Advertising industry needs to be nimble, no time to wait and watch

Innovations across industry are driving a massive change in customer behaviour, brands need to keep pace, writes K V Sridhar

A walk down the city streets after work-hours these days would depict a very different life being lived by the hardworking labour class from one even barely five years ago. Low-cost smartphones and the telecom revolution has given everyone access to a whole new world of entertainment and information. And that is creating aspiration in a section of society that was never really pulled into (or made a part of) the mainstream economy. 

Smartphones single-handedly have led to a revolution around us. The target groups for companies are evolving, touch points for brands are changing, shopping patterns today are different and accessibility and experience are the new parameters for measuring quality. The point to note is that though, as single units, customers in this segment might not look like making a big change; collectively the migrant population is a force to reckon with. 

Even a small proportion of the 80-million-strong migrant population can collectively change the face of consumption patterns in the country. In the midst of all this, the world of advertising appears to be standing still; it has failed to catch up with the pace of innovation all around. 

It is the accepted norm that as any new path-breaking technological evolution gets accepted by the people, brand powerhouses start adapting themselves to the new normal. They are followed by marketing firms who tweak their strategy as per the brand’s need and then comes the turn of the advertising companies, who move towards the change only when pushed. 

Ad agencies are not pre-empting the changes, nor are they adapting themselves fast enough. In a world speeding forward, agencies are being the laggards. This gap, between the advent of change and the ad agencies adapting to change, could be as much as two years! Enough time to make one irrelevant and get wiped out by what is being termed as ‘Digital Darwinism’.

Look at what’s happening in the industry, many brands are losing their equity and connect with customers and are increasingly being commoditized. Consider the airline industry. The companies have lost their brand value and the entire business resembles a price war zone today. People choose the cheapest flight and are not willing to pay any premium for a brand. 

One of the many reasons for such consumer behaviour is that airlines have failed to (effectively) tell their stories to their consumers. In that, they have failed to keep in step with the changing needs of new media. Once, television was an engaging medium and TV commercials served as effective medium for brand communication. But now, the world has shrunk into the 5.5” mobile screen and brand communicators have not been able to tap that medium effectively yet.

Although social media campaigning and digital marketing are the ‘talk of the town’ these days, we are still a long way behind. Innovators are moving far ahead even as we try to figure out what hashtags and keywords make users click. 

Technology is changing the landscape; the Siris and Cortanas are slowly becoming an integral part of our daily lives. Gadgets are becoming more intuitive and intelligent and chatbots are taking over communication. In such times shouldn’t advertising be moving on at the same pace? How do we integrate a brand with the modern-day J.A.R.V.I.S and F.R.I.D.A.Y, and gain the customer’s mindshare?

Seamless connectivity, accessibility and quick service are no longer a tool for customer satisfaction and retention, they now are hygiene factors; if you’re not quite there, you’re off the set, maybe, forever. Factors like quality, better features, design innovation, though are still relevant, but they are not the only ones that would differentiate one brand from another, simply because there are so many offering the same. 

To find a place in the customer’s top of the mind recall we need the brand communication to be an experience, one that puts customers at ease and merges into their lifestyles perfectly. The message needs to be unified at various brand touch points, from the customer support service to the UI experience.

A big revolution that awaits us in the very near future is Internet of Things, or IOT. We’re talking about a world where not just our phones and tablets but even cars, refrigerators, air conditioners would all be intelligent enough to know just what we need. These devices become store houses of data, giving novel insights into customer’s buying pattern, preferences, lifestyle and choice drivers: data that was previously unobtainable. The marketers will have several opportunities to deliver more relevant communication to consumers and it might not be in any ad-format we know as of now. 

We’re heading towards an unpredictable era. Is the advertising industry ready for such a change, from being just a communicator to being an integral part of the service design and orchestrating a brand campaign? We need to gear up and participate in this evolution, as the strategy guru Peter Drucker put it, “The best way to predict the future is to create it.”

(The author is founder and chief creative officer of ad agency Hyper Collective). This is the final part of a series on media, brands, advertising and marketing that looks back on 2016 to look forward to 2017