aspect would be fundamentally more important as we would need to create qualitative content.”
