Marketers Have To Be Agile & Nimble

Subhrangshu Neogi, director – Marketing & Brand at Religare Enterprises, is the chief custodian of brand Religare. He is responsible for its overall architecture, positioning and consistency across all platforms. With the consumer behaviour evolving rapidly, he tells Shubhi Tandon how the marketers need to adapt to the demands of the smarter consumers

How has consumer behaviour made brands more conscious of their marketing strategies and changed the marketing story for brands in India?
Consumers today are smarter, savvier and more networked than ever before. They are strides ahead of brands and brands more often than not, really need to up their game and play catch up. Essentially, this phenomenon coupled with changing competitive and regulatory landscapes across categories are changing the context in which brands exist, breathe and flourish. The mandate for marketers and brands therefore is to be far more agile and nimble and have a higher degree of adaptability to rapidly changing landscapes around them. Marketers need to quickly shift gears and start unlearning and be open to learning every day, realign and revisit conventional thinking and structures.

How would you define marketing in the financial services segment?
Financial services marketing is all about building and maintaining long-term trust. The category also allows you to be closer to your consumers and therefore gives you this exciting opportunity to have better, sharper insights and real-time data. Given low product differentiation, the big challenge for marketers is to use these insights and data to deliver a consistently superlative value proposition to customers; quicker and better than their competitors backed by an innovative experiential wrap. Marketing in this category is about managing three key levers across the spectrum — customers, channel (given that the category is channel led to a large extent) and colleagues (internal staff, the real drivers of brands).

How is the Indian market exploring avenues in digital media as against traditional media?
Digital is now a way of life; it is all pervasive in the way we lead our lives. Digital marketing will continue to grow, given that consumers are moving rapidly in that direction with adoption and consumption of digital content across screens, and more so on mobile. However, it cannot replace traditional media. Both will continue to coexist and have their own place in the mix. The beauty and the exciting part about digital is that everything is completely measurable.

Going forward, what are some of the key areas you will be looking at and how will you be changing your marketing strategy to explore the same?
We have shifted from an ATL heavy marketing strategy to a more ROI-driven strategy in the last few years. As a brand, we have and will continue depending on the business case of each segment, to rely on both traditional approaches coupled with new media. We strongly believe in earned media and content-led innovations in order to be contextually relevant to all consumer segments we cater to.

(This story was published in BW | Businessworld Issue Dated 14-12-2015)