From brief to governed creative: how Social Beat uses generative AI to build, test, optimize, and scale advertising creative.
Creative production is becoming the new bottleneck in digital advertising.
As platforms like Google and Meta automate targeting, bidding, and optimization, creative assets increasingly drive attention, clicks, and conversions. The challenge for brands is creating enough relevant creative quickly to keep pace with media plans, without compromising brand consistency or compliance.
Social Beat built SB Studio, to solve for this - its AI-first creative production engine inside PRISM
A brief moves through intelligence, concept development, image and video production, adaptation, and quality control in a single governed workflow. More than 10,000 creatives have been produced through SB Studio to date, while creative adaptation time has reduced by approximately 80%.
The broader opportunity lies in connecting creative production directly with media performance, allowing performance insights to instantly inform future creative output.
For years, digital advertising allowed agencies to differentiate through targeting. That is changing.
Google and Meta now automate much of the audience selection and campaign optimization previously managed manually. As targeting becomes automated, creative assets carry the primary responsibility for driving engagement.
This has created a new requirement for creative teams: Creative needs to become a testing engine, not just a production function.
A single media plan often requires dozens of creative variants across YouTube, CTV, display, retail media, and social platforms, testing different hooks, formats, languages, CTAs, and treatments against performance. Traditional creative production was not built for this volume. In India, regulated categories like BFSI, healthcare, and pharma face additional compliance layers, requiring specific disclaimers, mandatory language, and regional adaptations.
The core challenge is: How do we create relevant content faster, while keeping every asset on-brand, performance-ready, and compliant? That is where AI-powered creative production becomes useful.
SB Studio is the AI creative production layer within PRISM, Social Beat's broader AI-powered marketing platform.
It takes a creative brief and routes different parts of the production process to the models and tools best suited to the task, bringing image generation, video generation, copy, reasoning and creative workflows into a single system. The technology underneath will continue to evolve. The intelligence and governance around the technology are designed to remain consistent.
At the centre of SB Studio is what Social Beat calls the Brand Brain.
A Brand Brain contains the information an AI creative system needs to understand a brand before producing an asset.
That includes:
Designated owners manage versioned Brand Brains across 19 brands. This structure ensures that while AI models change, brand intelligence and governance remain intact.
SB Studio brings four interconnected layers into one creative workflow: intelligence, concept and copy, image and video, and quality control.
The first layer continuously feeds intelligence into the Brand Brain.
This can include:
Structuring and sharing intelligence across workflows ensures that each brand maintains a single, evolving source of creative intelligence.
The creative process does not begin with AI generating random ideas. A planner, strategist or writer starts with the human insight: the audience tension, proposition, cultural angle or creative thought. AI expands that vision into multiple executions, formats, languages, hooks, and variations while preserving brand voice.
While generative AI scales creative output, human judgment remains essential for deciding what to produce, while AI makes those concepts scalable and testable.
Once the creative direction is established, SB Studio can generate the assets required for different media placements.
The same Brand Brain governs the output across:
Mock creatives generated in SB Creative Studio. Directional only.
For video, workflows progress seamlessly from script to breakdown, storyboard, generation, and preview, shifting production from building individual assets to adapting a governed master at scale. This changes the production model from creating every asset independently to creating a governed master and adapting it at scale.
This is where AI creative production becomes particularly relevant for regulated categories.
Rather than relying solely on post-production legal or brand reviews, SB Studio's QC layer evaluates assets against defined rules directly within the workflow before export.
For example, a brand can define:
What must always be present: Brand elements, required messaging and mandatory information.
What must be present for regulatory reasons: Disclaimers, claims language and category-specific requirements.
What must never be said: Unapproved claims, prohibited language or brand-specific restrictions.
Deterministic requirements are automated; mandatory disclaimers follow defined rules rather than model recall. Every asset can also carry an audit trail showing the originating brief, Brand Brain version, checks performed and approval information. This is why AI creative governance and AI creative compliance are as important as AI image or video generation.
The value of AI creative production lies in transforming performance signals into more relevant creative, as shown by SB Studio implementations:
For a two-wheeler riding gear campaign, Social Beat tested lifestyle-led AI videos against product-focused films.
In shopping placements, product-led films achieved a ~3% CTR, compared to ~1% for the lifestyle route. Showing the product proved to be a stronger hook in high-intent environments, enabling teams to pause underperforming concepts and reallocate budget.
The implication was not that product-led creative is universally better. It was more specific. In a shopping environment where consumers are already evaluating the product, showing the product can become a stronger creative hook than showing the lifestyle around it.
The underperforming concepts could then be paused and the budget could be shifted towards the stronger creative direction. That is the real promise of performance creative: create, test, learn and adapt continuously.
For an FMCG client, creative was built and optimized within the media plan, earning Bronze for Best Programmatic Creative Innovation at the Programmatic Asia Awards 2026, demonstrating how creative production and media technology are merging.
In highly regulated sectors like insurance and healthcare, automation delivers value by minimizing lengthy revision cycles. Creative volume only adds value when assets move through approval safely.
Rather than tracking total assets produced, the critical metric is creative hit rate: the percentage of assets meeting defined performance benchmarks (e.g., CPA targets). This shifts AI production from simple efficiency to measurable performance marketing.
Rather than asking “How many creatives did AI produce?”, the more useful question becomes: “How many of those creatives produced a meaningful business outcome?” This shifts AI creative production from an efficiency story to a performance marketing story.
The biggest opportunity comes when creative production does not operate independently of media performance. That is why SB Studio sits inside PRISM.
The Media Brain, PRISM's AI-powered media planning and optimisation engine, can evaluate creative at the asset level.
Pinpointing specific driver variables, such as hook timing or product placement, creates an actionable feedback loop for ongoing optimization.
The loop then becomes: Brief → Intelligence → Concept → Creative → QC → Media → Performance data → Creative insight → New creative
An underperforming asset generates a learning. That learning goes back into the same Brand Brain. SB Studio can then use that learning to generate a new variation. The new creative goes back into the media plan and is evaluated against the same performance framework.
Underperforming assets generate learnings directly inside the Brand Brain to produce refined variations without separate rebriefs or long delay cycles.
Speed alone is not the core transformation. The shift lies in AI-powered creative systems that understand brand context, generate variations, enforce governance, and continuously optimize using media performance data. That is the direction Social Beat is taking with SB Studio. The goal is not to replace creative thinking with AI. It is to give creative thinking the production infrastructure required by modern media. Because when media can test twenty creative variants in a week, the creative function needs to be able to keep up. And when a regulated brand needs every one of those variants to be compliant, speed without governance is not automation. It is a risk at scale.
The future of AI creative production is relevant, governed, and outcome-driven creative, moving seamlessly from brief to governed creative, and from performance back into the next brief.
AI-first creative production integrates generative AI models into a unified, governed engine to automate asset creation across formats, aspect ratios, and languages. By combining brand intelligence, multi-modal asset generation, and real-time performance insights, it transforms creative production from a slow bottleneck into a scalable testing system built for modern performance marketing.
As ad platforms automate audience targeting and bidding, creative assets become the primary driver of engagement and conversion. Generative AI enables rapid production of diverse hooks, messaging, and visual formats, empowering performance marketers to execute automated testing at scale and continuously optimize ad creative based on real-time performance data.
Scaling creative volume without governance creates severe brand and legal risks. AI creative governance uses central brand intelligence—such as a Brand Brain—and automated quality control to enforce brand guidelines, mandatory disclaimers, and regulatory compliance before export, ensuring every asset remains safe, accurate, and on-brand across highly regulated industries.
A media-creative feedback loop directly connects ad performance signals, such as hook rate, hold rate, and cost per acquisition, back into creative production. By pinpointing high-performing driver variables, creative engines can iterate instantly on winning concepts, maximizing the creative hit rate and driving stronger business outcomes.
Multi-format adaptation automatically resizes, formats, and tailors master ad assets across diverse media channels like CTV, social feeds, and retail networks. By removing manual creative bottlenecks, production teams can deploy automated testing across multiple ratios simultaneously. This process drastically increases campaign scalability while maintaining strict brand consistency and driving peak performance marketing outcomes.
Automated testing continuously evaluates diverse copy hooks, visual treatments, and call-to-action variations against real-time media conversion metrics. By systematically identifying top-performing elements and pausing low-performing concepts early, performance marketing teams consistently elevate their overall creative hit rate. This feedback-driven cycle transforms static asset workflows into agile, data-backed growth engines.
