Graduate Studies Blog

NANYANG MBA

“When the power has shifted from the brand to the consumer”

Article contributed by Gurtej Singh, MBA Class of 2018.

On Sep 12, the Nanyang Business School hosted guests from Wunderman Asia Pacific, a leading digital agency, to join the Marketing class of the Full-Time MBA participants, for a discussion on the topic of “Marketing Communications in the Age of Fragmented Media and Digitization”. This session was conducted in an interactive “talk show” format, with Prof. Lewis Lim (the Marketing Professor) as the moderator and with 75 MBA participants.

Krishnan Menon (Chief Client Officer), Mark Miller (Head of Planning) and Wedad Sunny (Client Services Director), the 3 guest speakers from Wunderman spoke about the importance of marketing in this digital age. We are watching audio visuals all the time, everywhere, whether it is our phones, tablets, PCs, smart TVs or cinema and we are still listening to audio. A company such as Spotify has as much as data as Facebook does. Spotify knows the time path of what we listen to, what device we are on, how we switch between songs, when have we gone out for a walk since the music stopped playing on our laptop and started playing on our cell phone, they know where we are walking, so Spotify could interrupt us and say: “Turn left now, there is a promo at Zara.” Companies can store everyone’s Facebook links, Linked In pages, Twitter feeds, photographs from social media, number, address – These companies can help deliver ads directly to the intended audience. This sort of “uber” personalization is the answer for marketers in this digital age. If we look at content and delivery in this way, there is so much power in digital marketing.

However, a big challenge with Marketing in this Digital Age is Brand Safety and Ethics. One school of thought says blacklist fake sites, but the way to do is actually opposite – by Whitelisting. “I want be on these sites and not on other sites.” This is the sort of thinking a company should follow. For example, if you’re HSBC, you want to be on FT.com, BBC.com, Facebook, couple of local news sites in each country and that’s it! It is up to us as the marketing community to be responsible about Brand safety and ethics, as this is an easy hurdle to overcome.

Consumers are kept at the heart of the business, in today’s age of fragmented media and digitalization. Amazon algorithms work that way – for example look at trunk nodes (Homecare), Branch nodes (Laundry) and Leaf notes (Detergent). What are the words and strings associated with these nodes. This is how you understand consumer insights. For example, consumers are looking at softeners that don’t smell. This is how digital marketing is helping. Thus, the fundamentals of marketing in today’s age is – DO NOT JUST LISTEN TO YOUR CONSUMERS, ALSO GO A STEP FURTHER AND ACKNOWLEDGE THEM! Consumer is centric – demographically, psycho-graphically, media habits, consumption habits, environment – that is the blueprint of marketing in today’s day & age.