The stakes for a marketer are high every festive season, and more so this year, after the pandemic interruptions. On an average, the festive season accounts for 30% of the annual advertising expenditure (AdEx), as per the Pitch Madison Advertising Report. Industry pundits expect festive marketing spend to go up by 8-10% this year to touch `30,000 crore.
Breaking the clutter
Over the past two years, consumers have recognised the difference between their needs and their wants, making it more challenging for brands to feature in a consumer’s festive shopping basket, observes Saif Shaikh, COO at Madison Media Pinnacle. “To get better returns, brands must select the right touch points and break clutter, go beyond regular communication and engage consumers through online and offline activations,” says Shaikh.
This is that time of the year when discounts and special offers are expected to rule the roost, but these cannot be the only selling point, cautions Anisha Iyer, CEO at OMD India. “Today’s consumers need more than a rich media ad and competitive pricing to buy into a brand — it needs to stand for something, articulate its purpose and stay authentic to build trust and consideration,” she notes.
Taking a fresh approach
The festive season needs bold advertising and emotive storytelling if it has to stand out. Shradha Agarwal, co-founder & CEO at Grapes Digital points out that the campaign distribution needs to be inwards to outwards. For example, a brand could promote its festive campaign video through its employees with WhatsApp forwards and could eventually have it shared by influencers and publishers, and thus get higher visibility and recall. “Brands also need to follow a good ratio of creative and media budgets,” she adds.
Hyper-personalisation and contextual engagement with consumers are key for brands to effectively communicate and see sales conversion during the festive rush. Says Anand Jain, co-founder and chief product officer of CleverTap, a mobile marketing company: “An intelligent data layer allows you to utilise your data on a real-time basis to provide compelling consumer experiences. Agility is also a fundamental requirement, since consumers can be capricious, and brands have to provide for ever-changing needs.”
Marketers are also now seeking ways to integrate brand messaging into pertinent consumer conversations on platforms like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger in a non-intrusive way. This is where conversation media company, Bobble AI with its new-age marketing tool comes in, says founder and CEO, Ankit Prasad. The platform has been working with brands like Asian Paints, Mother Dairy, RuPay and Zivame this festive season.
“Marketers have the enormous opportunity to ride the wave of daily consumer conversations around festivity, building a connection with their audience creatively, where individuals turn into brand ambassadors,” he says.
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