Most AI SEO tools answer one question and stop there. Does the model mention your brand or not? That's the easy half. Lily Ray's research showed a brand can sit inside a "best of" list that the same model then ignores the moment it actually makes a recommendation. Share of citation looks good on a slide. It does not tell you if you are actually being recommended.
GEO Pulse is Social Beat's own answer to the harder half of that question. It is an AI visibility tool that tracks brand presence every week across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, and Google AI Overviews, running hundreds of buyer intent prompts per brand. Here is what it actually does, what we have learned running it, and where we think this space is headed.
Understand where your brand stands in AI search, what drives its visibility, what sources influence it, and how those changes translate into measurable business impact.
Mention share and share of voice against the competitors you name, shown as a trend line instead of a one-time snapshot. Category-level splits let you look at the numbers that actually matter. A mutual fund brand, for instance, can look at SIP prompts separately from tax-saving prompts instead of averaging them into a number that means nothing.
Every cited URL, sorted by competitor and mapped by page depth. This is the part that turns into real work. If a model keeps citing four community forums and two trade publications whenever someone asks about your category, you know exactly where your PR, content and community budget needs to go next quarter.
We run accuracy checks against your own facts. Models often pull from outdated pages, and a wrong answer about pricing, coverage or eligibility is not a small mistake in India, it is a regulatory one. A German court has already held Google directly liable for false claims inside its AI Overviews. Under the DPDP Act and consumer protection rules, "the AI said it" will not hold up as a defence.
Mention share placed next to branded search and direct or homepage traffic, pulled straight from your own Search Console and analytics, not a vendor's estimate.
Every report shows its own method on the page, the number of prompts, the number of runs, the date window, which engines were used, and a confidence band. You should be able to check a number before you act on it, not just trust it. We are currently running over 10,000 active prompts across 500+ categories with some of the largest consumer brands in India, and we have analysed close to half a million brand mentions so far.
Keyword tools will give you an estimated prompt universe, but that number is really a guess dressed up as data, because no reliable volume data exists for any large language model. So instead of keyword tools, we build the prompt list from the client's own voice data, call centre queries, enquiry forms, support chats, along with real discussions happening on Quora, Reddit and LinkedIn.
We then run each prompt several times a day and average the results across seven to ten days. That is not caution for its own sake. SparkToro and Gumshoe.ai ran the same 2,961 prompts across ChatGPT, Google AI Mode and Gemini with 600 volunteers, and found less than a one in a hundred chance that two identical prompts return the same brand list. A single run only tells you about variance. Citation frequency across a large run count is the only number that actually repeats, so that is what we report.
The first 90 days of any geo marketing engagement is a baseline. We are upfront about that with clients. It is not a performance claim yet.
The right GEO strategy starts with knowing where your visibility gap actually sits. These two examples show how the same goal being cited by AI can require completely different approaches:
Mental health is an ad-restricted category on every major AI surface, so organic citation was the only channel available to this brand. We placed brand mentions in the sources models were already citing, community forums, PR and guest posts, and restructured the site content so an AI model could lift a clean passage out of it, not just so a human could read it. We tracked mentions monthly on GEO Pulse across Google AI Mode, Gemini, and ChatGPT.
Conversions went up 61% on zero paid media spend between January and May 2026, alongside an 86% rise in impressions on AI surfaces. Click-through rate actually fell, from 3.06% to 2.37%. Fewer clicks, but better ones.
That pattern is not unique to one brand. Insurance, finance, and health all sit under the same advertising restrictions. For close to half our top twenty clients, paid AI placement is permanently off the table because of category policy, which makes organic citation share the only AI channel those brands will ever get.
Here the work was technical SEO and content built specifically for AI Overview visibility across the US, UK, and India; keyword and competitor research per market; broken links and duplicate pages cleaned up, and hub-and-spoke page structures built so a model has something specific to pull from. Keywords appearing in AI Overviews rose 55% in three months. Organic visits rose 54% in six months, with 28% more keywords ranking in the top 20.
The contrast between these two is worth sitting with. One was a citation placement problem solved off the website, the other was a site architecture problem solved on it. GEO Pulse tells you which one you actually have, before you spend a whole quarter guessing.
The counting layer of geo marketing is getting commoditised fast. On 31 August 2026, Google finished rolling out AI performance reports inside Search Console worldwide, giving brands first-party, observed data on how they perform inside AI Mode and AI Overviews, at no cost. Google also started rolling out passthrough URLs specifically to stop third parties from scraping its results. Google is handing brands the same data for free while cutting off the pipes that most scraped estimates run on. Any product whose entire pitch is "we count your citations" has a shorter shelf life than its pricing deck suggests.
Second, AI visibility is rented, not owned, and it is rented from a model version. When GPT-5.6 became ChatGPT's default on 8 August, Tomek Rudzki's citation analysis found Reddit citations down 88%, arXiv down 84% and YouTube down 78% within days. No brand did anything wrong to cause that drop. Any brand or agency that had priced Reddit seeding as their main geo marketing lever lost most of it in a fortnight.
So the four things we are building GEO Pulse around are the four things a plain rank dashboard cannot sell you. The change when a default model shifts, reported as a standing part of the report instead of explained away after the fact. The accuracy of what models actually say about your brand. Hindi and regional language retrieval. And the action layer: the content, PR, and site work that actually moves the number.
Localisation matters here too. India is a top three AI Mode market, and if your customers are asking questions in Hindi, Tamil, or Marathi, an English-only visibility dashboard is really just telling you about someone else's customers.
Most geo agencies will hand you a visibility dashboard and call it a day. The better question to ask any of us, including us, is: which competitors does the model recommend when it is not recommending you, what is it getting wrong about your brand, and what did the last default model change actually cost you.
If you want that answered for your own category, send us ten prompts your customers actually ask. We will run them and show you the content and sources deciding your category right now.
What is geo marketing?
Geo marketing, also called generative engine optimisation, is the practice of making sure your brand gets mentioned and recommended when people ask AI models like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity questions related to your category. It is different from traditional SEO because you are optimising for a model's answer, not a ranked list of links.
What does GEO Pulse actually track?
GEO Pulse tracks your brand's mention share and share of voice against named competitors, the sources models cite most often in your category, accuracy checks on what AI models say about your brand, and how mention share connects to real business metrics like branded search and site traffic. All of it is tracked weekly, not as a one-time snapshot.
How is GEO Pulse different from other ai seo tools?
Most ai seo tools only report whether your brand got mentioned once. GEO Pulse runs each prompt multiple times a day over seven to ten days, because a single run only shows you variance, not a real pattern. It also checks whether models are recommending you accurately, not just citing you somewhere.
Do I need to work with geo agencies to use GEO Pulse?
No. GEO Pulse is Social Beat's own tool, so it comes as part of working with us directly rather than through a separate vendor. Unlike a lot of geo agencies that hand over a dashboard and leave the action items to you, we use the GEO Pulse data to actually run the content, PR, and site work needed to move your numbers.
Can GEO Pulse track prompts in Hindi and other regional languages? Yes. Regional language retrieval is one of the core things GEO Pulse is built around, since India is a top three AI Mode market and a large share of buyer questions are asked in Hindi, Tamil, or Marathi rather than English.
How long before I see results from a geo marketing engagement? The first 90 days are treated as a baseline, not a performance claim. Real movement in mention share, accurate AI answers, and traffic lift usually shows up after that, once the content and PR work from the first phase has had time to get cited.
The integrated read from the 17th Digital Leadership Summit. Bengaluru, 31 July 2026.
We ran the 17th edition of the Digital Leadership Summit at the Taj MG Road in Bengaluru on 31 July, together with Google and Cheil. The theme on the invite read Building Brands for the Next Decade. Nine sessions, a room full of marketing leaders, and categories as far apart as diagnostics, accounting software, pressure cookers, deep tech, groceries and online degrees.
We expected the panels to pull in different directions. They did not. By the third session it was obvious that every speaker was answering the same question from inside a different category.
For First Club and Orange Health Labs, that thing was speed. For Tally, MTR and TTK Prestige, it was reach and distribution. For every company in the room, AI is doing it to execution right now. Same problem, three different decades of arrival. And it is the most honest brief for brand building we have heard in a while, because it forces you to separate what competitors can buy from what they cannot.
Both consumer brands on our convenience panel won their first customers on speed, and both spent this year taking speed out of the promise. First Club, the Bengaluru grocery brand, keeps the words quick commerce away from the brand entirely. Orange Health Labs sold itself for five years as India's fastest diagnostic lab, then retired the line for Speed Meets Science.
