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– Venkatesh Rangachari

In today’s scenario, the marketing spends are evolving.

In today’s scenario, the marketing spends are evolving.
Tik Tok videos for example, became popular well before they were being talked about in the larger marketing circles. Outsourced lead generation picked up well last year as did very short format multi language videos on a shoe string budget. Understanding marketing on e-commerce has become very important for D2C brands which spend 80% of their marketing budgets on performance marketing.

As the Corona virus pandemic started to take root, we are seeing a shift to projects around internal and external communication; employee engagement. And interestingly a lot of brands speaking on a digital first world for themselves and asking how to go about it.

As the virus has a full hold on the economy, these questions from our clients compelled us to think of how brands are assessing the environment and how they believe consumers will emerge out of the pandemic. And we took advantage of being a platform and we reached out to our clients, experts and agencies to ask how they saw marketing investments evolve: Budgets, mediums, messages.

Across industries and independent of size of company, there is concern around spending for the future. With zero sales, no supply chain to speak of, investing in consumer communication and brand building appears to be less than critical for most companies.

Or does it?

“Let’s look at it from the consumer’s perspective”

“When incomes are uncertain, consumers will hold back spending on everything but the most essential.”

1. Lifestyle purchases are not going to see a revival anytime soon. Folks will not step out of their homes for any non-essential business. Dining out, cinemas, recreation, holidays. All gone.
2. Upgrades will be postponed: A new washing machine, a new fridge, a new car? Forget it. Let’s squeeze a bit more out of the old Honda City before we upgrade now.
3. In home services- Education, healthcare, home entertainment (OTT) would thrive in the short term, but get a boost in terms of usability even in the long run. Hence services that can be delivered digitally should spend immediately on building awareness, customer acquisition and customer service. (the last is easy to miss out: customers moving from offline consumption of a service to online, will need a massive amount of hand holding.)
4. Package goods would become preferred over loose rations. All products would possibly need a “reassuring” story in terms of hygiene and safety for the next few months as a shaken population recovers its confidence. Establishing safety standards in production, packaging and delivery would drive brand confidence. Marketers therefore need to start thinking these stories TODAY.

The job of a marketer is then to assess where his service or product lies and what new questions the brand must answer in the post Corona world in order to remain in the consumption bucket.

And for those that are transforming (digitizing) the entire product, it’s about agonizing deeply about how a digitized service must look and how a consumer must be helped to make the transition.

It’s going to be interesting to see the marketing and communication landscape post the lockdown. Brands that have empathized with consumers today, have not lost touch with the consumer, have made efforts to still reach out and hear them, will speak a new language. In recognition of a significant psychological shift in the consumer.

About The Author
Credits: Venkatesh Rangachari, Co-founder, GroCurv.com – a B2B Services Procurement Platform headquartered in Gurgaon