S Swaminathan: How to market real time

Brands have seized demonetisation as an opportunity to connect with customers

Events often play an important role in building relevance of brands and reinforce their benefits to the customers. As marketing automation and big data become available, the ability of brands to build near real-time event triggers has become possible today much more than ever before. Many brands have taken the recent demonetisation event as an opportunity to build stronger connect with customers. Also, the brands that have been proactive to the changing on-ground situations over the last four weeks due to demonetisation are the ones that have found stronger connect with customers rather than those that used this as a tactical communication opportunity.

While Paytm is a great story of a brand that has taken advantage of this event through overnight advertising messages across mainline dailies, there are a lot of others that have taken advantage of this momentum creatively. The simple rules of real-time content marketing for events like demonetisation are — a) agility b) relevance c) repeatability d) resonance and empathy e) imagination.

Big Bazaar, the retail store chain, has been the most agile and swift to take advantage of real-time content marketing during demonetisation. What’s been impressive is that they have come up with a series of messages, as a follow-up measure, which has not been done by too many. They were probably the first brand to announce on Twitter, on the night of November 8, that their stores will be open till 11.50pm. They followed this up with cashless sale in their stores and finally started dispensing cash at their stores through special counters. The messaging inside and outside the store was extremely visible and this has contributed to their footfalls as it resonated with some of the pains customers were going through.

Uber was another brand that used this effectively for customer service rather than just marketing messages — reinforcing itself as a brand that cares. They were immediately on Twitter and the mobile app urging customers to carry smaller denominations or requesting them to move to digital payment methods.

The financial brand that was alert with real-time content marketing was Axis Bank with its Axis Pay — a Unified Payment Interface app. Axis dominated with this app through a series of messages reinforcing their offline and online presence. The key to their real-time marketing messaging was the relevance of the product to the customers. Kotak Bank also did a phenomenal job with their offline campaign right after the event.

If one treated the government as a brand, they used demonetisation effectively for real-time content marketing. The messaging post-demonetisation including the PM’s messages on mobile app, well-published polls and results, seeking feedback from citizens and shaping the response from their side for a nation of our scale was quite interesting.

A lot of brands created one-off or similar messages like Zomato, Mobikwik, Freecharge, Nestlé, Nilkamal and Durex — the differentiation in content was relatively poor or one-off. The ones that were first off-the block caught all the attention and the rest became blind spots. Those that were far more dynamic in their content over the weeks since November 8 also caught attention as they built resonance with the situation on the ground rather than one-off messages.

The key to real-time content marketing is not just agility but continuity. Brands that are able to build this across media with near real-time creativity and relevance are the ones that will win customer attention.