Lucky Saini of First Club gave the cleanest proof that a repositioning had landed, and it did not come from a brand tracker. His customers stopped writing in about late deliveries and started writing in about the fruit. Why is this apple bruised. Why is this mango not sweet. The complaint moved off the promise and onto the product, which means the customer moved with it.
Smita Murarka made the same case from diagnostics. Speed only became defensible once Orange Health could explain what produced it: automated labs with little manual handling, sample integrity from collection onward, and reports back in six hours. The new line does not throw the old promise away. It puts a reason under it. The second promise, not the first, is what brings a customer back.
The incumbents in the room are living the other end of the same shift. Akila Chandrasekar of TTK Prestige described Prestige selling pressure cookers and gas stoves on quick commerce platforms, where nobody actually needs a cooker in ten minutes. Her read: the platform has stopped being a delivery channel and become a discovery surface, and its search bar now does the job Google's search bar used to do for the category. Vibhor Ronge of MTR described the same platforms in media terms, with the impression and the conversion happening inside one session, which has changed how a hundred-year-old brand tests budgets.
Convenience did not stop mattering. It stopped being an argument. Any brand positioning still built on it is standing on the floor and calling it a ladder.
The second pattern across the day was brand trust, and the sharpest version came from the least glamorous category in the room.
Kapil Thukral of Tally described the offline communities around the company: chartered accountants, business owners, tax practitioners, content creators, tens of thousands of people. None of them are paid. None of them expect to be. The only commitment Tally makes is to do everything in its power to make them successful, and it evaluates those communities on what it can do for them, not on what they sell.
"In long-term brand building, the role of a well-wisher cannot be bought with any amount of paid advertising."
Kapil Thukral, Tally
Every marketer in that room has an influencer line in the budget. Almost nobody has a line for well-wishers, because there is no rate card and no dashboard for one. That is exactly why it compounds.
Ankit Kedia of Capital A gave the operational version in his fireside, and it was the line of the day.
"Marketing states the promise and the factory keeps it."
Ankit Kedia, Capital A
When a bottle leaks, no customer blames the cap. They blame the brand. Packaging, tooling, dispensers, supply chain: none of it appears in a brand deck, and all of it is the brand as far as the customer is concerned. His argument was that the old standoff between operations and marketing is dissolving, because the remaining edge is control over what you make.
Akila added the constraint side of trust. Heritage is a benefit and a baggage at once. An iconic brand cannot run twenty experiments to see what sticks, because decades of imagery ride on every one. And she named the challenger playbook precisely: a startup takes one narrow segment out of a forty-year portfolio, sharpens a proposition on that one thing, and puts every rupee behind it. When ten challengers do that at the same time, the incumbent has to answer all ten. The real asymmetry is not budget or speed. It is focus.
Every panel touched AI in marketing, and nobody on stage was playing evangelist or sceptic. These were operators describing where they had drawn a line inside a live business, and the line was remarkably consistent.
Rahul Datta of NoBroker runs a customer-facing voice agent with a supervisor agent watching live calls, and still will not let AI launch or change a campaign. His reason had nothing to do with capability.
"You need a neck to catch."
From the NoBroker exchange on the AI panel
Somebody has to be answerable for the call, which means somebody has to make it. Sandesh Gupta of Oolka said AI now does his research and his content, and that execution at scale on Meta and Google is not there yet, whatever the agency decks claim. Lucky Saini refuses AI creative for a fresh food brand while automating nearly everything in paid media except deployment and policy. Smita Murarka uses AI to get seventy to eighty percent of the way and never for the final work, because a diagnostics brand sells trust and the story has to be real.
Read together, they all land in the same place. Automate the layer where the output is a number. Keep humans on the layer where the output is a promise. Most teams are currently doing the reverse.
Kiran Kumar R of UNext supplied the piece with the shortest fuse. The SEO fundamentals have not changed, he said, but discovery has. Users are arriving through AI models now, and UNext can see that traffic. Around seventy percent of its business comes from Tier 2 and Tier 3 towns, so this is not a metro early-adopter story. Put that beside Kapil's point that zero-click results have made search winner-takes-all, and the conclusion is hard to avoid: being cited in the answer is starting to matter more than ranking on the page. Generative engine optimization is the name for that work, and hardly any brand has a budget line for it yet. It is the gap we built GEO Pulse to measure, and most brands still cannot say whether they show up when an AI engine answers a buying question in their category.
On the panel with Nikhil Khemani of Google, Varun of Epik and Gandharv Bakshi of Neosapien, the old framing got dismissed inside the first few minutes. If the idea is strong, the brand campaign drives performance and the performance campaign builds brand. The split is dissolving.
The more useful part was the CFO conversation underneath it. Gandharv described the proof he trusts: Neosapien has raised prices and cut discounts, and demand has held. That is a brand marketing argument that survives a finance meeting in a way aided recall never has. Varun's version was repeat, retention and lifetime value, plus a detail worth stealing: around ninety Epik employees carry the brand in their LinkedIn profiles, and branded search moved before any campaign did.
The honest summary from that room: the longer the horizon, the more performance marketing depends on the brand. Early-stage companies are right to be performance-heavy. They are also borrowing against a bill that comes due.
Three moves, in the order you can actually do them.
Since 2012 we have watched Indian brands win a category on one attribute and then spend years defending it. What was different in that room was that the best operators are no longer defending. They are retiring the attribute that built them while it is still working, and moving the argument up a level.
That is the pattern under all of it. Speed became infrastructure. Distribution became infrastructure. AI is turning execution into infrastructure right now, faster than either of the previous two. Anything that becomes infrastructure stops being a reason to choose you.
What is left is narrow and hard to copy: the second promise, the mechanism behind the claim, the people who vouch for you unpaid, and the judgment about what to make and what to kill. None of it is fast. All of it compounds. That is what building brands for the next decade actually looks like.
Thank you to Google and Cheil, to every speaker, and to the team who built the day. For the marketing leaders who were in the room, one question to take back: which of your current advantages will be infrastructure in eighteen months, and what are you building on top of it?
Brand marketing builds memory, preference and trust before a purchase is on the table. Performance marketing converts existing demand into a measurable action such as a lead, an install or a sale. The panel at Digital Leadership Summit 2026 argued the split is dissolving: a strong idea does both jobs, and over a long horizon your performance numbers depend on the brand you have built.
Performance marketing is paid advertising planned and optimised against a direct, measurable response: leads, installs, purchases, account openings. It is the right early bet for most young companies. The catch is that its efficiency is not independent of brand. As brand strength grows, click-through rates rise, acquisition costs fall and price sensitivity drops, which is why performance-heavy spending without any brand investment gets more expensive every year.
Brand building is the work that makes a customer choose you, and choose you again, without being convinced from scratch each time. It covers positioning, product experience, trust, communities and the operational discipline that keeps the promise. Unlike speed or distribution, it cannot be commoditised, which is why it is the part of marketing that compounds.
Assume today's differentiator becomes tomorrow's infrastructure, then invest in what survives that shift: a second promise beyond the entry fee, a visible mechanism behind your headline claim, advocates who vouch for you unpaid, and clear human judgment on which decisions a machine may make. Speed, reach and AI execution will all be available to your competitors. What you build on top of them will not.
Over longer horizons, yes. The evidence shared on stage: Neosapien has raised prices and cut discounts with demand holding, Epik tracks repeat, retention and lifetime value as its brand proof, and branded search moved when its own employees put the brand in their LinkedIn profiles, before any campaign ran. These are speaker claims from the stage, and they line up with what most mature accounts show: stronger brands pay less for the same conversion.
The Digital Leadership Summit is Social Beat's flagship event for marketing leaders. The 17th edition ran on 31 July 2026 at the Taj MG Road in Bengaluru, together with Google and Cheil, under the theme Building Brands for the Next Decade, with speakers from First Club, Orange Health Labs, Tally, TTK Prestige, MTR, NoBroker, Capital A, UNext and others.
Theme two of three from the 17th Digital Leadership Summit, Bengaluru, 31 July 2026.
The most useful thing said all day came from a B2B software company, and it was about people who are not paid anything.
Brand trust gets discussed in Indian marketing as if it were a media outcome. Run enough campaigns, keep the message steady, and trust will eventually show up in the tracker. What Friday's sessions made clear is that the trust which survives commoditisation is built somewhere else entirely: in unpaid communities, in decades of consistent delivery, and in the factory that keeps the promise marketing makes.
