Two years ago, certain comments by Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel on India had social media aficionados not just trolling Snapchat, but also the e-commerce site Snapdeal. Almost a decade back, controversial ads by the innerwear brand Amul Macho had consumers confused and outraged over why dairy giant Amul had to sell innerwear and resort to cheap theatrics.

Brand confusion in consumers’ minds is rampant and impacts brands in multiple ways.

According to CompuMark, an agency for trademark research and protection, almost 74% of brands globally have experienced some form of trademark infringement due to the existence of other brands with names that sound similar. CompuMark estimates show that 44% of brands that have encountered trademark infringement have identified customer confusion as the biggest after-effect, while 40% have spoken of revenue loss. In this day and age of social media, this loss is immense.

“Amul had to face challenges when Amul Macho was launched. This creates ambiguity in consumers’ minds. Frustration and confusion of consumers, loss in brand loyalty and effect on brand recall are other factors that impact a brand. The confusion happens as Indian consumers get easily swayed away by emotion and the understanding of the brand identity is low. Being emotionally swayed can cause a rage on social media,” says Saurabh Pacheriwal, co-founder, Gemius.

When hashtags reign supreme, similarity in brand names often gives way to hashtags trending for the wrong brand, causing a big drop in the image, says Ashish Shah, founder and CEO, Vertoz.

According to Prateek N Kumar, CEO and managing director, NeoNiche, what lies at the centre of such controversies is the innate fear of missing out (Fomo). “Usually, someone starts the topic with a trending hashtag, fact-checking takes a back seat and the wildfire creates an equivalent of internet Chinese whispers.”

Experts feel a lot of “confusion” also happens due to meme marketing tactics. “Probably, it could be that someone somewhere just wanted to have fun and started the whole thread of conversation, dragging in another brand. No one can ever clarify this. With a lot of fake content being shared, it is very quick to start and spread rumours. And when such brand confusion happens, people who are reading about it are more interested from a fun point of view or seeing how innovative the meme being circulated is,” says Sonam Shah, founder and CEO, Treize Communications.

Brands need to speak out and clear consumer doubts over their names. Brands should firstly consolidate their public image, feel experts.

“This can be accomplished by running branding campaigns and delivering the relevant brand communication to the right audience, at the right time, which improves brand recall,” says Shah from Vertoz, who adds that programmatic advertising, which relies on algorithms to purchase and sell ads real time, can be a great tool in managing ad strategies. “The specific targeting that programmatic provides can be a boon for brands to reach out specifically to the people that are most affected by the miscommunication of brand identity.”

Another way of addressing such situations is to come out quickly and build a funny brand story, feel experts.

Says Shah from Treize, “The brand (in this case MS Excel), should come up with an interesting comeback in the form of a video and join in the fun while addressing the issues. It should be a mix of both fun and education wherein they express the issue and explain the difference.”

Agrees Kumar, who feels brands need to build a funny story around their ethos and use social and traditional media to dish out this story. “MS Excel can, for example, talk about its multi-cultural background and weave it with humour by saying something like MS Excel is a good spreadsheet which can capture the misplaced statistics of this fallout with a trending hashtag of their own like #5FactsaboutMSExcel, etc.”

A customary email by the brand clarifying their position and stating that they are not under the radar can also mitigate the crisis, say experts.

BATTLING THE NEMESIS

Almost 74% – Of brands globally have experienced some form of trademark infringement due to the existence of other brands with names that sound similar

44% – Of brands that have encountered trademark infringement have identified customer confusion as the biggest after-effect

40% – Have spoken of revenue loss

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Over the past year, NeoNiche Integrated has encompassed the entire integrated solutions spectrum. From working on experiential marketing campaigns, to events powered by technology, NeoNiche Integrated has created several memorable experiences for clients including Amazon, ICICI Bank, Siemens, and several others.

