Marketers should work with consumers in digital era

This is partly because they have the unique trait of speed, the fastest and easiest way to match the needs of modern consumers. 

The latest statistics from the agency We Are Social give us a better glimpse of how people have taken the leap into digitising themselves. There are 2.3 billion social-media users around the world, 31 per cent of the global population.

With this breathtaking number, we have to sit back and ask ourselves many questions. What is the next step? How can brands operate in this transformed consumer environment? 

Let’s take this opportunity to dissect this new reality and see the implications for both marketers and consumers. First, with social media becoming such a dominant force, commercial-based communication is dying down. Since we moved to a multi-screen era with mobile devices accessible by most of the population, the importance of TV has not been the same. 

Despite this drop in importance, Thailand is still a TV-driven market, with almost 100-per-cent penetration, which helped spawn the digital-TV movement last year that came out with even more channels to attract Thai consumers. 

However, after all of these movements, there is a major decrease in consumers sitting idly in front of their TV sets watching commercials during programme breaks. 

Marketers have been busy reshaping themselves to strive for success in gaining consumers’ attention. Judging from the past three years alone, we can see that marketers have been putting less emphasis on TV commercials and moving towards content-based advertising. 

Brands now own many popular TV shows in the form of major sponsorships, tie-ins, or even their own programmes to handle the decrease in attention to typical TV commercials. 

We can clearly see that marketers have reshaped their brands from advertisers of products to publishers of content. Major brands have taken this as their new core thinking to connect with multi-screening and consumers with short attention spans. 

The great example of this is Unilever’s Rexona brand and its hit TV show “Thailand’s Got Talent”. Rexona was able to publicise its products, messages, and brand name beyond typical commercials. 

On the consumer’s side, apart from the global stats, looking closer to home will reveal how Thais have digitised themselves. According to IPG Mediabrand’s Wave study with 50,000 samples across the globe and 1,000 in Thailand, 91 per cent of Thais digital users also use social media such as Facebook on a daily basis. Out of this same group, 85 per cent also use the Line chat and social application daily. 

These stats may seem typical and befitting the digital era, but they also show how we have been fully digitised. According the same study, we spent 202 minutes per day on social networks. That’s around three and a half hours, leaving us about 20 hours per day to work, to eat, to play, and to rest.

With consumers spending much of their time on social media, changes in behaviour will follow. Similar to how marketers and brands have changed their approach to become content-driven publishers, consumers are making themselves publishers as well.

Over the past year, we witnessed the emergence of Net idols, where anyone with a social-media account can become popular if one knows how to present and advertise oneself. If people publish their content well, social sharing will burst across the digital world, making them celebrities overnight. 

This revolution of consumer to publisher is becoming an acceptable norm according the same Wave Study by IPG Mediabrands: 45 per cent of Thais stated that they would love to become famous online. 

These notable shifts from both the marketers’ and consumers’ perspective have shown that these two parties are turning themselves into publishers. Brands should work hand in hand with consumers by making space available for them to publish socially and vice versa. Consumers will help out the brands by publishing brand content right on their social spaces, generating even more awareness through sharing than ever before.

The way to survive is for brands and consumers to work closely as publishers. Once we are able to do so, both parties can emerge victorious, because we are always stronger together. 

 

Maas Virajoti is group head, strategy and innovation, IPG Mediabrands Thailand.