Kapil Thukral, who leads digital marketing at Tally, was asked whether the chartered accountants and business owners around the brand work as an influencer channel. His answer was no.
His reasoning cuts against how most B2B marketing budgets in India are being written right now. Conventional B2B influencer marketing does not really work for business software here, he argued, because the supply of credible voices does not exist. And it does not exist because the demand never did. Nobody built a career reviewing accounting software, so there is no bench of trusted reviewers waiting to be paid.
What Tally has instead is community marketing in its oldest form: offline networks of chartered accountants, business owners, tax practitioners and content creators that run into tens of thousands of people. None of them are paid. None of them expect to be. The only promise Tally makes is that the company will do everything in its power to make them successful, and it evaluates those communities on what Tally can do for them, not on what they sell.
"In long-term brand building, the role of a well-wisher cannot be bought with any amount of paid advertising." Kapil Thukral, Tally
Sit with the second half of that line. Every Indian marketer reading this has an influencer row in the budget sheet. Almost nobody has a row for well-wishers, because there is no rate card and no dashboard for them. That is exactly why they compound. This is word of mouth marketing at its most honest: recommendations that carry weight precisely because no money changed hands. And it means community led growth is not a SaaS playbook imported from the US. Tally has been running it offline for decades.
Kapil was equally clear about the cost side. Being trusted by a business community for decades is an asset; it opens doors a new brand has to force. It also means every decision has to pass through the customers who have trusted you for ten, twenty, thirty years. Not just the next customer. All of them, at once.
That is the part that rarely makes it into the brand trust conversation. Trust is not only an accumulator. It narrows your decision set. Akila Chandrasekar of TTK Prestige put the same idea in sharper commercial terms: an iconic brand cannot run twenty experiments and see what sticks, because there is too much riding on each one. Not just money, but imagery built over decades.
Akila drew a distinction we will be using in pitches for the rest of the year. For an established brand, the digital conversation starts at brand authority, not brand education. Consumers already know who you are. You are not buying awareness. You are buying relevance to a modern use case, which means the money moves down the funnel into consideration and intent instead of sitting at the top.
She was also honest about heritage as both benefit and baggage. Prestige, she said, is effectively five companies. Cookware competes with one set of brands, mixer grinders with a completely different one, and each segment needs its own answer.
Then she described the startup counter-move with unusual precision. A challenger picks one narrow segment out of a portfolio the incumbent spent forty years building, sharpens a single proposition, and puts every rupee behind it. When ten startups do this at once, the incumbent has to answer all ten, because a heritage brand cannot walk away from a segment it has served for decades. That is the real asymmetry between legacy brands and challengers. Not speed. Not budget. Focus.
Vibhor Ronge of MTR, part of Orkla India, described the discipline on the other side. A hundred-year-old Bengaluru institution that invented the rava idli mix carries an obligation to its legacy, and that makes the team more careful rather than less hungry. They do catch trends, he said, but not all of them. Only the ones relevant to their consumer that add something back to the brand.
In a year when every brand is being told to post more and post faster, that restraint is worth naming. For heritage brands, relevance is not about matching the content velocity of a two-year-old D2C label. It is about choosing the few moments where showing up strengthens the equity instead of spending it.
The line of the day came from the fireside chat with Ankit Kedia, Founder and General Partner at Capital A, who built and sold a packaging business before he started investing.
"Marketing states the promise and the factory keeps it." Ankit Kedia, Capital A
His illustration was simple. If a shampoo bottle leaks, no consumer says the cap failed. They say the brand failed. Packaging, dispensers, pumps, tooling: none of it appears in a brand deck, and all of it is the brand as far as the customer is concerned.
He argued that the old war between operations and marketing is dissolving, because packaging is commoditised and the only remaining edge is either the range of solutions or the agility that comes from controlling production yourself. One wellness foods brand in his portfolio now manufactures roughly eighty percent of its products in house, and he was blunt about how much harder the first two years were when the business depended on external vendors and minimum order quantities.
For anyone doing brand building in India, this is the least glamorous and most reliable trust lever available. The customer cannot audit your supply chain. They experience it every time they open the pack.
Kapil was asked what a well-funded startup does better than Tally right now. He did not get defensive. He said they can do everything, and that creativity is available to almost anyone today. Then he came back to the only durable answer he could see: whether a business chases what is currently popular, or works on the real problems of real people.
He also dropped a remark that deserved more attention than it got. Nine years at Tally, and every single year someone has announced that SEO is dead, content is dead, advertising is dead. His conclusion was not that the announcements are wrong. It was that the job is to keep evolving and find the way through. With zero click search, he noted, discovery has become a winner-takes-all market. Both things are true at once, and marketers who hold only one of them make bad decisions.
Three moves, in order of how quickly you can make them.
Which of your customers would defend you in a room you are not in? And when did anyone at your company last do something for them?
Brand trust is the confidence customers have that you will deliver what you promise, built through repeated proof rather than repeated messaging. It compounds because it has no rate card. A competitor can match your media budget in a quarter, but it cannot buy the recommendations of people who have watched you keep your word for years.
Consistency, delivery and community, in that order. Marketing states the promise; the product, the packaging and the service keep it. Add unpaid communities of practitioners and customers who benefit from your success, and trust starts building itself. What you cannot do is shortcut it with spending.
Rarely in India, and Tally's experience explains why. Credible B2B voices barely exist because the demand for them never did. Communities of practitioners, chartered accountants in Tally's case, do the job influencers are hired for, and they do it unpaid, which is exactly what makes them believable.
Community marketing means building and serving networks of customers and practitioners around your product, measured by what you give them rather than what they sell for you. Community-led growth is the compounding effect: those networks recommend, teach, and defend the brand, and the growth they produce costs nothing per impression.
Brand education spends money teaching the market who you are. Brand authority assumes the market already knows, and spends on relevance instead. For established brands, that means budgets move down the funnel into consideration and intent, not into awareness they already own.
By protecting focus rather than chasing velocity. Catch only the trends that add something back to the brand, the way MTR does. Avoid running twenty loose experiments, the way TTK Prestige refuses to, because each one carries decades of imagery. And answer challengers segment by segment, since the one thing they hold that you cannot copy is focus.
Theme one of three from the 17th Digital Leadership Summit. Bengaluru, 31 July 2026.
Two of the sharpest consumer brands in the room last Friday built their early businesses on speed. Both spent this year pulling speed out of the promise. First Club, the Bengaluru grocery brand, has decided the words "quick commerce" will not sit anywhere near it. Orange Health Labs spent five years selling itself as India's fastest diagnostic lab, then retired that line for "Speed Meets Science." Neither move was a coat of paint. Both were a read on the same shift: 10-minute delivery has stopped being a reason to choose you and turned into the price of entry. What follows is a brand repositioning story, and some version of it is now sitting in front of most teams working in Indian quick commerce.
The short version
We moderated that panel with Lucky Saini, Head of Marketing at First Club, and Smita Murarka, who runs marketing and the consumer business at Orange Health Labs. The part that stayed with us was not the repositioning itself. It was how each of them knew it had worked.
Lucky Saini described the change in customer complaints. Early on, people wrote in about delivery times. Now, when an order runs a few minutes late, most customers let it go. What they write in about is the fruit. Why is this apple bruised? Why is this mango not sweet?
That shift is worth more than any brand-track study we have seen presented in a review meeting. The complaint moved off the promise and onto the product. Recall tells you a message reached someone. A complaint tells you what they now expect from you. When customers start holding you to a standard you set on purpose, the position has landed. When they are still holding you to the old one, it has not, whatever the tracker says.
Most brands never look here. Support tickets sit with the CX team, positioning sits with marketing, and the two data sets never meet. They should. Read a month of complaints, and you learn what your brand actually promises, as opposed to what your deck claims it promises.
First Club's line is "curated slow, delivered fast." Lucky Saini was blunt about why the word "slow" is in there. People do not notice anything without contrast. If you are building a new category, you have to break the existing frame of reference, and you cannot do that with a line that sounds like everyone else's, only turned up a notch.
This is where a lot of Indian D2C positioning falls over. The category says fast, so the challenger says faster. The category says pure, so the challenger says purest. That is a comparative, not a contrast, and comparatives get beaten by whoever has the bigger budget. "Slow" sitting next to "fast" makes a reader pause for a quarter second. That pause is the entire job of a brand positioning line.
Lucky Saini named the harder task in front of him now. He has to turn a claim about quality into something a customer can actually see. His phrasing was about making the process of quality so obvious that people cannot unsee it. Every premium brand in India reaches this point. You can assert quality for one funding cycle. After that, you have to show the mechanism.