Speaking about the win, Mr. Riyaz Khambati, Head Operations Experiential Delivery, NeoNiche Integrated said, “This award is definitely well deserved, and I believe it is a result of our customer-centric approach. At NeoNiche Integrated, we always strive to ‘wow’ our clients, and have delivered events that speak for themselves. The experiential market in India is growing steadily, and such recognition from a body of repute such as IBC InfoMedia, further highlights that we are on the right path, and motivates us to work harder.”

India’s No1 Brand Awards is a flagship award series by IBC InfoMedia, (a division of International Brand Consulting Corp, USA), an independent media, global branding and brand consultancy company.

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The viewership and ad insertions for devotional channels have seen a considerable increase in the 2016-2018 period, shows data from Broadcast Audience Research Council India (BARC).

In 2016, the number of devotional channels watermarked were just 3 with average weekly impressions of 22.2 million, as per BARC data, but the number rose to 11 with an average weekly impression of 97 million in 2017, and in 2018 there were 11 watermarked channels with a weekly impression of 119.8 million.

The channels taken into consideration were Bhakti TV, CVR OM Spiritual, Disha TV, Divya, Hindu Dharmam, Prarthana, SAI TV, Sanskar, SVBC, and Vedic.

Speaking on the rise in viewership of devotional channels, Arun S Nair, Vice President – Sales & Marketing (South) Insight Media City said, “The viewership rise can be attributed to two reasons. The distribution of the devotional channels has played a major role in improving their reach dramatically. Also, the deep pockets and their connect with service providers has enabled channel operators to be available on all the platforms.”

“The emotional connect with one’s religion is also one of the reasons behind the increase in viewership. In today’s fast-paced life, it is very important to connect with our culture and to gain knowledge about the customs and rituals. The devotional channels have succeeded in that by providing relevant content,” added Nair.

According to Vineet Sodhani, CEO, Spatial Access, devotional channels have grown since the Free-to-Air (FTA) boom in 2016 when many new channels were launched and many that were paid turned FTA.

“Part of the growth also happened because BARC increased the sample and covered rural or semi-urban areas better which helped in the viewership growth of many such channels,” said Sodhani.

Apart from the viewership rise, the 2016-2018 period has also witnessed a rise in total ad insertions. In 2016, the total ad insertions for devotional channels were 1,75,681; in 2017 the it jumped to 2,85,971, and in 2018 it was 3,88,273.

The major advertisers for the devotional channels include Patanjali Ayurveda Ltd, Wipro Ltd, Dish India TV and MDH Ltd.

On how advertising in devotional channels helps brands, Prateek Kumar, CEO & MD, NeoNiche said, “The content of devotional channels caters to the robust spiritual community across the globe, which experiences among other things, the live-streaming of some of the most visited religious places in India. They also participate in the actual ‘darshan’ through 360-degree videos. These channels explore the spiritual and devotional space by providing unique experiences to viewers through e-sermons, e-darshans and online offerings.”

According to BARC data, there is a growth in viewership of programmes related to yoga, meditation and spirituality, Kumar said. “There has been an increase in the number of urban youth and international followers of yoga and meditation tuning into these devotional channels. Most broadcasters and advertisers are becoming aware of this trend and brands in the area of personal care & hygiene, food & beverages, healthcare, health & lifestyle are latching on to this opportunity. What’s a better way to sell a Patanjali product to a global audience than through a TVC placed right before or after a yoga programme,” he asked.

According to Sachin Kumar, Founder, Bottle Openers, “Unlike GEC watching habits, the mindset of the audience of spiritual channels is completely belief-oriented and hence brands falling into categories like natural or herbal or Ayurvedic will have higher acceptability. One of the biggest successes we have seen in the past is Patanjali. Since spiritual channels are largely based on spiritual events, brands can turn the audience into advocates. Also, unlike millennials who get bored easily, this audience doesn’t flip through channels and hence they tend to have higher receptiveness of the communication, which helps brands.”

