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80s and 90s were the decade when my generation was growing up attuned to song requests made on AIR by people from a non-descript town called “Jhumri Tilaya” andLalitaji’s pearls of wisdom on which washing powder made our cloths look whiter or how a particular Scooter brand was creating stronger images of stronger India as it was hard to miss on Sunday morning television along with “Ramayana” and “Mahabharata”. We kept trying to save a particular character’s girlfriend in the name of Video games. Digital camera was still a distant dreams to the ubiquitous Camera Rolls, X-Boxes and PlayStation were unheard of and life was about scarcity and limited choices.
But something remarkable happened in the 90s in India and became a buzzword we know today as “Economic liberalization” which opened the floodgates of breakthrough reforms for international trade and investment, deregulation, initiation of privatization, tax reforms, and inflation-controlling measures. The generation of ours and saw a whole new world where globalization and technology advancement shaped the way we perceived and saw things like never before and gave rise to a whole new breed of Consumers. Consumption was no longer about available choices but getting what you want on your terms.
Internet, Smart devices and Technology created a world in which, to a greater extent than ever before, individuals and small businesses competed and collaborated across the globe for a mindshare of the prospective customer residing anywhere again fragmented into demographics, geographies and so on.
While traditional advertising (radio, print, and television) verbally and visually communicated the brand and product benefits utilizing the traditional “Marketing Mix” of 4Ps the world had moved from “one size fits all” to all about “Custom made”, It has now become imperative for the Marketers to create differentiation and break away from the clutter and make a space in customer’s mind space… a mind space which has multitude of choices.
Brands shifted their focus from more traditional ATL /BTL to TTL way of marketing their products and services as a result of changing consumer attitudes; Today more sophisticated and informed consumers demands relevant messaging that engages them in a dialogue, and which allows them to interact with the marketer through their preferred communication channels. The world changed from Brand Promise to Brand experience addressed by whole new form of Marketing termed as what we call experiential marketing which tries to immerse the consumers within the product by engaging as many senses as possible. In this way, experiential marketing can encompass a variety of other marketing strategies from individual sampling to large-scale guerrilla marketing.While traditional advertising (radio, print, television) verbally and visually communicates the brand and product benefits, experiential marketing tries to immerse the consumers within the product by engaging as many other human senses as possible. In this way, experiential marketing can encompass a variety of other marketing strategies from individual sampling to large-scale guerrilla marketing.In the end, the goal of experiential marketing is to form a memorable and emotional connection between the consumer and the brand.
For the closer connection Marketers have started looking for 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. Today dynamics of marketing has changed from traditional marketing mix of Product, Price, Place and Promotion (4Ps) to Consumer, Cost, Convenience and Communication… Truly the era where content is the “Queen” and customer is the “King” has arrived.
Memories are always created what has changed is the realm in which they are created while Lalitaji’s may be a part of our memory dispensing advice to our mothers today her granddaughter will be dispensing the same advice to a more informed audience as per their convenience on their smart devices, saying “Daag acche hai”……