AGILITY, PERSONALISATION AND AUTHENTICITY: THE FORCES SHAPING POST PANDEMIC MARKETING

The tickle online has turned in to a stampede for businesses wanting to digitise operations following the Coronavirus pandemic. Technology has enabled consumers to shop online and also to influence the opinions of others. Jayomi Lokuliyana , co -founder and Chief Executive of zMessenger, Shalin Balasuriya, co -founder of Spa Ceylon and , Rohan Jayaweera , cofounder of Antyra Solutions, discussed how these forces, accelerated by Covid’s onset, has transformed the marketing landscape.

Imran Furkan was the moderator. He started by asking Shalin Balasuriya how he went continuing to build a brand during a pandemic and what about that process he expects will change after the pandemic. Excerpts of the conversation.

Shalin: Pandemic or no pandemic, we live in a world where consumer behavior is changing rapidly and on a global level. Branded companies need to figure out how they can keep pace with these changes. For brands, the approach has to be, first have a deep understanding of what resources you possess and then, what your brand represents to consumers.

When I talk about consumer behavior, I’m really talking about consumption patterns. How are these changing? What are their lifestyle choices? Do they travel and how do they enjoy leisure?

When consumer behavior changes, whatever your brand means to them can also change. You have to constantly observe customer behavior, evaluate your resources, and be agile enough to respond. That’s, essentially, what we’ve done at Spa Ceylon. We’ve kept an eye on how consumer lifestyles evolved and we have responded to consumer changes. As a result, the brand has remained meaningful and relevant to the consumer.

It’s the same approach in a post pandemic world; looking at your consumer’s lifestyle, considering how preferences are changing, behaviors are changing, and assessing how we can cater to these.

We shouldn’t get too excited about the changes happening during the pandemic. You just continue building brands. That’s what Spa Ceylon has continued to do. We’ve opened in five different countries and we have opened seven different stores in this time.

There were challenges and we’ve changed the structure of the business too. We used to attend store openings wherever in the world they happened, but we’ve managed to do it online now. The way we connected with our customers also changed, but importantly we maintained that connection. Having a mindset as a brand is what’s going to get us there.

I’ve seen a lot of Sri Lankan companies say things like ‘well, that’s not how we do business’. That mindset will be a problem. We can’t get too emotionally attached to the way we do business, because the world is evolving.

Since you are a marketing tech pioneer Jayomi, can you share some thoughts on how businesses, particularly SMEs which will have budgetary constraints, can adopt technology to create a personalised consumer experience?

Jayomi: I think the consumer experience has to be the number one priority for 2021. Why do I say that? There are many reasons but I can point out three main ones.

When you optimize your customer experience, you can grow faster than your competitors and your brand will be top of mind recall for customers. That’s the first reason. The second is that you can predict consumer behavior. The gateway to creating an outstanding customer experience is to have the insight. If your goal is customer relevance, then the key is customer insight. That’s the third reason why it’s important.

Here, and globally, these investments didn’t take place during the pandemic. However, some pioneering companies did invest in relevant technologies, despite their size.

Today, technology such as AI and machine learning are quite accessible. To get to that, the simplest thing you should be asking yourself is, am I capturing the customer’s digital footprints with my brand, inside and outside my company? If you don’t have that kind of customer insight, it is going to be challenging to predict their behavior.

During the pandemic we witnessed many large organizations which were traditionally retail, adapting to e-tail, and then they realized, the absence of insights posed a great challenge because they can’t orchestrate the consumer journey. It doesn’t stop there, with after sales you can continue orchestrating the customer journey ensuring their return and their loyalty.

Since I too run an e-commerce entity, I have come to realise the challenges of building loyalty in the absence of face-to-face interaction. The only way to even start to address that is by having access to customer data.

You have to constantly observe customer behavior, evaluate your resources, and be agile enough to respond

Rohan how do you tie marketing efforts into real business outcomes and how important is it for us going forward after Covid 19 you think?

Rohan: When we started none of us, myself or my co-founder, had any media experience. I come from an engineering background and my colleague had a software development background. We were comfortable with mathematics and analytics but we were extremely uncomfortable with fluffy presentations about how a brand will achieve awareness and other such vanity metrics. I have had situations where brands call me up and say ‘that blue doesn’t speak to me or that style is not big enough’. And I’m not passing any judgment on that but I don’t know what to do with that kind of feedback. As an agency, we realized very fast that we are not good at that type of thing.

