‘Mobile First’ and Digital have become the mantra today, and it is estimated that there are more than 300 million Internet users in the country, a number which will undoubtedly increase as more and more people, particularly in Tier II and Tier III towns, access the Internet for the first time on their phones. But, how are marketers tapping this segment? And are they looking to target these consumers in their local languages? To understand this, IMPACT hosted experts from the field of marketing at a roundtable discussion on ‘Localization of Language on Digital: A Game-Changer for Brands’. The event was organized in collaboration with dainikbhaskar.com in Mumbai. Sandeep Kapoor, National Sales Head, DB Digital, was the moderator and engaged the marketers in a discussion that threw light on various aspects of marketing in local languages on the Digital platform
‘Brands ready to experiment to reach out to regional users on Digital’
Across the industry, the relevance of Digital as a platform is clearly understood. Today’s marketer is keenly looking at this platform to engage with his audience. Although there still seems to be a great divide between India and ‘Bharat’, on the Internet, the lines seem to be fast blurring. There is a huge base of Internet users currently coming online to consume local language content, and this segment of users is bound to grow faster than their counterparts who consume content in English. While Digital as a platform clearly has the edge of being the most ROI and performancedriven media, brands across verticals are open to experimenting with the platform to reach out to regional users, especially synergizing their Digital initiatives with their brickand- mortar network spread across the country.
There is a clear need to develop the whole Digital ecosystem, involving seamless data-enabled infrastructure, content and reach, especially when most of the new users are expected to experience Internet through their mobile devices. While, this definitely is a great opportunity for brands, it also poses a challenge for marketers to optimize their offerings to mobile users and keep them engaged. We should be extremely excited and focused, as this is a time when we all will be a part of this great revolution of being truly connected...”
Here are excerpts from the insightful debate.
Deepali Naair: Mahindra Holidays is a fairly large spender on Digital. However, if you ask me what percentage of money has been spent on Digital on language in any format, whether content creation or advertising on language websites, that would be a minor single digit percentage. One reason is that for a high ticketsize membership-based product that we have, we find that most of our members are English-speaking. Our penetration in metros is still a minor number, while it is virtually not there in rural. There is no fear that you are losing out on people and this means I am probably also experimenting less on the language side. The second thing is the eco-system and I am not sure if the eco-system is able to chase Hindi keywords. The CMO’s eco-system is made up of agency, planner, app developer - how many of them tell you to do Hindi stuff? The eco-system is not talking that language or is enabled for that kind of conversation. What happens at the max is putting up a Hindi banner on a Hindi news site. Another observation is that people use the Latin script to write Hindi on the Digital platform. The solution will lie somewhere in this whole Hinglish aspect. We need to try experiments and they need to work… they will work.
Deepak Sharma: After Kotak’s integration with ING, we started seeing the Southern markets with new eyes. Kotak was a North and West-focused bank and our campaign ‘Kona, Kona Kotak’ said that Kotak is not only present in cities, but also in Tier II, Tier III and Tier IV markets. Our insights showed us that that there is a segment that, even if it knows English, loves to use its own language. Today, urban India is also semi-urban rural due to people who have migrated from rural India. Here, you may have a smartphone, but may not have data connectivity. So how do you connect to this customer segment where data and language are the two barriers and how do you bring a mobile application which solves these two problems? We tried a few experiments and launched the first multi-lingual banking app, Kotak Bharat, in six languages. We are the first bank in India to do that and launched it as an offline app. You can choose English, Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, Tamil, Kannada and we are going to launch it in Telugu shortly. We want to let people bank in the language of their choice.
Ashish Sahni: Tata Motors has more than 450 outlets across India and it is really important for us to be in the regional space. Out of our total Digital spends, only a single digit figure goes to the regional side, but it is becoming increasingly important for us. When Print is complemented with Digital, for example by being present on a regional site, we have observed that the conversion percentage as well as the recall of the product increases. Even our sales team comes back to us to say that the customer visiting our showroom says, “We saw your ad on this website.” The sales team then comes with the request of advertising in Digital. The information becomes seamless and the customer experience is uniform.
Deepali Naair: Looking at content, the travel industry is without a doubt far ahead of others in terms of understanding the importance of content. In another 18 months, if the Government’s initiatives on bandwidth gets sorted out and video comes into play, then the whole question of content creation and language will actually disappear because the content done in the video space for urban audience is in Hinglish. Videos are also very easily adaptable to the local language and the costs are not high. The challenge today, in terms of content production in vernacular languages, is more on the written side. For example, how will you do native advertising in vernacular languages? The eco-system doesn’t exist but the moment video takes over, this question will not arise. In the travel space, brands provide consumers with content they want, about destinations, sight-seeing, planning holidays and we are realizing the importance of content because that’s the way to get them in, and a lot of money is being spent on content creation. In the travel space, video and visual are very important, but a lot of written content also gets consumed and review sites are a peculiar phenomenon which does fantastically well for travel. There is also scope for user-generated content, but brands will need to continue to produce their original content to create the brand experience.
