IMA 2014 promises to bring forth marketing game-changers
Indian Marketing Awards, to be held in November, all set to unlock the potential of ideas, markets and businesses and realize their true value for customers and organizations By Ankur Singh The marketing industry is in a state of extreme competition, but within this battleground resides great opportunity. With the ever-changing marketplace, the industry is faced with new opportunities to connect with consumers. However, amid these opportunities, the industry faces countless challenges: overwhelming volume of data, the mobile explosion, shifts in agency models, the need to create and disseminate content across an ever-fragmented media landscape, and so on. In fact, it would be enough to make any marketer want to curl up in the foetal position and wait for it all to just blow over! Keeping in mind the challenges and opportunities for marketers, exchange4media’s stellar initiative, Indian Marketing Awards (IMA) 2014, will set the standard of marketing excellence in India, and reiterate the fact that marketing is critical for organic growth of a business - creating, communicating, capturing and sustaining value for an organization. Says IMA jury chair, Vinita Bali, former Managing Director of Britannia Industries, “With marketing conversations entering the boardroom, it is imperative for marketing professionals to demonstrate the return that marketing investment generates, so that in crunch situations, companies don’t slash advertising budgets, but spend them wisely and effectively to generate incremental sale.” Changing approach Marketing has typically been about the funnel: taking a top-down approach to generate awareness, create interest, cultivate desire and drive action. Today, the convergence of the access to data and an empowered consumer has forever changed the game. Smart companies are taking a more considered bottom-up approach. They are constantly asking themselves, “How can we better serve and support the customers we have?” IMA jury member Amarnath Ananthanarayanan, CEO and MD at Bharti AXA General Insurance, says, “I hope to look at the innovation of the marketing community and the impact that the Indian marketing fraternity has had on building brands, especially the smaller ones.” Another jury member, Prema Sagar, Principal & Founder at Genesis Burson-Marsteller, says, “I look forward to the IMA Awards recognizing the best campaigns that are creative, have a high recall and have left an impact on the business and consumers as well.” Commenting on IMA 2014, Annurag Batra, Chairman and Editor-in-Chief, exchange4media group, says, “With digital taking over, brands today are acting as publishers and newsrooms. Content creation and distribution are complex and difficult phenomena. New models in e-commerce emerge every day. The brands that are rethinking the traditional commerce model are the ones that will shape the future for marketers and consumers alike.” Re-invention The old paradigm -- where businesses produced, marketers talked, consumers listened and sales followed -has given way to an economy where customers co-create, marketing involves two-way interactions, and customized product offerings move into the marketplace via channels unheard of even a few years ago. Market researchers feel that programmatic buying and other forms of marketing automation started as solutions for remnant inventory. But in the future, programmatic will fundamentally reshape all areas of marketing and buying. Online reality While it is generally accepted that the future of business lies with e-commerce and ability to integrate your physical business into an online reality, businesses will also need to shift their marketing endeavours to the online world. Some of the smarter retailers are already ensuring that digital marketing is an important part of their marketing mix. It is important to understand that digital marketing represents the fastest growing new channels of targeted communication, interaction, engagement and delivery for an organization's branding, communications and products and services. The primary purpose of the Indian Marketing Awards is to advance the marketing profession and to unlock the potential of ideas, markets and businesses and realize their true value for customers and organizations. “It is always important to showcase success but even more important is the ability to distill the key factors that produced the success, so that success can be replicated and is not a matter of chance. It is my perception that we don’t spend enough time in understanding and decoding factors for success or failure and end up impeding our own learning curve,” says Bali.
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