Brand Activation | ‘The future is consumer specific not location specific’

‘While we learn only 10 per cent of what we read, 20 per cent of what we hear and 30 per cent of what we see; we learn fully 80 per cent of what we experience’ – William Glasser.

A deluge of competitive messaging is being launched at the consumer at every touch point: @home, @work @Play; information today is available on the go. As a reaction to this, the consumer, on the other hand, has matured to demand higher quality, better service and more importantly, customisation. The outcome, consumers have become research oriented. This heightened intelligent consumerism, coupled with intense competition from domestic as well as international brands, all more or less claiming similar core product values in their messaging and of course, the thunderstorm of recession, has left little breathing space for today’s marketers.

We look for minimal spillover with maximum influence. Three factors driving this trend are Measurability, Focus and Innovation. While traditional mass media is the pathway to achieving awareness and mass delivery of information, for the core primary consumer of a brand, experiential marketing plays a vital role in reaching out and activating the brand at the right time with the most critical last mile that drives consumer recruitment – experience. When both medias complement each other, the enhanced ROI is evident. While it varies from industry to industry and brand to brand, the trend is strongly evident, increasing budgets are being planned towards driving consumer experiences.

Brand Activation is an evolving genre, which has caught steam in the past decade, however, it is now that we are beginning to utilise its full potential. Solutions are increasingly channel neutral and marketers seldom utilise one media to make the consumer experience enriching. Brand Activation has taken a holistic approach with potential to integrate mobile, online, social media and WOM or PR within its offering as a consumer experience driven solution. While all media is up for the taking the real clincher is result orientation. In short, the greatest innovation is working towards and delivering against the brand objective.

The attitudinal change in expecting more out of the Brand Activation canvas has long begun, is well on its way and would soon start to snow ball. The need is to start looking beyond the obvious, bringing in a more realistic integration of creativity and technology to deliver an enhanced ROI, is a call to action for the immediate future, if not the present. Besides the existing choices within activation, there also exists, with increasing possibilities, an opportunity to integrate new media to enhance the response and ROI of activations.

“The world is getting smaller and the market is getting bigger, yet this is not in contradiction, but in synergy.” The market is getting bigger, which accounts for more numbers, not just of the shoppers and viewers, but more numbers to SMS, higher numbers of email users, customised software, more Indians than ever before accessing the net, social media becoming the rage and so on. This gives the Brand Activation planner a larger opportunity for reach as well as to build synergy and efficiency of ‘The’ activation.

With virtually unlimited options when planning the activation, we are limited only by our thought. The idea translates into an activation, which has the definite option – to break or not to break clutter. This is a situation currently peculiar to the metros, wherein the audience is evolved and has a great deal of exposure to almost every type of activation. This has, to a great extent, led to a “was there, done that, what is new” attitude, which, in turn, reflects directly on to results of the best intended consumer experiences. In the current times, breaking the clutter has become a salient feature in almost every brief. Herein, the splash of colour added by relevant technology or, more importantly, by the understanding of consumer behaviour and how that’s used, which comes to the marketers’ rescue. It is the Bible for the activation planner. Media in activations is truly dynamic.

Lines are blurred now, the nomenclature of school contact programmes, road shows, college contact programmes, etc., is fast becoming redundant. There is only one emerging truth, which is that of the most effective solution against the specific objective. In this journey of achievement, if one defines a new nomenclature, why not! The future is consumer specific not location specific.

exchange4media (read the article here!)