Talking about the other ways in which brands have been benefiting by placing ads in devotional channels, Prateek Kumar said: “Devotional channels offer a wide range of services for its audience like temple tourism, and access to japs, mantras, kathas, popular bhajans and holy books. Brands interested in target marketing, instead of trying to reach the mass market, can put their energy into connecting with a specific, defined group within that market. As per BARC, 77 per cent of TV viewers are in the age group of above 30. If segmented into right demographics, and psychographics and geography, it can help brands in cost-effective target marketing that will maximise the ROI on advertising budget since devotional channels are cheaper due to the waiver of broadcasting fee.”

Vinay Kanchan, Brand Storyteller, Innovation Catalyst and Author of ‘Sportivity’ says: “The ad rates offered by devotional channels are relatively economical. The clutter from other categories is a lot less. Brands advertising here have a stage where they can stand apart and make their point. Clients get ‘more blessings for their buck’ in a manner of speaking. Devotional channels help brands of a particular genre to truly engage their audiences. This association naturally makes sense for brands of a certain kind, especially those with strong traditional Indian roots.

“Consumers today expect their brands to mirror their own feelings and desires. Hence, for those spiritually inclined, seeing the brand on devotional channels they frequent only serves to strengthen bonds. This creates a deeper attachment which usually translates into sales. The opportunity also perhaps lies in creating specific narratives for these channels as they are unlike others in the media space in many respects. This makes sense because audiences are in an entirely different frame of mind when they switch to these channels.”

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South African billionaire Elon Musk says “Brand is just a perception, and perception will match reality over time. Sometimes it will be ahead, other times it will be behind. But a brand is simply a collective impression some have about a product”. I tend to agree with Elon. Brands are people too. And just as human behaviour leaves a lot of scope for judgements from fellow humans, brands too are subjected to constantly varying perceptions and judgements. Like people who are conspicuous in their absence, these brands are easily forgotten if they are just one in the crowd of many.

Every brand comes with an intent to stand for certain qualities that need to be highlighted, Experiential Marketing is helpful in enhancing customer perception of the brand towards the qualities of the brand that we wish to project, rather than it being perceived due to uncontrolled exposure. Organisations are using experiential marketing so they can create a strong customer-brand connection and highlight desirable values that capture the brand’s essence and drive loyalty, word-of-mouth and the persona of the brand in a direction that we champion. While there is not much empirical research on the impact of Experiential Marketing, in my professional expertise in Experiential Marketing, I have understood that consumers are looking for unique and distinct qualities that will act as a key differentiator which we wish to highlight as the core perceived essence of the brand.

While traditionally the product value to the brand perception journey has been laced with product packaging strategies and pricing games, the emerging trend for competitive advantage is to put experiential marketing on the top of the game. In my opinion, consumers are now looking for an extra dose of personality that stimulates sensations and evokes emotions, rather than something that barely meets the need.

Research unravels that in experiential interpretation, the interaction between a subject (the consumer) and an object (a product, an event, a person, an idea) within a given context originates the consumption experience, and the companies benefit from this set of interactions. With the advent of social media and digital advertising, media outreach has become easy and affordable, however, every brand is looking for an extra edge to move beyond. Experiential Marketing provides that extra edge of personalisation and ensures a rounded experience.

Even in the experiential marketing sphere, we have constantly innovated over time. Traditional singular experiential marketing tools are a passé, the space now is for integrated marketing communication with a healthy mix of all media elements to drive consumer perception. Constant reinforcement of brand values through integrated approaches to experiential marketing that forms a healthy mix of digital media, print, social media and public relations, not just to complement but to enhance the desired brand value that we wish to project.

With the passage of time, our ideas are evolving into a more collaborative sphere and experiential marketing is at the helm of it. We are designing a web of experiences through experiential marketing. We need to deploy a healthy marketing mix with experiential marketing… truly, in the experiential elements space, the future is together.

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Clinique India’s ‘We Hear You’ seeks to celebrate independent and beautiful women; experts share their take on whether the campaign rings the right note.

