The year 2014 is going to be tight for marketers. Cost-consciousness will drive reduction in marketing budgets. The categories where marketing spends might continue to remain steady or even grow are in the media and e-commerce businesses — in both dedicated e-businesses such as flipkart or Amazon and the e-commerce extensions of brick-and-mortar businesses across categories. This means that traditional brands venturing into e-commerce will support the e-commerce part of the business optimally.

Marketers in manufacturing categories and financial services are not expected to splurge, but the good news for both media companies and advertising agencies is that political parties might make up for the shortfall in category spends.

Like every year there will be more and more marketing spends which will flow to the digital media increasing its share of the pie of the overall marketing and advertising spends. Digital has been touted as the ROI medium for a while, but marketers might move ahead from performance-based advertising into content building and changing the objectives of their digital spends. Social media and websites will continue to be “influencing media”; however, the focus will shift to building quality content and video-content.

The advantage of digital is that a brand manager can build small and get her feet wet with small budgets, which is not possible in TV or outdoor, where you need comparatively bigger spends to get the desired impact. Hence digital will continue to attract more spends from big marketers and newer spends from new brands on digital platforms. All marketers will make the next leap in their digital journey. Those who are not on mobile, will adopt mobile; those who have not yet created apps will consider them and those who don’t have video content will commission it; hence the entire set of digital partners are likely to see growth.

With the recent changes at Google on search data, the way marketers approach SEO will change. This will also lead to marketers getting more dependent on search engine marketing data and a far greater focus on brand’s digital platforms in building engaging content.

With content building as the focus, the accent on visual content will be to do even better. The head of marketing at South West Airlines shared with me recently that their company commissions hundreds of videos every year themselves and the user-generated videos are about twice the number. The airline has created its own in-house video department to manage the volumes at low cost. That’s a model Indian marketers could follow too.

In the service industry there would be greater collaboration between marketing teams and customer-service teams as more and more organisations become adept at “online reputation management”. Among the larger service brands, social media is already firmly established as a s a source of customer queries/complaints and feedback. As more customers are discovering that complaint resolution is faster through the social media channel, more organisations are ensuring that customer service teams are working together with marketing teams.

(Deepali Naair is the Chief Marketing Officer at Mahindra Holidays & Resorts. In the last two decades, she’s seen marketing both as a client and as an agency executive. She began her career with Tata Motors followed by BPL Mobile when the first mobile phone was launched in India. She has also worked in advertising as a Strategic Planner at Draft FCBUlka, followed by stints at Marico, HSBC Global Asset Management India and L & T Insurance.)

As told to Prasad Sangameshwaran

Related Topics