Smita Murarka made the same case from the other side of the market. Orange Health started during the pandemic, when a diagnostics brand that came to your home fast was solving a real and urgent problem. Speed was the wedge. It was also, in time, the ceiling.
Her point was that speed became defensible only once the brand could explain what produced it. In their case, that is automated labs with little manual handling, sample integrity from the moment of collection, and reports back in six hours. "Speed Meets Science" does not throw away the original promise. It puts a reason under it.
She also drew a distinction Indian brands get wrong all the time. Orange Health is not positioned as premium. It is positioned as fairly priced for the quality you get. Lucky Saini said the same about First Club: good design reads as expensive in this market, and a big part of his job is separating the two. Indian shoppers have been trained to assume that anything that looks considered must cost more. Both brands are trying to break that link rather than cash in on it.
Smita Murarka said retention runs above fifty percent, which is high for a category built on one-off tests. If that holds, it is the strongest number on the panel. The second promise, not the first, is what brings a customer back. For any D2C brand, that is the whole game. The first promise buys the trial. The second promise earns the repeat.
The convenience question was not limited to our panel. In the Iconic Brands session, Akila Chandrasekar of TTK Prestige described something we did not expect. Prestige moved early to put consumer durables onto quick commerce, and pressure cookers and gas stoves now bring in a real share of its online sales.
Nobody needs a pressure cooker in ten minutes. Her read was that the platform has stopped being a delivery channel and become a discovery surface, a shift we called out in our digital marketing trends for 2026. The search bar on a quick commerce app now does the job the Google search bar used to do for that category. The query, the comparison, the shortlist, and the decision all happen in one place. She framed these platforms as closer to a partnership than a marketplace, partly because they pick a small set of category leaders to build the category with.
Vibhor Ronge of MTR, part of Orkla India, described the same thing in media terms. On a quick commerce app, retail and media land on the same screen. The impression and the conversion happen inside one session. For a hundred-year-old food brand, that has changed how budgets get tested: smaller bets, faster reads, a hypothesis built on a narrow segment and then scaled once the signal is clear. This is retail media doing its real job, and most brands are still treating it as a listing fee.
Akila also named a constraint that pure D2C brands do not carry. An omnichannel brand has to hold price hygiene across every channel. It cannot discount hard online without hurting the offline relationships it spent decades building. That is a real strategic limit, and it is one reason incumbents look slower than they are.
Three moves, in the order you can actually do them.
The convenience era did not end. It became the floor. The question every brand in that room was answering, in its own category, was what sits on top of it.
So here is the one to sit with. If your category matched your fastest promise tomorrow, what would you sell on instead, and would your customers already believe it?
Quick commerce is the delivery of everyday products, mostly groceries and essentials, in ten to thirty minutes through hyperlocal dark stores. In India, it has moved from novelty to default. Speed is now expected across the category, which is why the strongest brands are competing on quality, range, and trust instead.
Dark stores are small, delivery-only warehouses placed inside neighbourhoods. They hold a tight, fast-moving product range and exist only to fulfil online orders, not to receive walk-in shoppers. They are the reason a quick commerce app can promise ten-minute delivery across dense urban areas.
Quick commerce works in India because of dense cities, low delivery costs, and a large base of shoppers who order small baskets often. Dark store networks sit close to demand, and habit has done the rest. Ordering in ten minutes has become normal rather than remarkable across most metros.
Not on its own. When every serious player offers ten-minute delivery, speed becomes the price of entry rather than a differentiator. The advantage now sits in the second promise: product quality, a clear reason behind the speed, and enough trust to bring the customer back for the next order.
Brand repositioning is the deliberate shift of what a brand stands for in the customer's mind, usually to move past a claim that has become common. First Club dropping "quick commerce" and Orange Health retiring "India's fastest lab" for "Speed Meets Science" are both examples of repositioning above a commoditised promise.
Read your complaints. When customers stop holding you to the old promise and start holding you to the new one, the reposition has landed. First Club saw this when complaints moved from late delivery to the quality of the fruit. A tracker tells you a message landed. A complaint tells you what people now expect.
The best marketers are the ones who constantly try to improve their craft, no matter how good they are at it already. If you are looking to read some offbeat, lesser-known marketing books that will help you in enhancing your marketing skills even more, here is a list of such books written by our very own Indian authors.
Written by digital marketing experts from Social Beat, this book deals with the various aspects of digital marketing and the methods marketers use to leverage the medium to grow their sales and revenue. Much like the annual spectacle of millions of wildebeest and zebras migrating from the parched savannahs, humankind too witnessed an even greater migration over the last two decades where 500+ million Indians ‘migrated’ to the internet. Over the last few years, this migration has led to a phenomenal growth of digital marketing. This book will help beginners wade through this digital wilderness and is packed with case studies and infallible insights. Decoding the Digital Jungle takes the readers on a safari of marketing concepts transitioning from the traditional to the digital age. You can get a glimpse of the expertise of the team on their YouTube Channel which has a knowledge series called Digital Bytes.
Written by Anisha Motwani, this book is a unique collection of contemporary, true stories about Indian businesses and brands that rewrote the norms of their respective industries. All the twenty stories are not only inspiring, but they will also bring in some remarkable change in your approach towards marketing and business management.
This quirkily titled book written by Ambi Parameswaran, an ad veteran, discusses the story of Indian advertising over the past 50 years. Over a hundred ads have been studied and examined in this book by the author. This book will let you know how advertisements take inspirations and influences from politics, culture, society, etc. Reading this book will give you in-depth knowledge about Indian advertising scenario.
Written by one of the gurus of Indian advertising, Piyush Pandey, Pandeymonium is not just biography but also a brief history of advertising and how its evolved. He has put in some amazing tidbits and experiences from his life at Ogilvy as well his love for cricket. He shares how he helped build brands like Fevicol, Vodafone & IPL amongst others. Most importantly he talks how he draws inspiration from people and things around his daily life.
How interesting would it be if there is a toolkit of new techniques that you can use to come up with new, innovative marketing strategies? Well, that's what the Marketing Unplugged book has in store for you. This book written by Suman Srivastava is a book full of scholarly yet delightful ideas for marketing.
From humble beginnings as a Bollywood film billboard painter to the National Creative Director of Leo Burnett India, KV Sridhar (or Pops as he is known as) has seen it all and today is widely respected as a creative leader in the Indian Ad-world. He’s credited with the emergence of Leo Burnett as a creative powerhouse in India so that makes this book even more interesting.
The book is unique because it brings together behind the scenes of every loved ad, right from the Doordarshan days to today’s YouTube; right from ‘Chal meri luna’ to ‘Airtel smartphone ads’. It covers interviews of creative heads and directors of all generations, right from vintage to new age. Pops has handpicked each ad based on their popularity among viewers and met its creators and talked to them about the entire process. He had left out the marketing jargons and advertising sham and just weaved stories using wonderful stories.
Satish Y. Deodhar has written a series of management books under the IIMA book series title. If you are looking to read the series, Why I Am Paying More is the right choice. This book explains the dynamics of pricing with respect to demand, supply, market structures, etc. Beautifully illustrated through various case studies and examples, this book is something that you can never put down.
Dheeraj Sinha’s book on Indian consumer market is something that every marketing professional should read. Some brands and businesses fail in the Indian market mainly because of their assumptions about the Indian consumers. This book tries to break all those myths and misconceptions. It gives a fresh, new, and a genuine perspective about the Indian consumer market.
Have you wondered why some startups become hugely famous while some just fade away? This book published by Notion Press and written by Yaagneshwaran Ganesh gives you an in-depth knowledge of the various marketing principles. While most marketing books talk about the macro concepts, this book speaks of the micro concepts of marketing as well; this is quite crucial for new-age marketers.
As we all know the sweet spot is the optimum combination of factors or qualities to achieve success. True to the name, this book brings to your notice the sweet spots that you can explore and utilise in the field of marketing. In other words, just like how sportspeople make hardest shots or tasks look easy because of the sweet spot, this book also allows you to make your business grow in an innovative, seemingly easy way.
Mainak Dhar has written a dozen of books in multiple genres. Considered to be one of the best-selling authors in India, Mainak Dhar primarily writes on science, marketing, and management. Brand Shastra is one of his latest books and is also listed under the Amazon’s list of Memorable Books of 2016 So Far. This book discusses the various aspects of marketing, ranging from primary promotions to B2B marketing. More than talking about the theories of marketing, this book explains the science and logic behind the various marketing tactics.
