Share This Article
Flashback to 80s and 90s, those were the years when my generation was growing up. The ASIAD Games brought us more than the mascot “Appu”, for the first time TV telecast happened in colourand opened the floodgates for advertising. We still remember Lalitaji’s pearls of wisdom on which washing powder made your whites look whiter as it was hard to miss on Sunday morning television along with “Ramayana” and “Mahabharata”.
But lot has changed today and lot will, globalization and technology advancement is shaping the way we perceive and see things today like never before. Strategies, tactics, and processes that just a decade ago reigned supreme, now look a little out of sync, when viewed through today’s consumer perspective.
Today branding is a function of media fragmentation. More channels and more newspaper reaching out to diverse customer base, makes it harder for marketers to reach a truly mass audience.Simply stated, above-the-line marketing that utilizes generic messages to build awareness is no longer the best way to influence customer behavior.
The shift from ATL to BTL spending is in part the result of changing consumer attitudes; more sophisticated consumers demand relevant messaging that engages them in a dialogue, and which allows them to interact with the marketer through their preferred communication channels. At the same time, technology allows marketers to better target consumers, and to better track results and measure ROI of BTL campaigns.
Below-the-line initiatives are more successful because they stress targeted and customer-centric communications. Below-the-line also creates measurable results and ROI metrics, which are important to marketers under growing pressure to prove the value of their campaigns and believe me this demand for quantitative results will continue to intensify as more and more technology advancement takes place in near future.
We do live in exciting times, where things change within a blink of an eye.Today speed-to-market with the right message at the right time through the right channel while maintaining brand consistency, coordinating with multiple internal and external stake holders, developing actionable insights are clear challenges that a brand faces and the same is better addressed by BTL.
As the line between traditional ATL and BTL has started blurring, marketers have started looking for a more robust marketing mix, one which will interact with consumers in unbelievable ways at various touch points, allowing brands to come alive for the TG by creating connections between brand and consumer, in their personal world. These connections should be formed by experiences that are personally unique but relevant to the consumer, it should be memorable for them, it should be interactive, and it should invoke emotion and lead to sales and brand loyalty.
While the current BTL trends are exciting lot is yet to happen when a marketer will face a new set of challenges with new and yet to be invented technology and devices… The biggest challenge will be to be less intrusive yet establish a more relevant one on one connection… A paradox isn’t it?