Deepak Sharma: People don’t want to read, but they like to watch content. As long as you can make the content appealing, you will find more consumption and that’s precisely what we are doing. Bringing in more relevant, contextual, real time, usergenerated content is becoming the key rather than getting content people to write. The trust around financial services has also started diminishing, so how do we bring this element of trust back? That’s where the relevance of content is. It’s not about what you produce, but what you give to that space and we are using a lot of analytics to bring in something that is customized to the consumer. It is more about the relevance and contextuality of content for the mobile customer. However, there are certain segments like research reports, where we still invest our time because we create a niche value.
Ashish Sahni: Media reviews are a large chunk of the content creation. It is also important for us to reach our audience through our outlets and videos play a big role for us. We also tap into the blogger community. There was a time when we used to look at only metro bloggers. But when we recently launched the new Tata Zica, we even had bloggers from places like Kanpur. So, content is both created by the brand and user-generated by the blogger.
Deepali Naair: Coming to measurement on social, it is very important to look at your category and then choose the platforms you need to track. If you are in the service economy, you should listen in by using tools and then categorizing your negative, positive and neutral mentions. It’s extremely important for a brand to acknowledge the positive and the negative sentiments and to say, look we have heard you. If you have been appreciated, amplify that. For the negative ones, there needs to be a mechanism in place and we have a CRM system that manages complaints. One of the tactics for nullifying negative sentiments is that you create a lot of positive opportunities for people to comment. For every negative comment, do you have four or five positive comments, because then the people reading it will note that this may be an issue but these are the positive things about the brand. That’s where a lot of the brand engagement initiatives work and help.
Deepak Sharma: It’s pretty easy to build a ROI matrix on Digital. Every penny can be accounted for and you can account for every single matrix. You can get all your scores to see how well you are doing on every single parameter leading to the last mile which is a conversion. Thereby, you can account for your cost of acquisition. You can account where these customers are coming from, and through which channel have they come. Which media, what hour of the day… How much did it take for us from lead to conversion? It’s pretty easy to build a case of why to invest more in this medium.
Ashish Sahni: The emotional connect with consumers begins at the discovery stage itself, right from the time the name is out in the market. We have done a fairly good job in doing this from a launch perspective. For example, when we launched Tata Bolt, we had four Twitter users tweet about the car to their fans and as fans voted for them, the key of a Bolt came down and finally one of the Twitteratti won a Bolt. That’s one way we use social. For our most recent launch, Tata Zica, we did a Digital plus on-ground event in four cities. Each city had a clue with a letter, and consumers had to find it with clues we gave on Twitter. At the end, the letters came together as ‘Zica’. So, social plays a big role for us in the auto sector. At the same time, listening and management is very critical. We have an in-house social center that looks at all the chatter around our many car brands, and ensure that every genuine query is looked into. We have a team that gathers consumer insights and sends it back to the design and engineering team, and that goes into the final product.
Deepali Naair: India is not one India, but multiple Indias. There is the affluent urban class and the not-so-affluent class which behave differently not just in terms of choice of brands and categories, but also online. Similarly Tier II and Tier III towns and even rural India behave differently. If you put in the language variable, you are again dividing India further into six-seven different languages. While the urban audience is getting on to the Internet for communication, the primary reason for the rural audience to come on to it is entertainment. The way we look at content will also start differing and you actually will have to produce content which will feel and be different for different segments. I see a lot of complexity coming in, which is why I think it’s extremely important for the eco-system around the marketers to evolve for language to take off. The eco-system for the consumption of vernacular news content will come first and when there is a base, that’s when you will start seeing the marketing money coming into it.
Deepak Sharma: Digital gives us enough room to experiment at a lower cost than Print or Television and you will see a lot of small steps. But every small step will get tested and validated before brands commit to burn large money. Language may work for customer engagement, but may not be enough for customer acquisition - you may find relevance in some areas but not in others. We haven’t yet built enough insights to say anything with certainty, but we will take measured steps as we start seeing success. But investments are still in single digit.
Ashish Sahni: The integration between local language and the Digital platform is directly proportional to the number of outlets and the increasing penetration. A Digital lead becomes really complex, especially with a limited budget. So, which channel do I use? When we have tried local, some of the engagement rates have been really good and encouraging. With mobile coming in, we have to see how content is consumed. Once we crack that, it will be really bright at least for the auto sector.
Feedback: simran.sabherwal@exchange4media.com