Don't forget to check out our video on 7 Best Marketing Books Every Indian Marketer Needs to Read for a few notable additons to the list.
We hope, by now, you have a handful of books to be added to your to-be-read list. What are the other books published by Indian authors, that you would suggest for marketers to read? Let us know in the comments.
As shopping patterns continue to evolve thanks to Covid 19, even mobile and digital wallets in India small-time have evolved with it. With UPI making payments seamless, mobile wallets and digital payment apps have been surpassing credit card usage and are slowly beginning to replace the traditional payment methods.
A mobile wallet or digital wallet, in simple terms, is a virtual mobile-based wallet where one can store cash for making mobile, online or offline payments. There are various types of mobile wallets in India, such as open, semi-open, semi-closed and closed - depending on the type of usage and payments that can be made. Wallets are growing rapidly as they help in increasing the speed of transaction, especially for e-commerce companies and all e-commerce marketplaces have integrated with such mobile wallets too. With the launch of UPI, it has become even easier, as the transfer happens directly from the bank account rather than from a wallet.
Here are some of the top 10 digital wallet and the top online payments apps in India and what they offer to their customers. Our top pick is Google Pay, which is also the No.1 digital wallet and UPI payment app right now
As its part of the Google ecosystem, they have scaled up their user base quickly, despite being a late entrant. It is currently the No.1 digital wallet and one of the top online payments apps in India. With Google Pay you can send money to friends, pay bills and buy online, recharge your phone - all via UPI and directly from your bank account. Since Google Pay works with your existing bank account, which means your money is safe with your bank. There's no need to worry about reloading wallets and you don't need to do additional KYC - which is required for all the other apps. You can also earn scratch cards and other rewards, with the cashback directly being transferred into your bank account. Now you can also recharge your mobile or monthly utility bills. Since the introduction of UPI, wallets have become passé with users preferring account to account transfer via UPI.
Number of installs: 100,000,000+ (100 Million or 10 crore) on Android Play Store
Next in the list of top online payment apps in India is PhonePe. PhonePe started in 2015 and in just 4 years it has been able to cross the 100 million download mark. From UPI payments to recharges, money transfers to online bill payments, you can do it all on PhonePe. Its got a very good user interface and is one of the safest and fastest online payment experience in India.
Number of installs: 100,000,000+ (100 Million or 10 crore) on Android Play Store
Dhani App is part of the Indiabulls group and has multiple features. It is not only a regular e-wallet app but it can also be combined with Dhani SuperSaver Card. Dhani also has a reward & loyalty program for Dhani customers wherein customers can play games and win cash to pay for mobile recharge, EMI payments, Insurance, and also for new Dhani products. This can be combined with Dhani Super Saver Rupay (physical and virtual card) which has assured 5% cashback on all purchases done via the card and its completely free for the first month.
Number of installs: 20,000,000+ (20 Million or 2 crores) on Android Play Store and iOS
BHIM Axis Pay is a UPI banking app that lets you transfer money instantly to anyone using just your smartphone. Make online recharges to your prepaid mobile and DTH set-top boxes directly from the app.
Number of installs: 1,000,000+ (1 Million or 0.1 crore) on Android Play Store
PayTM is one of the largest mobile commerce platforms and one of the top online payments apps in India, offering its customers a digital wallet to store money and make quick payments. Launched in 2010, this e-wallet app works on a semi-closed model and has a mobile market, where a customer can load money and make payments to merchants who have operational tie-ups with the company. It was originally the No.1 digital wallet in India before UPI being introduced. Apart from making e-commerce transactions, this e-wallet app can also be used to make bill payments, transfer money and avail services from merchants from travel, entertainment and retail industry. They also have UPI enabled payments now.
Number of installs: 100 Million (or 10 crores) on Android Play Store.
MobiKwik is an independent mobile payment network that supposedly connects 25 million users with 50,000 retailers and more. This e-wallet app lets its users add money using debit, credit card, net banking and even doorstep cash collection service, which can, in turn, be used to recharge, pay utility bills and shop at marketplaces. Owing to the growing need for convenience, MobiKwik has also recently tied up with large and small-time grocery, restaurants and other offline merchants.
Another unique feature they have is their expense tracker which allows setting budget for your expenses across all payment instruments and it uses your SMS data to analyse and control spends. No wonder it made to the list of top online payment apps in India.
Number of installs: 10,000,000+ (10 Million or 1 crore) on Android Play Store
This mobile wallet application was launched by State Bank of India to let users transfer money to other users and bank accounts, pay bills, recharge, book for movies, hotels, shopping as well as travel. This semi-closed prepaid wallet offers its services in 13 languages and is available for non-SBI customers as well. This app also allows its customers to set reminders for dues, money transfers and view the mini-statement for the transactions carried out.
Number of installs: 10,000,000+ (10 Million or 1 crore) on Android Play Store
Pockets by ICICI is a digital bank that offers a mobile wallet for its customers. It provides the convenience of using any bank account in India to fund your mobile wallet and pay for transactions.
With Pockets, one can transfer money, recharge, book tickets, send gifts and split expenses with friends. This wallet uses a virtual VISA card that enables its users to transact on any website or mobile application in India and provides exclusive deals or packages from associated brands.
Number of installs: 5,000,000+ (5 Million or 0.5 crore) on Android Play Store
PayZapp is a complete payment solution giving you the power to pay in just One Click. PayZapp lets you recharge your mobile, DTH and data card, pay utility bills, compare and book flight tickets, bus and hotels, shop, buy movie tickets, music and groceries, avail great offers at SmartBuy, and send money to anyone in your phone book.
Number of installs: 10,000,000+ (10 Million or 1 crore) on Android Play Store
Amazon Pay is an online payments processing service that is owned by Amazon. It is also a top online payment app in India and the global market. Launched in 2007 globally and India in 2017, Amazon Pay uses the consumer base of Amazon and focuses on giving users the option to pay with their Amazon accounts on external merchant websites, including apps like BigBazaar etc. You also get to shop on Amazon using Amazon Pay. Amazon Pay has also tied up with fintech companies such as ZestMoney to enable no-cost EMI payment options on its platform. This makes it easy for consumers to purchase products on Amazon and pay for it through affordable monthly instalments.
Number of installs: Undisclosed
And here are some interesting findings on digital payment adoption from the recent ACI Survey:
While these numbers indicate the growing need for secure, faster and efficient payment methods for the online marketplace, efforts to make payments to an individual or brick & mortar stores are also increasing. Start-ups and huge corporates are constantly on the lookout for customer-friendly technology, thereby giving more power to the customer.
Need a few financial tips to handle your money wisely? Follow our YouTube channel Paisa Pujari for more insights. Here's a video to help you understand the smart ways to use a credit card:
Thus, the day you will walk around without a physical wallet and pay your local dhobi and Kirana store uncle using a mobile wallet is not so far. Do you use any of these e-wallets apps? Have we missed out on any information in this list of top online payment apps in India? Write to us in the 'Comments' section below.
When you live the brand, it is so much easier to build it. Simeran Bhasin, Co-Founder of Innerwear Brand, BRAG, has lived by this policy that has constantly helped her gain over two decades of experience with brands across diverse consumer segments including kids, youth, and luxury. After having worked with Fastrack by Titan, Manipal Hotels, Britannia, and Wildcraft in 2014, she turned entrepreneur and launched India's 1st and only young girl focused Innerwear brand - BRAG, in 2016.
During our webinar series, Simeran Bhasin shared her journey of working with some of the most iconic brands, her insights on making a campaign successful for GenZ, and how she scaled up Fastrack, Wildcraft, and now BRAG at a national level. Throwing light upon her learnings throughout her journey, she believes that it’s important to stay true to the brand essence and that each brand should find a way to become relevant to its consumers in order for it to become a success.
Starting with your journey with Fastrack - from watches to a lifestyle brand for the youth, was the transition easy?
“Everyone in the team at Fastrack was excited about trying something new. I always believed that we have to live the brand to build it and connect with it. That was our starting point. In a company like Titan, the transition was easy. Entrepreneurship is in the blood of Titan. It’s the organization that allowed us to explore innovative avenues for the brand. It’s comparatively easier to build a new brand from scratch or with a relatively smaller brand that is open to experimentation.”
How has it been like to scale brands with national presence?
“It’s simply the amalgamation of a universal business insight, a relevant product insight, and the brand insight that gives the nationality and scalability of the brand across the country. Simultaneously, working on the other aspects of the brand to understand the consumers comes into play that help in scaling brands on a national scale.”