So, we pivoted and identified ourselves as a creative performance marketing agency. We try to be accountable for every cent a client spends and that’s a lot harder. But the conversations at board level and the reviews are a lot easier because you are not subject to someone’s subjective opinion. We speak hard facts. When Covid happened, it took away 40-50% of our revenue overnight because the hospitality industry was affected. Since then, we have pivoted some more into performance marketing. And that has held steady over the last couple of years.

We are a small country with limited human capital, particularly for the adoption and full utilization of the spectrum of technology that is now available. This is a real problem in many industries. How do we solve this or how do we make sure that we have the kind of talent pool that can utilize the full spectrum of technologies to scale?

Jayomi: Globally, accessing the talent for digital transformation is a real challenge. Let me ask this rhetorical question, ‘what would a car manufacturer, health insurer and a bank have in common?’ The answer is their search for talent, because across industries the need for talent is converging. We are, all of us, in competition with each other, looking for new talent that never existed about a decade ago.

Talent capable of the latest technologies like cloud computing, e-commerce and advanced coding is becoming rare. I think now it’s time for our HR or and recruitment to look at a different spectrum.

New platforms like Fiverr and or freelancer.com are places where SMEs can access freelancers. In one of my other businesses Ad Studio where we had to work with advanced coding solutions for machine learning and AI, I couldn’t find the required talent in Sri Lanka for the last five years. Where I found it was in Eastern European countries like Romania and Poland, where talent with these skills are more readily available.

Shalin: What’s happened globally was this whole digitisation that we have been talking about for five years is happening in six months or a year. Suddenly everyone is looking for the same people. But as a brand you need to figure out what you can yourself do and what assistance you need from experts.

Then we work with companies who handle the analytics and understand the numbers. We realized early on who we need to have in-house and where we need to get professionals to come in.

The other thing we’ve come to realise, and one we had never used before, is working with people remotely. Now we even have a bunch of people working for us remotely as part time employees, but who are putting in the hours and delivering. We would never have thought of this before. And we only got to know that remote working works because we were forced to do it. Why do we need people sitting at their desks working for you full time? So given that everyone’s looking for the same talent we need to figure new ways of bringing in experts. If necessary, we can get resources from another country.

Rohan: My personal opinion is that being small scale gives us the ability to adopt technologies faster. Last I checked, Sri Lanka produced around 25,000 undergraduates annually of which just over 2,000 were engineers. These numbers are certainly not enough. That’s a small number compared to the demand.

For companies the question is, why do you need talent in Sri Lanka? Why do you need talent to be located here? What if the right person is in Fiji or anywhere else? We only need to figure out a mechanism of how we make that person contribute to our business. We really need to think about HR policy, recruitment and compensation in that scenario. The changes are coming and Covid has accelerated all of that.

We are, all of us, in competition with each other, looking for new talent that never existed about a decade ago

How can an organisation acquire real time data, analyze it, and interpret it, when society and how we do business is changing so fast?

Rohan: The biggest thing isn’t so much about how society or how the macro environment will impact a business; that’s hardly within your control. I think what we should be thinking about is how we redesign a company?

There’s something called building a stable core with the right kind of technology infrastructure. On top of that you can have your teams and contracted employees. There needs to be a system available that they can plug in and plug out. It’s about redesigning your business to have this capability. It’s like a Formula 1 team. The car that you design at the beginning of the season versus the car after 20 races, will look so different. Because with every race it takes a new iteration.

I don’t think trying to predict what the world is going to be is going to provide certainty. I think it’s about being the first to respond that will lead to success. Today, the patterns of analyzing buying behavior is silly. Because the closest data we are looking at is, say from maybe ‘the last six months of 2018, or first two months of 2019’, to analyze. That’s two years ago, how is that relevant anymore? I think it’s just about building a level of agility at the edges, and thinking about how we can iterate fast while staying true to the core.

That’s what we try to do. We are not trying to forecast what’s going to happen, but trying to be the first to respond.

Jayomi, marketers have to take a lot of risks. Your advice to marketers in terms of career risks, because I’ve seen your profile and you’ve taken a number of significant risks?

Jayomi: I think you’re implying the entrepreneurial mindset for the marketer. Indeed, in this era, marketing is undergoing a huge transformation. Humanity has lived through a few revolutions and right now, what we are seeing is Industry 4.0. This has impacts on the marketing, organisation, the structure, digital dexterity, as well as brand strategy. Everything is requiring a massive change.

In that context, for marketers or for an enterprise marketer, the best or closest example you could look at is to adopt the mindset of a marketer in a startup.

