Marketing In The Era Of Transformation

Marketers have always been innovative with their new ideas, adapting various channels for their businesses to maximize their visibility to drive sales. The key between the consumers and the businesses is to understand the behavioural pattern, providing creative solutions to attract more sales.

Gaurav Verma, Chief Marketing Officer, Pharmeasy explains the paradigm shift of marketers. “The role of a marketer has fundamentally three aspects to it. One is to understand the consumer and the consumer is changing a lot. We fundamentally deal with medicines and diagnostics. The diabetes of today and the diabetes 10 years ago is completely different. The awareness of health, the need for proactive testing has now completely changed and the way they are thinking about their own health is very different from the pre pandemic. The second part is media. The choices that we had 10 years ago, we made a media plan for 3 things, TV, print & radio. Today it’s like a 100 things. You have to choose between social, influencer, digital, AI etc. and there are bunch of choices to make The third role is internal. The window of the consumer inside of the company boardroom and how we kind of demand the seat on the board has also changed quite a lot. The role remains the same but understanding all the 3 aspects have become more and more critical”, says Verma.

Abhishek Gulyani, CEO, Hill and Crowlton Strategies, raises a question on how startups or companies under INR 10 crore work or what are the ROIs of that stitch or horizon? To which Kamna Hazrati, Founder, KH Advisory, states “In the case of startups, the founder’s mindset is to first create profit and then anything else. That remains a very critical part of the thought process and how we work and function. There is so much pressure to deliver on strict budgets and still create a lot of value and a lot of recall. It is not only for immediate sales but also create a pipeline for future. So PR & communications, it is a marriage of data plus design. With data we are calculating a lifetime value of customer so the marketers are looking at the data, day in and out but all of this combined with a lot of storytelling with the value which we are creating, the purpose of the company.”

Conversing on how important is physical world in these digital times and are they still relevant in planning. Hazrati mentions, “Primarily looking at where your target audience is and how are they consuming, there is a mix of retail plus digital”. Verma further adds, “The synergy of physical and online gives the best ROI. Being omnichannel is very critical and helps us bring the trust of the consumer.

The discussion was held at the IPRCCA forum on 5th May, 2023 at New Delhi, India.