How did the insights garnered from other brands help in building BRAG?
“One has to put oneself into the consumer’s shoes. We were always building a brand for ourselves. Having human bodies come in indefinite shapes and sizes, making the age-appropriate product and creating age-appropriate communication were some of the key parts of BRAG’s brand strategy. With some key hits and misses from the brand, having multiple channels explored, and a direct-to-consumer approach, it all fell into place.”
How would you define BRAG’s vision and why did you pick this particular brand name?
“Brag’s vision has always been “To bring girls’ innerwear out of the closet and onto the streets”. It inspires and aspires for women to speak. Product stereotype, business model stereotype, and the gender stereotypes were the hurdles that we jumped to create the brand. BRAG- the name was short, simple and it connected with our target group. We, as marketers, need to make it simpler for the consumers. The aim was always to leave behind a legacy and create an impact, however, we have seen the definitions of impact change every few months. The priorities shifted from having a cool product to a comfortable one. It’s been a vertical learning curve.”
Insights, Hits, Misses, and more...
“The approach was never to start off as a direct-to-consumer brand. 95% of India shopped for innerwear from offline stores. The game has changed now. Indian retailers have always been a tough nut to crack but they saw BRAG as an opportunity. Our biggest validation came from them. Soon, we were on leading brands’ radars. BRAG’s biggest selling product was for tweens but we were targeting teens. That was an opportunity from the brand to tap onto which gave birth to Ms.Brag (beginner bra for tweens), contributing to 80% of the revenue. The biggest learning for us was to change the consumers (especially teens) mindsets and selling the idea of ‘comfort’ with innerwear, who were habitual to a conventional bra. It was more difficult than convincing a beginner. Switching is a very big challenge and we faced too many barriers. The girls loved what the product looked like, more than what it felt like. Some very strong cultural nuances like these would come up in conversations, revealing external-driven purchase processes. For example, how is it fitting vs how is it looking during the trial sessions? So changing behavior was one of the learnings.”
What according to you are the key drivers to build a brand for GenZ according to you?
“Building brands is not just about identifying the demographic and we tend to get caught up in this a lot. It’s the mindset of the youth in the context of the age segment that is more important. Today, youth brands include Levis and we have seen 70-year-olds wear Levis. They are young at heart. At Fastrack, we defined it as the ‘campus-mindset’ that exists in older generations and younger ones too but the center of the gravity of the mindset is always on the campus. If we get stuck at the age, we still might go too wide and won’t be sharply defined brands. GenZ is extremely authentic and honest as consumers, and they are aware of almost everything, from gender-sensitivity to democracy. When they consume content, they are much more opinionated that previous generations.”
Marketing strategies and channels - what was so different about BRAG?
“Balance between communication for the teens as well as the mothers was crucial. How will the brand look like if the consumer came across the content and how would a mum see it. In the case of tweens, it’s the mother who is taking the user to the product. Hence, we are doing education for the mothers but it’s in the voice of a young girl and we have a separate brand presence on social media for that. Indirectly, communication is what a mum would relate to. It has to be more fun and less awkward, all of that coming from a tween girl to her mother. The trust is built differently hence a separate platform is dedicated to that audience set. As a brand, we also cannot forget to talk to the other set of consumers who have their own voice (the teens) because that might backfire. The content has to be relatable to both the groups.”
New Market Segment Vs Competing in an Existing one - what are your thoughts?
“Playing within the segment is relatively simpler because we don’t need to sell the relevance of the product. For a new segment, you have to build awareness around the need from scratch. That takes a lot of effort and it was the biggest learning for me. It’s not only about creating awareness for the brand but also of the need. Behavior change takes a lot more effort. The risk also revolves around being too early in the market. In the case of existing competition, we need to convince people that what they are buying is not good enough.”
Changing strategies, Changing times during Covid-19 - any message for the branding agencies?
“Marketing is largely a variable expense. Given that there are fewer brands in the e-commerce space, marketing budgets will reduce. Brands are going to cut down projects. For agencies, It's also crucial to recognize ongoing expenses, make operations leaner, and pick smaller projects to meet expenses and keep the cash flow going. It also comes with figuring out of the box solutions towards communication and media, which was probably not part of the mandate in the past. Being overly supporting and going beyond the original mandate will be much appreciated. Humanizing the decisions is the key when it comes to supporting employees...”
Building a brand’s digital community - what should be the starting point of this?
“Ensuring the ‘why’ in place is crucial. Clear purpose, brand persona, brand tonality need to be in place, along with having a strong target group in mind, keeping your communication streamlined. The sharper it is, the greater the chance of success would be. Every brand is online today and everyone is saying they are cool. We should also be very clear on what we will not do or talk about and it should be all part of the brand too.”
Can Purpose become the Brand’s Voice?
“Yes, the purpose can become the brand voice. The purpose can go hand in hand with the brand’s personality and can be used to communicate the end goal. We talk about things that matter to the brand. It may or may not directly talk about the product sometimes. Today, all of us are curating our feeds based on interest so every creation of the brand revolves around the interest. You will attract consumers of that kind.”
Watch the complete session of Simeran Bhasin in conversation with Social Beat. Feel free to drop your questions if you still have questions for Simeran.
A product may be extraordinary, but only a stellar marketing approach will help give it the boost it requires to get the conversation going and keep it that way. In a digital age, leveraging growth marketing to lift your startup off the ground is a powerful way to grow your user base quickly, and growth hacking can be shaped to work with almost any marketing requirement.
But to begin with, what is growth marketing? And how is it different from traditional marketing?
Since your target audience isn’t aware of what you’re offering, your approach to marketing needs to be strategic. Simply put, growth marketing is a process of selecting and implementing scalable tactics used to swiftly drive a large reach on a budget. Experiential marketing allows you to test the waters, analyse trends and optimize marketing campaigns for optimal results. This helps increase acquisition, retention, recall, engagement, and a positive brand image, regardless of whether your company has a webpage, an app, or both. Growth marketing strategies will work for the common and unique components of both.
Traditional marketing focuses on the top of the funnel and follows the same principles in helping your brand build its market presence, but it does not implement optimized results the way growth marketing does. The latter nurtures the relationship with the audience, acting on the feedback of consumers, enabling growth in customer relationships, and thus, steady growth in the brand’s visibility.
With limited time, money, and manpower in the initial phases, it is unlikely that traditional marketing will be the right fit for bootstrapped startups that need to scale up quickly.
Growth marketing for startups uses a combination of tools to drive growth and traffic, which can ultimately culminate as a marketing mix model strategy. With a 360-degree approach, growth marketing also doubles as full-funnel marketing, with brand-building aspects like search engine optimisation, performance marketing, and social media marketing.
Here’s a look at how each element can work wonders for a brand.
Assuming a startup has reached its market, the next step is to run ads online and track and analyse the data generated from various sources. Continually tracking and optimising campaigns will always be impactful since insights help pave a tailored path to achieve the desired results.
Media buying through programmatic solutions automates the process and enables the analysis and optimisation of campaigns with machine learning and AI. Using automated dashboards for analytical reporting allows you to consolidate campaign insights from various platforms to make swifter business decisions with a data-informed approach. There are also tools that help calculate the effectiveness of a brand’s campaigns in comparison to its competitors’.
Use Google Analytics and other tools to analyse which pages are witnessing better traffic and lesser traffic, and optimise both. Information like location, gender, age, clicks, session durations, ad engagement, and more, can all inform you on audience interests, helping you to build an insightful audience profile.
For our strategy for KhataBook, we leveraged TikTok, Facebook and Google to increase app installs, customer events, and acquisition, with different campaigns and creative resources. Alongside this, by using features such as ad scheduling and retargeting, we were able to achieve 1 million downloads on the Play Store. This goes to show that playing with different strategies will help you reach your goals eventually, but a lot faster.
Social media combines content and performance marketing to offer a one-stop-shop for guaranteed engagement. With so many different platforms for different kinds of enterprises, a startup only has to pick and choose which to use - from the most essential ones, like Instagram and Facebook, to niche ones, like LinkedIn and TikTok.
Your growth marketing strategy must include the Facebook family of apps, which includes Instagram, Twitter and even WhatsApp. With target audience segments and tools to run optimised ads, social media also enables measured results and insights. Apart from this, social media platforms offer readily available insights and data for the audience base you want to tap into. With hashtags volumes, follower counts, engagement through likes and views, and even digital marketplaces, your brand can drive ROI swiftly.