I can relate to my own experience, because years ago we had an approach called marketing with zero budget. Which actually challenged the team to work with limited resources, but unlimited pressure. That’s the number one mindset change you need. The second is basically investment or your own personal skill set development. Because, I see, most mature marketers are struggling to understand emerging technologies, and to appreciate the impact these could have on their own customers and their organisations. They don’t lean-in, they are leaning back.

When I did my CIM, we always said that marketing was the driver of any organisation. After some time, finance took centre stage. But in the present context, again, I think marketing holds the key to an organisation’s future. Because consumers are driving the changes across organizations.

So, we are talking not only about marketing but also about the entire business transforming to digital. Your acumen of innovation, emerging technologies, as well as business strategy, customer centricity; everything comes to play.

I don’t think trying to predict what the world is going to be is going to provide certainty. I think it’s about being the first to respond that will lead to success

Shalin, I want to draw your attention to the way brands need to position themselves. Covid reinforced a trend that was around for a long time. That is that brands need to communicate whatever they’re offering to a very localized, very precise, and a personalized way. How should brands tailor their communication to become meaningful to consumers?

Shalin: This goes back to what I said earlier, the deeper understanding of your resources as a brand, of what you can deliver and a deep understanding of your consumer and how you can bridge the gap in a meaningful way.

We live in a digital era which actually makes it easier. If I go back to when I started, as a marketer, it used to take a week to get an artwork done, and its published in print three weeks later. That magazine is around for another three months. Somewhere within that period, your consumer sees it.

But now for Spa Ceylon we do something like 250 creatives a month. And we have the option to customize our marketing, we can change the tone, we can change the imagery, we can change the language. We can do it all simultaneously. And you can layer it, and you can test what you’re doing in real time and adjust.

What we need to appreciate is how branding and marketing work has changed a lot. Branding used to be; ‘this is my product, this is what it does, here it is, come and buy it’.

So the brand conversation is now two sided. I can come and tell you here’s my product come in, buy it. But there can be 20 people who could get together and tell me, ‘no, that is not your product proposition. Instead, this is actually what it does is. And this is what it’s worth’. And it then snowballs because everyone has a voice. And everyone has a voice that can be amplified. This is the world we live in.

Brands that understand how to create that link between the consumer and start speaking the same language are the brands that are going to be successful. At the end of the day, all these technical things end at an emotional decision at the end of any purchase. You purchase something because ultimately, it either makes you feel safe, happy, pretty, whatever. So how do we make that customer continue to feel something?

And personalisation is a great way of doing it. We need to sell understanding. That’s actually something that Covid taught us, as well as how to layer our marketing in a way that we can talk to multiple people like talking to them individually, but do it at the same time and continue to test and adjust.

Jayomi: Shalin has reiterated the importance of relevancy. How do you trigger that emotional element? That boils down to how well you understand your consumer and how well you can predict their actions.

After the understanding comes the execution. I see the traditional agencies struggle saying that they now have to do 10 times as much creatives for digital. Its because now you need the creatives to be optimised. If agencies want to be in this game, I think they need to adapt to that mindset, you now need giant content, because each piece of content is personalised to the consumer, based on their insight.

Rohan: I can add something to what Jayomi says. Just because the work quantity has gone up by 250%, the customer budget hasn’t risen. I have had situations where a customer says, ‘let’s do a New Year campaign’ and that translates to 16 different executions, and close to about 100 different visuals. It’s madness, and the budget doesn’t go up. I think agencies have a tremendous amount of pressure and responsibility on how to set expectations and manage that.

With digital marketing, just because you have the access doesn’t mean that you stand out. But then there’s a lot more other stuff that you actually have to follow to be able to get that done.

Shalin: Spa Ceylon now operates in 27 countries and we have been growing. I often get asked why more Sri Lankan companies are not going out and making it happen. I’m focusing here mostly on consumer brands and products rather than on services.

When it comes to consumer products, a lot of Sri Lankan brands that try to go international, ultimately try to build a product that looks like it came from the country they’re going into. If they are going to Europe, they develop something that looks European, if they are entering the U.S market, they develop a product that looks like it will fit in with the American market.

But there is a problem with this approach. Given where the world is today, if your product is not unique and you don’t stand out, no one’s going to be interested. So that’s what I keep telling brands and startups I talk to. Coming from Sri Lanka, we have some amazingly unique resources that are only ours, our flora and fauna, culture. All those things that we can combine into a story.

