Who moved my cheese ?...& Marketing📝 

In India, marketing is typically perceived as a spending function. Even large businesses still 'keep money aside' for spending on this function. Instead, Let's look at it as money invested in reaching out. So just like HR & Finance if you do not have the marketing department in place, it reflects on the performance of the business or in technical terms, the opportunity cost of the business turns out to be high.

To give a measurable return on money invested, marketers are now shifting focus on deliverables through digital formats and trying to find a fine balance between offline and online activities. Well, it totally depends upon what your business objective is.  Marketers in the offline space see this as an opportunity lost as they have to part ways with their budget.

On the other side of the fence is the digital workforce which shows how to measure the return on money invested and is always asking for more. The adaption of the skills and availability now is leading to a sea change attitude in spends in this function. All this because, they are now spending where, one - there is direct ROI and two where the consumer is to be found.

Now, where is this consumer ? In India, except large businesses and FMCGs, market research is primarily a product of secondary research and derivations from many researches in related areas. So it becomes difficult to find the exact numbers but all these million internet mobile friendly numbers available are simply not wrong. Hence the conclusions and decisions to spend in this area of internet & mobile friendly genre. Hence, the cheese has already moved.

Who is Marketing ? 

There are two types of companies - Product Marketing & Consumer Marketing. Where the former focuses on creating & offering exceptionally high value from the product & charging a premium on their product, the latter focusses on fulfilling a need gap or creating a utility / service where profits roll in when the volumes are hit.  Some companies go to the extent of not investing in speaking about their products and let happy consumers do the talking, but even with social media not every happy customer talks about it on social channels. Incidently, the Word-of-mouth still scores high here. For the rest, content marketing is a real saviour. 

Content marketing is simply presence of all product and company knowledge that lets a user / researcher decide what he needs to buy. So to say, the decision is firmly taken shape even before meeting the sales reps from their organisation. Here communication around the products and services could have been available with the user with the help of articles, blogs, whitepapers, videos etc. Contrary to the fact not all marketers invest in this area, instead they create a fancy website( which is not wrong ) and wait for things to happen. Well, it is simply a stepping stone and is good but mostly it fails to educate a consumer. Hence, we look up for content to discover more. 

Where investments are large, the consumers want to be in charge as always, these tools help them identify if they are investing rightly. Until they find the right fit, they keep hopping products / vendors / solutions and reaching out to fill the much required. Lets hope that invest in the right communication and empower the consumers to take the right and favoured decisions.