Blending traditional and new-age marketing for brand success

New Delhi: Seminal arguments, no heavy jargon, and a distinguished panel that loves building brands and talking about it - says an audience at Goafest Day 2 Knowledge Seminar titled Marketing Adaptability: Blending Traditional And New-Age Marketing For Brand Success.

The panel featured Chandan Mukherjee, Director & Executive Vice-President at Nestle; Shubhranshu Singh, Chief Marketing Officer of Tata Motors Commercial Vehicles; Sukhleen Aneja, Chief Executive Officer of The Good Glamm Group; Sandeep Karwa, Vice President, Monetisation at Flipkart; and Zairus Master, Chief Business Officer at Honasa Consumer. 

Singh had a quirky yet informative take on elasticity in marketing and said, “For early humans, if there was a bush that was shaking and if you went behind it to discover what it was, you became a protein snack for something which was stronger than you. So basically, the gene pool that was left behind is the one that believes if there is a bush that is shaking, you run in the opposite direction.” In other words, it is the very nature of humans to stay away from change and the entire human gene pool has become very conditioned to accept what's working.

As the session progressed, panellists brought out distinctions between performance marketing and brand marketing. But what binds all of these approaches is the idea of creation. Zairus Master, the Honasa executive said, “Eventually there is one objective - to create a brand, and one action which is to create a business.” Adding to this, he gave the example of how Honasa uses ‘search’ as a tool to evaluate their performance, and both traditional and new age forms of marketing impact search equally.

In agreement, Mukherjee said, “The fundamentals remain the same, while also having a good understanding of the consumer along with the goals and objectives of the brand being built.” Thus, urging marketers to redefine what they want to achieve and use a blend of both old and modern marketing techniques for the seamless integration of different aspects of marketing.

But there's this challenge of resource allocation between new-age and traditional forms of marketing. As the world of marketing is moving ahead, it feels like the availability of tools is not able to keep up with this pace; it remains limited is what a few of the panellists agreed to. 

However, Mukherjee and Aneja contradicted this. Aneja said, “No, I'm not sure if the tools can't keep up. If the consumer itself evolves, then you don't have a choice but to ensure that you keep pace. Otherwise, you lose.”

Commenting on whether AI could take the job of all the marketers sitting in this room or not, Singh had an intriguing reply when he said, “I don't think jobs are threatened but the pace of change will accelerate faster than ever before. You are in an aeroplane that flies you from Japan to India, you know, one steel tube that is carrying 400 people and people will endlessly complain about how their sandwich was soggy or how the air hostess was rude to them. No one is interested in the underlying technology. I think our understanding of AI is deeply superficial and AI is no different than the arrival of the microwave to the gas tuner.”

Further into the seminar, Master addressed the prevalent issue of emerging brands being overly fixated on short-term goals, long-term goals, and the apparent divide, weighing on the importance of balancing short-term and long-term objectives. He drew attention to the overarching goal of building brands and the necessity of acting swiftly to achieve business growth. 

Herein, Aneja while addressing the audience spoke, “Fundamentally, if we have to grow, we have to keep adapting and manage the pace of change, while keeping our humility in check.”
 
With a focus on adaptability in an ever-evolving market landscape, the seminar concluded with the speakers sharing their insights on blending time-tested marketing approaches with innovative techniques to stay ahead of the curve. At its core, the seminar embodied ideas that delved into the fusion of traditional and new-age marketing strategies for brand success.