We should tell the story that stands out and look at some of the brands that have gone out and been successful like Dilmah Tea for instance. Which is why every time I’m asked what the global brands from Sri Lanka have in common, I say ‘we are essentially selling a story from this island we come from, and that is a unique story that no one else can tell’.

In a globalized world due to technology, everyone is looking for unique experiences. As a result, our story resonates with people. And we have so much more potential for similar stories in this little island of ours. There’s a lot of interest, especially post pandemic. People appreciate the ingredients, the sciences, and they are realizing the importance of nature and so on, that we have such an abundance of those to leverage.

Every time i’m asked what the global brands from sri lanka have in common, i say ‘we are essentially selling a story from this island we come from, and that is a unique story that no one else can tell

But in a developing country like Sri Lanka, advocating or taking a stand can be a complex thing. How do brands, get behind causes and become effective but yet keep their relationships intact?

Jayomi: Unlike normal times, crises expose who we really are as organisations, individuals, and brands. Given the fact that everybody is a journalist now, and have access to all the social platforms, consumers are hyper-tuned to brand messaging.

For example, despite the implications on their bottom-line Walmart stopped selling e-cigarettes recently. This shift was due to growing consumer concern about the health impacts of e-cigarettes. Actions such as these trigger an emotional response from consumers. I think this is what a brand marketing mission should be.

Another great brand is Nike. When they took a stand alongside NFL activist Colin Kaepernick about racism in America, they had customers insights. Before you take a stand or associate yourself with an issue, you should also have an understanding about what your customers value in your brand. Because you can’t be taking a stance on every social issue. A brand must decide if it’s going to be a bystander or going to be an activist on any particular issue. So it all boils down to the same thing, how well do you know your customers and what insights do you have of them?

Another crucial questions a brand could ask themselves is, who are you as a brand? With the new brand that I built, mymed.lk, we kind of had the values of care and convenience. Before the pandemic, we created a platform for medicine donations. And during the pandemic, we realised that there was a need for medicine donations not just for patients suffering from chronic illness like cancer, but that there was a huge demand for meds from the high life dependency units at local hospitals. Crowd funding meds during the pandemic triggered a major emotional response from consumers on a continuous monthly basis, even if it was donating something like a small stock of cannulas to hospitals, because that’s close to their heart.

Are you willing to lead by your profit margins by taking a stand around values? Are you walking the talk? These are important questions because we see a lot of hypocrisy. Your brand values are printed in your reception area, but then what you do on the outside is something that doesn’t resonate. Especially during a crisis, like the one facing us now, people are hyper tuned. That’s what I have seen. And they are not afraid to call brands out.

Rohan: I think it also depends on other variables as well. There’s a saying I’ve heard that, ‘just because it worked for Google doesn’t mean it will work for you’. My belief on some of these things is that it all starts from what kind of person you are and second, it’s about common sense.

And there will be a short-term noise but I think in the long term if you still got what you’re doing, I don’t think some of the noise on social media will impact good businesses as much as we assume. I think there has to be a point where you have to take a stance and stand by it.

Shalin: As a brand, we need to understand that we belong within the brand framework and the brand story. If you’re going to take a stance, does it fit in with what you’re doing? You can’t go about being activists on everything. Whatever I believe, personally, isn’t what my brand should stand for.

Plus there are a whole lot of other things that you have to fall in line with that you can’t ignore because your consumers are demanding it, especially from brands like ours. They want to know what we are doing in terms of recycling? How we are using energy? Now these are basics and there are brands out there which are not touching even the basics, and they are going to get called out.

As human beings we have moral standards and I’m happy that consumers are now holding brands to some sort of standards as well.

But when you do put up your hand for one of those big causes, and want to champion a cause, you should make sure that it’s within your brand story. Otherwise it doesn’t make sense. It’s not going to connect with your consumer. It will just show there is no authenticity in what you’re doing. That’s the takeaway I’d like to leave.

Jayomi: Societal issues are one dimension, but the brand values that you have orchestrated, usually comes down from the founders of the company. Are you actually living up to those brands values, which you can communicate to your customers? That’s another part of it. So these are the two sides of the same coin.

In this post pandemic era, I think you have to balance risk aversion with growth. So, you have to be conservative without stifling the emergence of opportunities. And finally, as we all said, it’s a great time to upgrade your skills as well as of those of your organisation.

Shalin: The one big thing I’d say is to continue to have a deep understanding of your consumer. That’s the beginning and the end for me, as far as marketing is concerned.

Rohan: I think the most important thing is about agility. Agility of your organization and in being adaptive to the environment