BRANDLOGIC
BY L K GUPTA
I am often asked by my team members how best to visualize the future of online media, and therefore strategize better for digital marketing. This has a direct linkage to resource allocation and prioritization in marketing planning. To be honest, for some time I was stumped, given the plethora of choices available to a marketer today. Then, on closer inspection of basic human needs and behaviour and recent trends, I was able to come up with two trends that will endure far more than others.
Let’s look at human needs and behavior first. As a social animal, the fundamental need of our species is to communicate. And not just communicate; interact. Hence the development of languages, symbols, explorations and rituals since ancient times. In the olden days, this was achieved through congregations at various places – whether work or social or tools like books, letters and telephones. People around the planet invented mediums to interact and exchange thoughts, emotions, news and views. As exchange of goods and services grew, this information exchange naturally led to the development of market places, advertising and its numerous media through which information was disseminated by sellers and marketers.
As we know, until recently, the communication thus evolved was largely one-to-many, a one-sided sending of messages which was consumed by the masses. But as technology developed, humans have given themselves the opportunity to interact at a scale so huge that it has spawned a new branch of marketing – social marketing. Because it works both ways, and is at once one-to-one as well as many-to-many communication, it mirrors the fundamental human need to interact a lot more closely than previous methods could ever do. The rise of social platforms, be it Myspace, Orkut, Flickr, and later Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and many others, is nothing but a manifestation of social communities that mankind has been inventing and re-inventing for millennia. In that sense it is nothing new; just a scaled improvement of what we have been always doing.
So now, marketers have this amazing opportunity to finally have a real dialogue with their constituents – consumers, trade, media, vendors et al. In the future, these platforms will further change and morph into new shapes and entities. This will happen because (a) humans by nature tend to become bored with the sameness of things, and (b) the ability of technologists to invent new stuff that tap into our natural desires is much more sharply honed now than ever before. We should, for example, fully expect to see the decline of Facebook in favour of something else – maybe not at the same scale, but perhaps more focused, targeted to specific groups that allows for a higher level of thought exchange. Be that as it may, online social communities is a sure bet for next many decades if as marketers we’re looking for enduring platforms. All we have to do is to keep a keen lookout for the next trend in this area, and experiment early and frequently.
The other basic human need is to be entertained, or rather, to keep ourselves entertained. Music, dance, drama, magic shows, gladiatorial fights, they were all invented to deliver entertainment to us. And if you look more closely, the audio-visual impact has always been higher than a purely visual or solely audio carrier. When cinema came initially (without sound) it tried to mimic visually what people were used to seeing as entertainment, but with live orchestras performing alongside the screens. As the talkies came, the first stories to be told were mythologies and shows similar to what the nautankies of yore used to provide. It was much later that cinema became a genre by itself of telling stories, but the audiovisual impact had a lot to do with the medium’s rise. Television’s rapid adoption was largely enabled by this too.
In the context of today, and what it implies for the future, therefore, online videos present the greatest opportunity. Advertising via display, search, apps all may be well and good, but it will be videos and application of video technologies that will prove to be the most enduring of all media vehicles. And that is simply because of the fundamental desire of humankind to be entertained preferably with an audio-visual spectacle. Combine this with the tendency toward information gathering and you have the most potent tool.
The implication for brands is enormous. It is time for us to shift more and more resources towards expressing our messages – overtly or implied – through videos. I need not quote any numbers, but I think it is obvious that we’re reaching a new watershed now that people have the power to consume videos anywhere they choose to via mobile devices of varying sizes and capacity. Even brands that do not work with TV commercials will soon find that some form of video communication needs to be an essential part of their marketing mix. As I keep emphasizing all the time, the brand that entertains more or proves its usefulness more is a sureshot winner in the media battle. Video gives exactly that opportunity to all of us.
So, now when someone asks me, I can confidently point out two enduring platforms to always be associated with for any brand, whether or not you’re doing anything else online – video and social communities.
