Marketing has undergone a renaissance over the past 10 years, and there’s more dynamism & disruption to come, for organizations of all shapes and sizes. The future of marketing in India is being shaped by a multitude of tectonic forces coming together to shift consumer sentiment and behavior. To help CMOs make sense of the emerging challenges & identify resilient levers of growth, Deloitte has published its latest edition of “Marketing Trends 2023: The India story”. The report unearths 4 macro trends - pertaining to evolving marketing investments, emerging marketing technologies, sustainability & creativity, which we describe in the section below along with one key action we can take in the local context.
Ashvin Vellody, Partner, Deloitte India
Trend 1: Brands answer economic instability with marketing investments
CMOs in India will continue to act as key growth drivers, growing their organization’s capability to endure future challenges. Future-ready brands are investing in their customers and building their own moats – like, introducing martech like customer data platforms, or implementing hyper personalization strategies or becoming synonymous with immersive digital experiences to connect with customers where they are.
Action Point: With market volatility, comes immense opportunity. It is advisable for CMOs and CDOs to start making their marketing investments (subject to their organizational realities) to earn the dividends in the long-term, rather than waiting and watching.
Trend 2: Rising technologies for marketers to watch
Without giving in to the hype, adapting and Indianizing emerging technologies such as the ‘responsible’ metaverse, promises to unlock new frontiers in immersive tech and branding opportunities. Unlimited reality & immersive digital experiences have broadened imaginations, but these are merely fresh platforms to analyze customer behavior from, on a new scale and depth.
Action Point: Brands should judiciously dip their toes by selecting pilot use case/s to get acquainted with the metaverse continuum. We advise CMOs to build gradually as per the realities of the end consumer and the market, keep testing and focus on unlocking the human impact of the emerging tech, not the tech itself.
Trend 3: Creativity as a force for growth
For CMOs to continue offering superior human-first experience to their customers, their best bet is creativity. While data may be liquid fuel, creativity in the marketer’s playbook propels them to never settle for the status quo. Be it harnessing regional micro influencers to drive brand credibility, or gamifying/incentivizing digital payments, or even leveraging AI & voice cloning to create hyper personalized ads to boost small businesses, we strongly believe that creativity is every Indian CMO’s secret superpower to unlocking growth, innovatively.
Action Point: We advise CMOs to leverage design thinking, workshopping, exploring external perspectives to scale up creativity within the organization. This will not only help approach ambiguous business problems innovatively, but also transform creativity into a growth enabler rather than it being just an output of a marketing campaign.
Trend 4: Stepping up to the sustainability agenda
As an increasing number of customers in India are calling out sustainability as a critical parameter for brand choice, CMOs must view sustainability from a wider aperture – empowering a sustainable future for customers, colleagues, communities and, of course, the planet. We recommend marketers to take the lead on sustainability issues within organizations and walk the talk when it comes to proving that sustainability & profitability can coexist inside the boardroom and outside it.
Action Point: For CMOs and Experience officers, we recommend establishing a connect between the brand and the sustainability agenda, making it a pertinent and future-ready CEO agenda topic.
We have often heard that the leading companies use every challenge to shape it into an opportunity and 2023 is certainly turning out to be one such year for CMOs and CDOs to differentiate themselves.
We believe that our report “Deloitte Marketing Trends 2023: The India story” will help marketers steer their growth strategy efficiently and effectively in the coming months as they continue to deliver value for their customers.
Article Credits - Barsha Chakraborty, Manager, Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu India LLP
First Published: Mar 10, 2023 1:06 PM IST