For TV presenter and Youtuber Leeza Mangaldas, skin care has always been more important than make-up. Meanwhile, being unafraid is beautiful feels Stand up comedian and makeup enthusiast Supriya Joshi. Mangaldas and Joshi along with Teena Singh and Lisa Mishra feature in Clinique India digital campaign We Hear You where the brand asked the women about finding the right attitude, direction and foundation to be #EvenBetter.

About the campaign

Produced by Supari Studios, the video shows the four influencers candidly talking about what beauty means to them simultaneously describing the role that Clinique’s Even Better products play in their lives. They put together a series of films that offer viewers a glimpse into each influencer’s personality.

In between all the objectification and constant judgments towards facial features and the looks, today’s woman is more concerned about her appearance and how she presents herself in the crowd. While taking all this into cognisance, beauty brands are opting to preach what real beauty is and how to preserve and identify it while subtly integrating the product in the communication.

The YouTube video has garnered 211k views and is shared by the influencers on their personal Instagram and Facebook profiles.

The Director’s Cut

The aim of the film was to celebrate the diversity of smart, independent Indian women and at the same time highlighting that the brand caters to over 50 types of different skin tones.

Sameer Ghauri, Director of the film said, “Our goal was to keep the tone of the films honest and real, complemented by clean and elegant visuals that are crisply edited to music handpicked to pair with each lady’s distinct personality. The colour tone of each film was also meticulously chosen to complement the different skin tones of our influencers.”

Objective

With the campaign, Supari Studios wanted to focus on the tagline ‘Even Better’ by bringing out the strong personalities of each of the influencers and how they don’t like to settle in life, just like the Even Better foundation. According to Mitali Sharma, Executive Producer, Supari Studios the ad campaign tried to encapsulate a piece of the influencers’ life into the films by throwing in some minimal props that gave a suggestion of their profession.

The brand extended #WeHearYou with an influencer outreach initiative featuring paid partnerships with influencers such as Aashna Shroff and Ankita of Corallista.

Experts Take:

Diana Fernando, Account Manager, Gozoop

For a consumer who watches the campaign video for the first time, he/she is bound to be super confused. There’s so much online content available today that consumers have no time to rewind and watch something if they don’t understand it at once. Were they promoting a new range with the name ‘Even Better’ or were they telling women that they can be even better?

After watching all the videos I realised, they were actually trying to marry the product range and the thought of being even better but failed in doing so. Keeping the insight and thought at the forefront would have grabbed more eyeballs and curbed the confusion instead of pushing the product so hard. The choice of influencers seems to be good. They’re simple yet ambitious women with very good to decent social following.

Prateek N Kumar, CEO & MD, NeoNiche Integrated Solutions

Clinique’s even better product campaign brings 4 very distinct influences to tell the story of modern Era Indian women who are independent. The campaign “We hear you” is able to create the distinction with the choice of music, background, and moods. However, would have liked a more distinct choice of influencers apart from the 4 already captured in the campaign to bring in emotional connect with different demographics, geographical market, and ethnicity.

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The prestigious awards were presented by Aquil Busrai – Chief Executive Officer, Aquil Busrai Consulting along with Ms. Nisha Jamvwal – Columnist, Luxury Brand Consultant, Television, Influencer, Blogger, Social Activist, Craft Crusader, and Accessibility Crusader.

Commenting on the achievement, Prateek N Kumar, CEO & Managing Director, NeoNiche said, “This victory at the ET Now Stars of the Industry Awards is a testament of the disruptive day-to-day operations we conduct at NeoNiche. I am really proud that we concluded 2018 by winning 2 awards and would like to credit my clients and my team mates. We hope to continue our journey with the same fervour and by achieving greater milestones in 2019”

Valay Lakdawala, Director, NeoNiche said, “The financial year of 2018 has been a rather enlightening journey for all of us at NeoNiche, with over 392 campaigns that have been successfully curated for more than 60 brands. These awards will only serve as motivation to our passionate team that is working day and night, behind the scenes, and will be instrumental in providing a greater push for me to aim higher to end the year with a blast”.

