It gives me immense pleasure to have produced this whitepaper on behalf of DDB Mudra Group, in partnership with BW Businessworld, to showcase the importance of Online Reputation Management (ORM) for brands in today’s everchanging consumer journeys. 

What the pandemic did to the world was unprecedented. World economies had to change gears to not only ensure continuity to businesses but also to ensure brand love is maintained, in the new way of engagement. This new way, that predominantly took place in the cyber world via social channels, was pushed forward as India witnessed the recent second wave. 

While several progressive sectors such as banking, telecom and entertainment had already taken the route of addressing consumer grievances through social channels, brands started understanding the importance of staying connected to the new age consumer whose consumer journeys were no more linear. 

Identifying the chatter happening in the social media space through listening tools and creating content strategies that resonate positively for the brand to ensure they remain top of mind and in good stead in this new world of engagement, has become a business imperative. Brands have also realized how social space can bring down their image in no time.

There are several such cases we have seen in the recent past where ORM took massive importance to control damage, where there was consistent proactivity shown depending on the damage control one had to undertake, which largely was a reactive approach to a situation on hand. However, there are several proactive approaches too that only builds continuous confidence in the consumer’s mind, helping build affinity and love. This leads to not just advocacy that improves consideration scores, but also influence peers that helps in conversion. 

We at DDB, have been at the epicentre on some such situations, and with our deep understanding of the space, have delivered on some stellar work with some of our clients. 

This whitepaper will bring out tremendous learnings and will help marketers to not just understand the importance of ORM and social listening but will now know how strategies get driven from what your consumers are saying about you, thereby bringing ORM into mainstream of marketing. 

I hope the efforts put by the teams at DDB Mudra and BW Businessworld & BW Marketing World is well appreciated by you all, and this paper acts as a fuel on some of the pending decisions on ORM which you would like to consider closing the loop on.