Today's Marketing Trends @ SiliconIndia Marketing Summit
By siliconindia   |   Friday, 30 September 2011, 18:40 IST
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CHENNAI: Each technological triumph in various fields has written a new story for every Marketer. With every new product, new concept, new idea, begins a new journey for a Marketer which either breaks the old rule or builds on to make a new one. The Strategic Marketing Summit, Chennai saw a 360 degree view from Marketing professionals, diversified by their sectors, products and consumers but linked by one single thread: Passion to reach out and satisfy their END consumers! The Keynote session was initiated by Sundar Balu,Global Management Consultant, "He focused on todays marketing trends he said 'Mobile Marketing is certainly a wave of the future especially as the marketing community refines its content, focus markets to a target audience and does so prudently with privacy "permission". He also said"Marketing community should take an equally responsible role in the definition and enforcement of privacy laws in India. A task group should be set up so that consumer privacy laws are written with enforcement and penalty while the inherent technological and consumer benefits of mobile, social and web marketing are not compromised". He puts across very important points in front of the audience like "Twitter, Facebook and Youtube usage by marketeers will explode in India as we are only at about 7% penetration (proliferation) and by just going to 20-30% will increase reach to few hundred million users especially as multi-lingual voice based messaging hits the rural community. This combined with various states' aggressive campaign to ensure each child receives an education will further enhance the multi-channel marketing effort as we will now have a larger literate and empowered audience." Sunder also said "India, ofcourse, more than any other country be very watchful that we do not start "exploiting and profiling" individuals by way of their Facebook profile or worse yet, create intended or unintential harrasment. This is already occuring with improper use of technology where cyber crimes are at an all time high.India has been very quick to gravitate to social media as we were always a highly socially networked country and Facebook, Youtube and others just brought people that much closer. There is no longer a need to post a letter, email or personal visit. Youtube, Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Skype and other video chat services provide instant gratification of SiSOMO. A new born baby can be webcasted to all your network friends within seconds. This provides marketers a window of opportunity to showcase everything from baby care products, to baby gift ideas, to baby fat reduction exercises, yoga / gym memberships to new fashion wardrobe for the mother, life and health insurance policies etc etc)". For the first panel "Digital Marketing: Innovative strategy" Kalyan V Chatrathi, Head, Marketing Engineering and R&D Services from HCL Technologies 'Digital Marketing professionals need to track' screen wars' "TV, Laptop, Mobile at the very least as all of these are turning intelligent and becoming adaptable to Apps. Apps in laptop & mobile market is mature while the TV apps market will mature in 1-2 years and then the remaining screens (car, home appliances etc) in 3-5 years" He also said "While marketing managers have mastered the art of using Digital platforms for Inform and Interact with customers, they should use the medium for Influence as well" For the second panel "Social Media Marketing Strategy" Vijayakumar Radhakrishnan, Co-founder from Magzter said "How Indian companies can use social media to get visibility and branding. Social media is just now about twitter and FaceBook, it"s also about video sharing, online discussions, RSS feeds and then monitoring the effectiveness of the social media marketing". He also mentioned "Social media for any corporate it today considered as the face of the company and provides a clear transparent relationship between a company and its clients" For the last Panel "Cost effective Marketing strategies for Startups" we had Ramesh Kharbanda, Chief Operating Officer from TVS group comments .The presentation made by Ramesh went about not only looking at cost effective marketing strategies but also on what are genes or basic constituents which make a start up successful by looking at Succesful start up case studies in India and Global space. Action Orientation, Innovation, Creativity, Persistence, Passion and belief in what u are doing were thought to building blocks. Moving forward, Ramesh kharbanda went about explaining fundamental steps for building up powerful marketing strategies citing live examples from corporate world. One of the interesting observations he made was that it was not important to have all superior features in the product. Maintaining parity in most and huge lead in one/two features over competition could get a company miles ahead which was supported again with live examples. Some fundamental concepts like Segmentation, developing USPs, customer service focus were well covered and Ramesh kharbanda went about giving tips on cost effective marketing strategies. He particularly stressed upon building up Referral base, using PR, Networking, using BTL effectively, social marketing, website as effective tools for start ups To add onto this Dr.P Ratnakar, Director- Strategy from Dr.Reddys stressed upon the Guerilla marketing, which is adapted as the appropriate cost effective marketing strategy for the start ups. Various case studies were discussed how large corporates could sustain and grow by adapting Guerilla marketing strategies to enhance their position in their respective markets.He said "dwelled upon Innovation as yet another key strategy which again is proved by various corporates as the most effective strategy". Over all the Strategic Marketing Summit Chennai was entirely a new platform for the budding Marketers to bring their diverse thoughts, different experiences, thought provoking new ideas. Different industries have valuable lessons to offer to others on what they do very well. One has to be vigilantly learning from all sources to tap into them successfully. The event was sponsored by Apna Circle.com, OneMG and Tata MacGrawHill. Learning is a process and every New Marketing concept is just a sequel to an old story!

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