What Anand Chakravarthy teaches about B2B marketing

There are very few brands or businesses out there that can live without considering digital as part of their media mix. Hi Anand, you are an evangelist of the digital medium of advertising. Tell us why and in what circumstances does digital work better than mass media such as print and television? Firstly, I don't think I'm an evangelist of digital. I think the truth is in today's day and age, there are very few brands or businesses out there that can live without considering digital as part of their media mix.

So I don't think it's a choice of and digital or digital versus offline or traditional media. I think today the challenge for most businesses and marketeers is that consumers are consuming content across different kind of platforms. It's not that television has declined, television continues to grow. And obviously digital is making a significant impact on how consumers consume entertainment and content. So I think it's more about evangelizing how you bring the two worlds of digital and analog together.

And how do you measure the efficacy of using both digital and analog media in the most effective way. And I think I would rather see myself as an evangelist of more integrated thinking versus platform specific. And in what cases does digital not work? Look, I think the truth is that digital, it's not that digital doesn't work. I think if you look at use cases of digital and proven efficacy of digital, I think irrespective of the kind of metric you're trying to move,

it could be a very fundamental brand metric like awareness, visibility, perception, or it could be a business metric, which is, you know, what we call as bottom of the funnel metric, which is conversion, leads, sale. I think digital has proven itself to have efficacy across the board. Maybe there are categories and maybe there are services where the role of digital still hasn't created the right kind of impact. So, you know, content marketing and storytelling are buzzwords today. Yet there is so much debate on the right metrics.

What is your experience here? So, right, I think, see, I think, is there a need for content? No question about it. I think the challenge today in today's environment is that reaching audiences through media and digital media is not a problem, right? You have 10 to 15 large platforms all the way from, you know, YouTube to OTT platforms to the new age of Chinese apps, which are coming in through now big ecosystems like Jio, Flipkart, Paytm, etc., which all have millions of consumers.

But I think the debate or the need of the hour is to move away from just reach to engagement. The biggest challenge is today everybody across the board, you know, irrespective of age or stage turn life, everybody is so fragmented in terms of their attention, right? I mean, if I look at myself, I get up in the morning, I open InShorts, I flip through InShorts. Then I go and check WhatsApp because WhatsApp has personal message groups, it has professional message groups. Then I will go and check my email.

Then I will probably go and also check out Facebook and look at it for updates. The moment I go five years younger than me, the whole journey of using digital changes, right? And I think therefore the challenge is for marketers and for brands is, it's not about just reaching consumers, it's how do you engage them? And I think that's where content plays a superior role. Now, how do you measure content? Should we measure content in terms of number of shares, number of people who view the video, number of people who share the video?

Yes, I think those metrics do matter. I think the challenge today in the industry is, how do you start getting some more hard-coded metrics? Like, for example, if you've created a piece of content, so one is reaching consumers through it, which is doable and it's easily doable through paid media. I think isolating the impact of that piece of content from your regular advertising on what impact it had on either the consumer awareness, consideration, preference or actual purchase of your brand is where the next stage of focus needs to be.

Okay, you know, B2B brands, they often focus on performance campaigns rather than brand building. What are your thoughts here? So, specifically if you're talking about B2B, what would you refer to? I mean, I don't know. Maybe if you're talking about B2B technology brands? No, absolutely. So, let's look at tech brands, right? I think the reality with tech brands at the end of the day is that most of the large tech brands already have very strong equity in the market.

Secondly is the way they build brand is very, very different from the way a traditional consumer brand would be built. So, for example, brands like IBM, Dell, in the tech space or Oracle or Adobe, they're all B2B brands, right? Right. But they build their brand by building their expertise credentials through multiple different streams. So, whether it is producing white papers, whether it's sponsoring industry forums where there's key stakeholders. Yeah. Driving thought leadership. Right. That's all brand building. Mm-hmm.

I mean, we may not see it as brand building because we're used to brand building means you have to do an ad on air and the ad has to talk about the philosophy of the brand. But I think that these brands have used a very different way of brand building which is more relevant to their audience because they're not talking to billions of consumers. Mm-hmm. They're talking to a very finite set of key decision makers. And it's much more effective to build your brand through things like thought leadership

being part of common forums, writing white papers, being part of large research studies that finally land up in the hands of such customers. And I think for them, therefore, brand building is happening through a different work stream. Therefore, for them, I think when you look at the way they use digital, the role of digital is therefore to look at really more bottom of the funnel and mid-funnel metrics, which is once you've created awareness for your product and built equity for your brand, the

target audience you're looking at, go online to look at research to find out more about these companies. And I think that's where digital plays a role of then moving them down the funnel. So I think it's a good balance of brand building. I think the way they build brand is distinctly different from B2C. And so it should be.