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1. On my bookshelf…
I usually read three books at a time; one each is kept in my car, bedroom and office. Currently, I am reading Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari, Life’s Amazing Secrets: How to Find Balance and Purpose in Your Life by Gaur Gopal Das, and Becoming by Michelle Obama.

2. A movie I’d like to watch again…
Jurassic Park, the first movie of the franchise. It brought my imagination alive as a kid; seeing the dinosaur in action was the closest we could be to experiencing the real thing.

3. My inspiration is…
I get inspired by many great leaders, but most of all by Mahatma Gandhi. He taught the world what servant leadership is all about.

4. My wanderlust
I would want to travel all across India. While the West has found it so enchanting and alluring, we need to explore the diversity that our country provides.

5. Indulgence is
Food cooked by my mother. Unfortunately, we reside in different states and the indulgence happens only once or twice a year.

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Prateek N Kumar, CEO & MD, NeoNiche talks about HR processes, engagement and hiring the right set of people.

Several reports suggest that Indians are the most hardworking employees across the globe, how important is employee engagement. Is engagement losing its meaning nowadays?

Employee engagement is critical for the survival, growth and strategic advantage of the business. There is enough research already done to suggest that a disengaged employee can result in revenue loss and an actively engaged group of employees can actually make a business grow faster than the competition. Therefore engagement remains an important goal that we actively pursue. Engagement can never lose meaning unless you run your organization with robots or treat your employees like robots!

How often do you measure employee engagement? And what to do after that?

Formally, we measure it once a year during our employee offsite when we conduct an externally anchored, confidential survey. However, we very actively look for signs of engagement or disengagement during our monthly 1O1 process and take active steps to sort out any issues. The annual survey results in a Stratcom managed and delivered action plans. The regular checks result in quick corrective actions like more active mentorship, role changes, career and/or compensation growth etc.

How has the role of HR changed in an organization in terms of hiring as well as management?

Talent Acquisition, Engagement, Development and finally managing performance is core to the existence of an HR Department. Any failure in performing any of these roles well will result in organizational vision failure. We must, however, be mindful that HR is a subject matter expert working on designing and enabling processes. Embedding the HR processes and making them live is the Business leader’s job. The critical manner in which HR role has changed in our case over the last 18 months of Talent Transformation is that HR is leading the strategy formulation in the organization. All the functional goals take shape as an outcome of our Strategy Retreat in April.

How strong is the role of HR in today’s world considering the fact that quite a few decisions are taken by top management? Is it HR or top management that decides on what to go ahead with?

That is an interesting question and assumes that HR is not part of top management or strategic leaders which is not true. HR is very much part of the leadership team. However, HR has to earn that seat on the table, same as any other function. In our case, we have co-opted Industry HR Veterans (all erstwhile HR Heads of Fortune 500 companies) into our Stratcom who advise, guide and facilitate strategic decisions at NeoNiche.

What will define organizations of the future? Is it going to be around the employees that are engaged, or will it be around competitive hiring or what?

You are asking a buy or build question. I believe both questions are important. Buy is for the short term talent need after that build kicks in. One must have the capacity to attract great talent and hire them in the right roles. However, this process only feeds into the engagement, development, and performance processes. Finally, only the lasting performance over a significant period, of these new hires will grow the business profitably. Organizations of the future will be those who instill a sense of purpose in people and convert their careers into a calling!

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Video is the ‘BIG’ thing today, undoubtedly, and will be, given the volume at which it is getting produced each day by millions of online users. While video marketing has witnessed exponential growth in the advertising and marketing industry, we, the daily users do not miss an opportunity to take one and upload as one of our stories on Snapchat, Instagram or Facebook.

With the rise in video, the most benefited is the content creator community as it is the one way they get their audiences engaged with top-notch content and make it popular online. Also, on the hindsight we can witness an intense race among the platforms housing these creators including the likes of Youtube, Instagram, Snapchat and Facebook. While Youtube and Instagram are considered the go-to platforms for video-making, Snapchat and Facebook have been recently introducing various tools and features to lure the content creators and launching original content.

