By Team Impact
South editions of exchange4media Group’s Pitch CMO Summit to be held at Hyderabad and Chennai on June 19 and 22 respectively.
Marketers are faced with diverse challenges today. Many of them are not product-related but focused around creating and communicating the brand’s essence. In an age where short attention spans pose a serious threat to marketing effort, how does the marketer entice the constantly evolving, the multidevice prone, well informed consumer to make a purchase decision? Challenges lie in choosing the message, the medium and the spends with or without measurable data. But between identifying a need and ensuring consumer delight, the last mile for a marketer is communication to his audience. This is what the Pitch CMO Summits in South India will discuss.
The summits will be held on June 19 and 22 at Hyderabad and Chennai respectively. The Summits will also explore how brands have broken new grounds in different ways on parameters like New Product Development, Pricing Innovations, Marketing Communication Effectiveness, Pioneering New Distribution & Retailing Trends; Customer Experience Management; Marketing Effectiveness in Under-Marketed categories. The keynote speaker for the Hyderabad Summit is Bijou Kurien, President & CE-Lifestyle, Reliance Retail Ltd. Some CMOs who will participate in the Hyderabad Summit are Shubhranshu Singh, Marketing Director, India & South Asia at Visa and Manisha Lath Gupta, Chief Marketing Officer, Axis Bank. At the Chennai Summit, Rajiv Mehta, Managing Director, South Asia at Puma; Len Curran, Chief Marketing Officer, Renault India and Murugavel Janakiraman, Founder & CEO, Bharatmatrimony.com will be the speakers.
Usually, to target difficult market conditions and touch the pulse of the consumers, marketers undertake a few predictable steps. A research agency is hired. A need is identified. Product teams are thrown into action. Simultaneously, the creative agency is briefed on creating a campaign. Media planners swing into action and marketing teams are working overnight to meet the deadline for the brand to hit the shelves. However, there are several questions that the marketers are confronted with. How does he create his unique brand voice? Is it through disruption? Is it by playing down competition? Is the channel experiential or should he stick to ATL? Is television a no-no for a new brand? Is digital measurable? Hence safer? Would radio bring in walk-ins without an on-ground event? Should one just hire a PR agency and not spend on advertising at all? How much should be allocated on media plans? How much is too much?
The Pitch CMO Summit will bring some top marketers on the platform to answer some of these difficult, unanswered questions. The Summit explores these marketing communication challenges first-hand through case-studies presented by marketers, supplemented by wisdom from media owners and insights by media planners & creative agencies. It is a focused day-long knowledge exchange with key insights from brands – both national and regional which have been successful in converting their share of voice into market-share. A day-long conference starting with a regional legend in Marketing presenting the keynote followed by individual CMO presentations for 30 minutes each and two regional panels that keep the audience engaged and highlight regional challenges & opportunities.
With the events in South India, Pitch CMO Summit enters the ninth year of its inception. The Summit is an initiative that seeks to be a platform where the Indian marketing industry’s direction could be discussed and advice could be given to brand managers on what is the next step. The last few editions of the summit held in Mumbai and Delhi, have seen marketers reiterate new ways of looking at the media plan. Some of the issues discussed in recent past were future direction for a faster move on adding more of New Media in media plans, and a shift from above-the-line media vehicles to below-the-line media vehicles in media plans.
Some of the speakers who participated recently at the Mumbai and Delhi Pitch CMO summits were Chander Mohan Sethi, CMD, Reckitt Benckiser; Anuradha Aggarwal, VP - Brand Communication and Insights, Vodafone Essar; Krishnadeep Baruah, Director Marketing, RIM India (BlackBerry); Lutz Kothe, Head of Marketing and PR, Volkswagen Passenger Cars, Volkswagen Group Sales India and Neeraj Chandra, COO, Britannia Industries Ltd among others.
