Your views, your show! - Building brand equity and loyalty through new media

Anyone who is worth his/her salt in marketing knows that the power needs to be with the customer. Customer satisfaction is essential in the development of a strong brand and a strong business. With the advent of social media and handheld devices, customer interaction with the brand has become more frequent and deeper. With the availability of hundreds of competing providers for a service via the internet, consumers have a gamut of choices to choose from. Thus differentiation and customer satisfaction for web based services couldn't be more crucial.

In the following article I discuss how famous television networks like NDTV, Sports Center ESPN could use their financial might and talent pool to enter this exciting new form of media, where the viewer has all the power.

Internet Television

This new form of media truly engages the user, by providing a huge archive of TV shows to choose from. Most of the shows are tailored specifically for the avid internet audience and embed features like post show comments, video responses etc. Apart from the huge choice in content, internet television also sparks the formation of communities dedicated to a specific show or area of interest. Imagine, the thousands of our engineering student population performing a postmortem of a show on cloud computing or sixth sense digital devices.

Market players like Hulu, Revision3 have taken the concept up a notch in the US with specific How-To TV shows targeting a niche audience and connecting with them via live feeds, the itunes store etc.
To validate the power of internet television, when the Brit version of the popular business game show, "The Apprentice" was aired, 3-5% of the UKs entire internet traffic was taken up by live streaming of the show via youtube and BBC iplayer!

Next Level Customer Participation

The Objective

To increase customer involvement with the brand and facilitate deeper interaction with the brand and show content.

The Current Situation

Players like NDTV and ESPN do have discussion forums and interactives online for their shows, however, customer interaction is limited only to a postmortem of each episode or a string of queries. Show content and involvement still remain opaque to the user.

Specific shows directed at the internet audience do not exist. Thus a major audience that spends a handful of hours online and that also surpasses geographical boundaries has not yet been tapped to its full potential.

The Target Audience

Though the internet user demographic might be wide and include diverse users from school students to homemakers, the targeted audience in our case is the creative and outgoing user who wants further participation and involvement in the show’s content than what is currently available.

This is a user whose brand loyalty and participation in the brand building process will be effective and long lasting.

Users typically in this category will actively take part in opinion polls and discussions and would have subscribed to regular newsletters and feeds. Thus the target audience is essentially the list of top users in the CRM database. However, new and creative users, who might start a brand bonding process, can also be expected after the repositioning and addition of services.

The Mix

Product/Offering

The key to the offering is to allow users to create their own shows, under the theme of the brand and main concept.

To initialize the process, a video competition could be held, inviting users to post their own episodes under the name and concept of a famous show. Further development in user created content and idea could be carried out.

Presentation/Distribution

Via the formation of a community, users can share videos amongst themselves and subscribe to popular user created shows as is done with blogs. An interactive and eye catching web portal for users to post their videos, start channels or send episode reviews is essential.

The most popular and viewed user-shows could be posted on Facebook fan pages to encourage users to develop better and exciting content and take advantage of the free publicity.

Promotion

A specialized and coordinated promotional mix that keeps with the theme of the offering needs to be undertaken. Social media will play a key role in spreading the word to the targeted audience.

With the financial resources to buy advertising might, the big players could broadcast the theme of innovation and creativity to the masses.

A promotional campaign that airs the most viewed user created show on television would resonate with user expectations and entice a larger audience to join the community.

In sum, it is about time that the corporate world realized that users want an increase in participation with the brand and product development. A fully interactive environment is a very strategic way of engaging with the audience and fostering long term brand growth and equity.

The Gora Fever- an ever popular positioning strategy

They came on a boat, claiming to start a company, with their aristocratic norms and love for tea and 400 odd years later they have left us not only with the foundations of our railway and postal system, but also with a deep rooted consumer mindset, that marketers tap into till today. The British did spark a sense of awe into the people of India with their logical thought, systematic work habit and unfortunately an aristocratic class based society. India has developed a lot since then both socially and intellectually, yet trails of devotion to anything over the seas or quite crudely "white" still remains embedded in the Indian consumer.

The Americans have been playing into this mindset for decades not only in India but also in South East Asia and remarkably Japan. Archie did sell soda pops in the 70s and Gossip Girl designer outfits today. The Indian consumer has progressed with time and would not be enticed to pick up a product just because it has the stars and stripes on it. However, when it comes to more high involvement purchases such as a masters degree or a high-tech industrial equipment- white it is!

In this study I discuss how I used this ever popular tactic to reposition a declining brand amongst the ever volatile student population at VIT.

The Background

Before the dawn of the 09-10 academic year, the IEEE Student Chapter saw itself at crossroads. The university management had decided to allow more chapters to enter the market to pave way for a diverse and rich extra curricular environment at the university, good move for VIT, scary one for the IEEE chapter. With the introduction of international chapters like the ISA, the cropping up of many new student clubs, we faced a tough task at hand. On one hand, we could utilize our already established brand name to target the technically enthusiastic juniors or we could apply a more mass market strategy to grab the masses before anyone else. A niche audience would further instigate our position as a high tech niche brand, and would allow us to focus more on a selected group with our services, but our membership numbers were on the decline and so were the number of technically inclined students entering university(shocking being an engineering institute) How would we sell the most expensive membership on campus to the not so involved student population?

The Positioning

We positioned ourselves as primarily an American brand that offered high value services from abroad and gave students an opportunity to connect to the international, science and engineering community.

All our products and offerings and their promotions, needed to stay in lieu with the position we wanted in the minds of our consumers.

The Strategy

• We created a display campaign that portrayed all the big wigs of the engineering world who were IEEE members, mainly American or from the EU.

• We promoted the mentor ship program that connected students to American professors via live web chat.

• We justified our higher costs, with international standard rates, the opportunity to learn from the best in the western world, and the fact that our services were being provided from abroad.
• A sales pitch that enticed students to get involved in projects and innovations like students in the States and EU.

The Result

A sheer 54% increase in memberships.

The Pitfall

With newer international chapters entering the market, promoting the "white" brand might not suffice.
With a less motivated and inclined crowd, we might need more than just "the international pitch".
Our services did not entirely meet our hyped elevator pitches and word did spread.


All in all, employing the "gora fever" tactic does have it's short term rewards, however, with an ever developing Indian consumer, we marketers need to pull out more tricks from the hat!