Digital : As I feel it...

Sheikh Noorul Hassan *

Lately I have delving in the domain of Digital Marketing, Strategy and Media for some time now. For a person with an mass communication background and with eventual progression to B school, understanding, deciphering and more importantly trying to sync with the conventional marketing wisdom, still holds fort for me.

Amongst all the brouhaha about the Digital related noise (news) being created, I have fundamentally found three things that are immutable to digital and digital marketing:

1. It is a means and not an end: In effect Digital will at least for some time remain contextual in nature and not subjugate in its approach. For instance, the origins of Digital coming from Digitisation (product driven, like digitising contents) and Digitalisation (process driven, likes B&FS sector adopting computers in their process automation part) are efforts of the 70's.

Eventually, when the available body of work had been sufficiently digitised and digitalised, the next generation of activities were actionable (result driven), thanks largely to the internet and later with IoT becoming a more used and accepted work based norm. For instance; consider the Entertainment industry.

Before the birth of the multiplexes the single screen theaters relied on projectors that ran a 35mm or a 70mm. With multiplexes came Digital prints in the form of LD's and today we even are talking of live streaming at these multiplexes (albeit to contain piracy).

From marketing perspective too, I see a lot of Digital activity is about integration of digital into the existing framework of things. In it's entirety therefore, Digital will continue to remain a means at least for some time to come. Marketers may take note of that

2. The second aspect of Digital will be about co-creation: About which a lot of it has been discussed and spoken and written. Content on the digital being "user driven" "sponsor driven" and "marketer driven". Hence the convergence of these will continue to happen, but the real takeaway will be learning's from such convergence.

A picture taken of Lalbagcha Raja and posted through a tweet or a Facebook by one of it's subscribers may have implications for marketers or sponsors. The key is "how" and "when" to do it. I think with so much content being generated, content categorisation will be the key and some of the aspects derived from "machine based learning" will help.

In the case of topical messages, such as the one cited above, topical brands or having topical messages would stand to gain most out of it. Or perhaps brands that are positioned on the contextual flavour of festivity, joy, togetherness or any thing that is about bringing the fervour of festivity and people together (a la Coke perhaps, which talks of "Open Happiness") would have relevance to sync it's own content with the user's content, in the above cited scenario of Lalbagcha Raja.

3. The third and final aspect of the Digital deluge is about basics of marketing remaining unchanged: Classical marketing mix (read 4P's) and STP will still continue to remain "HOT" (as basis of marketing strategy) even as marketers are trying to rake themselves up to look at Digital Marketing and integrating that into conventional marketing.

Either for traditional organisations with traditional marketing approaches or for new age companies with new age marketing tools in their armoury, the basics will remain. Big data may move to smart data or marketing managers may be replaced (or replenished) with data scientists. But someone has to take the call. And it has to be the person who is "experiencing" customers everyday.

Maybe touch points to market (read consumers) have increased but deploying them intelligently and strategically will be the challenge. A classical company like ITC versus a more neo classical like Emami to a more contemporary like Paper Boat will deploy digital and it's off shoots in their way, however fundamentally they would still need to segment the market and have a positioning strategy in place and even manage 4P's too...

Therefore, what's the future of Digital and Digital Marketing. Stay grounded and keep a close watch on the consumer, they will provide adequate signals and reasons to adopt the Digital tools and techniques. Not convinced! The Kaan Khajuri Tesan initiative from HUL will tell you about what I am talking about...