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IAA Summit: Unlocking super-connected world with content, connection & culture: Unilever's Rahul Welde

Welde stressed on leveraging the mobile medium and spoke about how “speed is the new currency” for brands at the third day of the IAA Silver Jubilee Summit in Kochi

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IAA Summit: Unlocking super-connected world with content, connection & culture: Unilever's Rahul Welde

IAA Summit: Unlocking super-connected world with content, connection & culture: Unilever's Rahul Welde

Welde stressed on leveraging the mobile medium and spoke about how “speed is the new currency” for brands at the third day of the IAA Silver Jubilee Summit in Kochi

BestMediaInfo Bureau | Kochi | September 8, 2015

Rahul Welde Rahul Welde

The IAA Silver Jubilee Summit saw another terrific presentation from Rahul Welde, Vice-President - Media, Unilever Asia, Africa, Middle East, Turkey and Russia, who spoke about aspects of brands, advertising and communication in the context of a super-connected and superfast world.

Beginning with the pace at which the world is changing due to digital and technology, Welde remarked that one of the biggest impacts is that the world has become super-connected, which is set to grow more in next 20 years with one person connected to more than five devices. “From a marketing perspective, this has resulted in an extraordinarily complicated ecosystem. The reality is that we do not know whether we are actually moving towards some destination or is it a dead end. In my judgement, nobody in the world can claim to have mastered this connected world and really be a super marketer in this connected world,” said Welde.

According to him, “Crafting brands for life is Unilever's approach towards marketing, where we put people first and it is about looking at people especially in today's context as individuals and human beings first and then possibly looking at them as consumers. Our second approach is to building brand love. We believe that if you achieve that, market share gains, sales growth, profit growth, etc., fall into place automatically. In order to achieve brand love, we need to unlock the magic in some ways for you so that you can experience our brands in a very different way.”

Content took centerstage of Welde's presentation, as he emphasied that the centre of marketing was content. “What is it that you have to say to the people is really very important. This is followed by how you say it. With the rapidly changing ecosystem, the content is exploding around us at an unthinkable pace. This puts a huge degree of pressure, challenges and opportunities on us as marketers to play in this space. We need to think of brands as publishers, content creators and curators, and not as brands alone.”

Assuring the ad community that Unilever will continue to spend on advertisement, Welde said  that the group would spend significant amount of time, energy and resource investment in the space of content through a new outfit – Hindustan Unilever Content.

Welde's second focus was connecting with the consumers, and according to him, mobile is a medium which is accessed by most of the people in India and across the world. To leverage the medium, Hindustan Unilever recently came up with the Kan Khajura Tesan campaign, which is perhaps the most awarded campaign in the history of Indian advertising. “However, that is just a beginning to establish the first connection, but the real ambition from a marketing standpoint has to be to move from these connections to building real relationships with people,” he added.

According to Welde, “Underpinning both content and connections is culture. Everything else may follow if we make the culture work.”

He also spoke about the importance of speed in marketing, be it reacting to a customer's problem or reacting to a situation or development in order to leverage a brand's visibility. “Speed is the new currency and we have been benefitted by reacting fast. 'Vaseline bat ad' and 'Sure deodorant ad' during soccer season are some of the examples of how speed works in favour of your brand. This applies to reacting to consumers' problems as well at lightening speed,” he concluded.

Info@BestMediaInfo.com

Info@BestMediaInfo.com

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