In October this year, Snapchat launched ‘Snap Original’s -the debut of serialised Shows, including its first formal slate of scripted Shows and Docuseries. Building upon its successful vertical video content platform designed exclusively for mobile, Snap is aiming to move mobile TV forward with series from some of the industry’s biggest names, including Bunim/Murray Productions, the Duplass Brothers’ DBP Donut and Brad Weston’s Makeready, as well as established film and television writers. The makers also bought ‘Discover’ to India- tailor-made for the growing community of Indian Snapchatters, through partnerships with nearly a dozen media brands. Snapchat has offered local publisher content in India. Discover partners will create made-for-mobile Publisher Stories and TV-like Shows for Snapchat, across multiple genres.

Early this month, while addressing media at Facebook India’s debut ‘Creator day’ edition in the country, the company’s Head of Product for Video Paresh Rajwat said the biggest trend that Indian digital industry has witnesses in consumer behavior, is rapid growth in adoption of video and that video has become one of the biggest drivers of engagement growth on Facebook. Facebook Creator Day reinforced Facebook’s continual commitment to support the publishers and creator community in India, helping them grow and monetize their videos on the platform by introducing ad breaks and Brand Collabs Manager.

Facebook videos VS Snapchat videos

While both platforms imbibe their strengths and specifics, it is their race to attract more number of creators for boosting videos on the platform has become the talk of the town. A study also reveal that Facebook has been losing more of the younger lot to Snapchat due to easily accessible services. Meanwhile, Facebook has been gaining lot more popularity from the elder generation who keep themselves glued to the videos in their feed. Echoing similar views, Neil Athayde, Group Account Manager, Chimp&z Inc believes that both are not really competitive with each other as they cater to different objectives. Like on Snapchat videos are consumed over their discover section, while a similar section to the same on Facebook is Facebook Watch than Facebook Videos.

Throwing light on the demographics for each platform,  Prateek N Kumar, CEO & Managing Director, NeoNiche shared that Facebook videos cater to a wide variety of audiences, while Snapchat Videos are youth-oriented as 60 per cent of its audience fall under the age group of 12-24 years. Snapchat videos have quirky decorating tools like emojis, bitmojis (personalized emojis), and stickers, apart from this, Snapchat also provides revenue generating tools like sponsored lenses, geo-filters and spectacles which helps it to monetize at the same time let the user customize the video. While Facebook videos either through FB Live or recorded ones are less customized in terms of visual appeal. Snapchat videos also hook the audience to check the platform frequently as there is a sense of fear of missing out (FOMO) as the videos disappear after 24 hours while FB videos are less addictive from this sense.

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MUMBAI: NeoNiche Integrated Solutions Pvt. Ltd, a 360-degree experiential marketing agency, recently won the events mandate for Kalpataru Limited. The account was won following a multi-agency pitch.

Kalpataru Limited is one of India’s leading real estate companies, responsible for building Mumbai’s tallest and luxurious residential tower in the ’70s, a record that stood for the next quarter of a century. The brand also has several luxury properties under its domain, such as Avana, Magnus, Amoda, Solitaire, Vista, and Yashodhan.

NeoNiche will be playing the role of showcasing the grandeur and luxuriousness of the brand events through the right mix of design and storytelling, with a combination of immersive technology, skilled professionals in marketing, space designers, architects, and much more. Its aim is to enthral the audience to maintain the legacy of Kalpataru and deliver an effective engagement, amalgamated with a flawless execution. This will bring about a high recall value for the brand, for attendees and client alike, and make it a glorious success.

Speaking about the win, Mr. Valay Lakdavala, Director – Client Relations, NeoNiche said “We are very excited about our association with Kalpataru Limited, as it allows us an opportunity to use our expertise to showcase the brand as an industry leader, for its thoughtfully designed, high quality, and innovative life-spaces. The opportunity will set the roadmap for our plans to create meaningful and remarkable experiences in the real estate industry”.

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