CX is the brand ambassador, Marketing & Advertising News, ET BrandEquity
When it comes to branding and marketing of D2C brands, CX is what fundamentally determines the brand’s success and growth in the segment. This customer experience essentially boils down to brands ensuring their consumers are seen and heard. At the Brand World summit, organised by ETBrandEquity, a panel on “CX is Brand Ambassador: D2C Building on Experience” consisting of marketing professionals from various segments threw light on this topic.
Moderated by Hemanshi Tewari, producer and anchor, The Economic Times, the panel included Nishant Nayyar, vice president and head of marketing, Kaya; Geet Rathi, vice president marketing, Man Matters; Amit Singh, vice president, marketing and growth, Gynoveda and Arpita Kulkarni, head of marketing, Mymuse.
The panellists commenced the discussion by talking about how marketers integrate data obtained from different sources such as surveys, CRM, social media and others.
Singh explained that having a helpline where consumers can call to ask about disorders and medicine aids an omnichannel marketing strategy which centres around the consumer. These calls understand the emotions and concerns of the consumers and largely rely on listening and talking to the consumer to work on creating pleasant experiences.
Tewari noted that the brands operate in a trust deficit market. With trust playing a crucial role in consumer experience, the panel pondered on data strategies employed by brands to anticipate consumer’s needs.
“Trust is like hair. If it’s gone once it’s very hard to get it back,” said Rathi in a light-hearted tone.
He added that the category of Man Matters is such that consumers see health outcomes after six to nine months, so it’s important to document the journey at the 15-20 touch points with consumers within that period. This assists the brand with understanding what issues they are facing while providing the ideal customer experience. Doing this also helps build a basis for consumers and makes anticipating needs more efficient.
“We have doctors on our platform whom consumers come and speak to. On the side, we’ve also built up systems and designs to make sure that we capture as much information as possible from the consumer. We make sure that the consumer interacts a lot with the platform and the more he interacts, the more information we have. This helps us customise the experience for the user,” he elaborated.
Another key point for marketers is to carefully tow the line between customisation and personalisation when selling an experience. So how do you determine where to sell this experience and how to enhance it? Nayyar explained that a lot of the coming of age brands and D2C brands use new tools to find the right catchment area in specific areas. He believes it helps brands to double down in specific cities and get good EBITDA margins. “We’ve started using those notional variations that these tools provide to kind of expand and go to the last mile”
For brands like Mymuse, it will take more time to arrive upon this stage of consumer experience as consumers struggle to educate themselves on the segment and category of the brand itself. Kulkarni revealed that branding around such products have been gendered or sleazy which would often stigmatise the category more than it already has been.
Trust again becomes a vital factor again for such stigmatised brand categories and it must be treated carefully. Kulkarni clarified how good understanding paired with a friendly and open approach has gone a long way for the brand’s marketing strategy. She elaborated, “For the Valentine’s day campaign in 2021, our co-founder wrote a note to customers talking about her own journey of what Valentine’s day meant to her growing up and how that’s changed. Conversations like these through various touch points is what initially builds that trust among consumers and then you come in a position to educate them. After this an array of touch points open up.”
The panellists agreed upon the significance of consumer experience and trust building. Singh also highlighted the role of community building at Gynoveda to bring women together and carve a space based on trust.
Tewari inquired how this community-building experience translates into profit when it comes to the brand’s business. To this Singh answered that consumer advocacy through this community building creates a referral system that ensures your current consumers bring in your next consumers.
Most importantly, he approaches this experience with a result-oriented mindset where the consumer’s experience and results in the ‘Circle of Sisterhood’ speaks for the brand itself.
“Once you join this group on social media you will see at least 15 posts every day where women are sharing beautiful pictures of their babies with captions ‘one month completed’, ‘two months completed’ and so on which encourages other women to adopt the Ayurveda practices we recommend,” he reiterated.
Another metric to measure the brand’s profit is repeat percentage. Singh elaborated that by understanding how many consumers acquired in month zero are continuously taking medicine beyond six months, the brand drives loyalty and hence profits.
The other side to the problem of education is excessive information on the internet. Rathi explained that consumers can easily access the internet to find information but due to multiple sources with various information, consumers often get confused and overwhelmed. This quickly damages the trust built with the brand.
“One of the things that we do is that on the very onset we try to identify by certain markers where the consumers lie on the spectrum of hairfall and we take off everything else from the platform to make it neat and sanitised for that specific consumer” he shared. This eliminates confusion preemptively and enables brands to observe promising results.
Talking about balancing this education with marketing, Rathi remarked advertisers go to greater lengths just to increase their hook rates within the first three seconds of the ad by putting irrelevant content at the beginning or something that’s clickbait-worthy which can even lead to brands being ‘cancelled’. “That’s a challenge because it’s supposed to be engaging and fun but we’re dealing with a serious topic so that’s honestly a challenge that we deal with on a day-to-day basis” he added.
Nayyar said it is crucial to stay innovative and break the monotony created in the segment. This is often achieved through loyalty programs. “We just focus on outcomes. I think that is where everything gets intertwined with loyalty, with repeats, with new customer customer coming in through word of mouth,” he added.
Kulkarni, on the other hand, exemplified Mymuse’s meticulous approach to marketing to ensure the brand doesn’t face backlash for being insensitive. She gave an example of a beta massager which was of tangerine colour and looked too close to saffron. To avoid being cancelled or sparking backlash, the brand has to shut down the launch of the massager. Kulkarni justified this decision by stating that being relevant does not mean doing something that would upset consumers or communities.
When asked about amplifying marketing decibels to churn profit centres, Kulkarni also highlighted the significance of community building. She illustrated examples from her experience at MyMuse, where beta testers come together in dance-offs and quiz events to interact with each other and share their consumer experience to better the brand’s knowledge about the customer’s needs.
“We saw a lot of comments coming on Reddit talking about how our massagers are slightly overpriced so this year we came up with a sale called ‘boss read your comments and hence we are dropping our prizes’. So we do a lot of these fun campaigns which amplify what’s what we have done previously and then build on top of it,” she said.
However one key challenge faced by many brands in such segments is how to differentiate themself from competitors while building on the product’s experience?
Rathi reaffirmed that his team members such as doctors, coaches, customer happiness team, customer support team are all the actual brand custodians since they are interacting with consumers on a regular basis. Thus, the brand ensures to imbibe their ethos and values properly onto them and differentiate themselves from competitors. “There are regular audits too to give training to those who require it”
Lastly, the panellists concluded the session by giving their advice to D2C brands on how they can build on consumer experience while simultaneously reaching their profit goal.
“Keep experimenting on the qualitative data and quantitative data gathered after listening to your consumers is key,” Kulkarni suggested
Nayyar added on this by urging marketers to have a strategic input led team that understands the data acquired and churns it. “It’s not always about going for the new customer, the biggest revenue chunk for us is from existing customers. That’s only because we’ve doubled down on our data churn strategies to figure out who’s coming from here, what do they want, what is their buying pattern” he indicated.
“Understand their dream state understand, their pain points, their desires, their hesitation and build content around it. If you start addressing this in your content on YouTube or Meta, it will become more engaging,” Singh implored.
Rathi said, “We live in a bubble especially in a country like India that we sometimes lose touch of what’s the reality so that data cuts through everything and tells you what’s actually happening.”
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