New platforms like TikTok are growing at breakneck speed and should be leveraged to increase your brand presence. By tracking the performance of your posts on a variety of platforms, you’ll be able to discern which platforms work best in terms of lead generation, audience engagement, and data collection.
These platforms allow you to use multiple combinations of ad formats, such as video ads, HTML creatives, GIFs, and more. This is a great way to hack your content and see which creative resources are working best.
As discussed earlier, you can increase acquisitions by running referral campaigns. Audiences are always looking out for coupons, freebies, and bargains. Doing so will generate a buzz online around your brand, and will help to drive growth. While you should have these on your app or website, promoting these on your social media handles will give the campaign the boost it needs to generate and garner attention.
Social media is obviously the best way to engage with audiences far and wide, and it’s up to you to expand your strategy beyond likes and comments on posts. Explore the ‘stories' features that several of them offer, and come up with ways to be creative there. Data shows that over 400 million people engage with Instagram’s ‘stories’ feature daily. With both video and post formats available, adding elements like polls, countdowns, quizzes, filters, and stickers can increase your engagement rates exponentially. You can also ask customers to mention and tag you so that you can feature user-generated content as testimonials to your brand offering.
Social media is also great to connect with influencers and known personalities that can benefit your brand image. Seeking out conversations, tie-ups, and influencer posts work to create word-of-mouth marketing, amassing relevant audiences that are more likely to have a higher life-time value. Apart from the usual featured posts, other ideas include live streams on Instagram, re-tweeting posts, and following content based on viral social trends.
Content can be considered the driving force behind your organic marketing strategy. Continued and sustained audience engagement through authentic and valuable content will keep traffic incoming and ongoing, and your content will rank higher on search engines. It’s also more likely that these audiences will turn to you for trusted information over and over again, building customer loyalty.
The following growth marketing strategies are critical for increasing organic traffic and conversion rates.
Creating a blog is an essential hack to drive visibility and website traffic. Not only does it acquaint audiences with a startup’s product, but it also creates an opportunity to grow leads by offering relevant content in exchange for the visitor’s email.
Using out-of-the-box content marketing ideas will help your startup stand out from the competition. Based on the kind of product or service being offered, startups can choose to put out content through influencer marketing, customer testimonials, social media, by leveraging Quora and by creating multilingual content.
For startups, growth marketing with content also means efficiently using time and resources. Creating new content is essential, but it can also become time-consuming. In this case, repurposing existing content can help speed things up. For example, turn blogs into videos, ebooks, Instagram posts and more. This strategy builds your content base and simultaneously increases opportunities for shareability with your target audiences. It also offers variety to target different audience interests - someone who isn’t big on reading may be more open to watching a video on the same content.
Ask customers to leave reviews whichever way they can, whether it’s through feedback forms, emails, or social media messages. A lot of brands that are just starting out also request their first batches of customers to send in their thoughts about the product through a note included with the packaging. This personal touch to the product compels them to comply, and you can then feature these across your online handles. This will build an element of trust for future customers and users.
To understand the facets of content, we can turn to our strategy for our client mfine, a cloud-based app where users can book instant consultations. They wanted to build a strong content strategy for overall organic growth. Since they are a newage startup, we analysed what would help them grow exponentially, and suggested running aggressive SEO strategies. This included building high-quality external backlinks, optimising existing pages with highly competitive keywords, building long-form content, and interlinking blogs and relevant pages.
This resulted in organic and increased visibility of their medical speciality pages, with an increase of 3,00,000 sessions in the span of 4 months. Traffic also increased steadily month by month, and 1000 of the keywords ranked on the first page of search results. The interlinks also helped decrease bounce rates and increased the amount of time spent on pages. All this goes to show that building on an organic strategy guarantees astounding results.
Video marketing is a crucial part of content marketing as well but can be considered as a separate strategy owing to the number of ways you can go about it. Video content is one trend of the last decade that has taken off with virality, conveying dense amounts of information in a concise manner. To put things in perspective, 65% of viewers watch over 3/4th of a video, and 92% of viewers on mobile devices share videos with their circles.
By using a wide range of video ad formats across platforms, not only will you increase audience engagement, but you’ll also be able to track different parameters of data. From thumb stoppers, bumper and discovery ads to skippable and non-skippable ads, there’s a plethora of formats to play with.
The kind of content you create with your videos also matters, since these will increase engagement, traffic, session duration, and customer loyalty in the long run. Your videos may fall into three broad categories, namely awareness, educational, and entertainment. Examples of these include:
Implementing strategies in regional languages is, once again, another tangent of content marketing. With higher Internet connectivity in today’s day and age, new data users are increasing, and in India, it is estimated that there will be an unprecedented billion users that will make the move online. With this new wave of users, a new challenge is posed - ensuring that your content is in a language they can read and speak.
Since over half of these audience segments come from Tier II and Tier III cities, having a multilingual marketing strategy can bring your brand to the forefront in a line of competitors. Moreover, it will not be enough to implement this on your webpage, but with your app, videos, creatives, ads, and all other content as well.
For KhataBook, we leveraged the growth of regional content online and created close to 200-300 videos in regional languages across platforms. On TikTok, we partnered with influencers who created these videos for us, and their relatable content in different vernaculars, with a large focus on the top South Indian languages, helped us garner 1 million app downloads, making the campaign a huge success.
While traditional marketing shouldn’t be your sole approach to hacking your startup’s growth, it is not entirely redundant to your strategy. By using the strategy of online to offline attribution, a company can work to uniquely build a strong brand presence.
Combining all these strategies and tools might seem daunting at first, but they’re a lot easier to implement, and don’t take as much time to get started with either. Seeing results will take a few months, but with steady optimisation and performance tracking, you’ll be knocking your goals out of the park in no time. All it takes is an analytical approach to see what works and what doesn’t, and then tweaking it over and over again as you watch the numbers rise.
The year 2019 has been a whirlwind in terms of growth in the digital space. The number of internet users has gone up to a number that was previously unprecedented - from 483 million users in the year 2018, India has now crossed half a billion internet users at a whopping 566 million. This means brands and companies have a whole new audience to market to and multiple innovative ways to do so! If you are keen to learn more about digital marketing, do check out our digital marketing training arm, DigiGrad.
Here are 7 digital marketing trends for 2020 that we expect will see the most traction:
While user growth has slowed down across most key markets, India has shown no such trend. This is a direct result of easy accessibility to mobile internet and cheaper smartphones with the advent of Jio. This has consequently led to the huge influx of new social apps in digital markets, like TikTok, Helo, Sharechat, Vigo, Bigo, Firework and some more in the pipeline.
The year 2020 will likely see a rise of even more such apps as these have proved to be a hit with new data users, having tapped into vernacular content and the interests of people in smaller towns. And since a large chunk of internet users from rural India - 251 million to be precise - have contributed to the growth in the total number of Indian internet users this year, 2020 can expect to see a higher demand for social apps that cater to this demographic.
It also doesn’t hurt that these media conglomerates have figured out a key factor in driving growth - offering social apps with access to entertainment like short-videos, gaming and live-streaming. 2019 has already seen these newer social apps climb the rankings on Google’s Android PlayStore, with TikTok ranking number one, and Helo at a close second. Facebook currently holds the third position, which may indicate that the dominance the Facebook family of apps has had may see a negative impact.
On that note, with so many first-time internet users, the rise of a lot of social platforms have seen their tremendous growth simply because they offer their content and services in vernacular. Language-driven services have had such an impact this year, that even Amazon and Flipkart are planning to get on this bandwagon soon to catch up with new age players like niki.ai, bulbul tv and Shop101. With a higher demand for vernacular content online, brands across segments will be forced to explore and deliver too if they want to see bigger growth. Storytelling is an impactful way to engage and connect with customers, and when done in a native tongue, the outcome is very personal and unique. This is evident in the thumbstopper format that Facebook offers, which intends to tell a story without sound, in order to capture the essence of a story and be able to tell it to speakers of any language.
Featured below are the thumbstopper videos we did in collaboration with Malabar Gold to promote their ‘Men in Platinum’ collection. The campaign dismantles stereotypical gender roles and highlights the fact that men are at their best when they are in their element. With an overall reach of 13 lakh views across Facebook, Instagram and Youtube, the brand’s Facebook page witnessed a 450% increase in user engagement proving that relatability is a language in itself.
Speaking about breaking language barriers, Swiggy recently ran a campaign titled #SwiggyStarhunt - a platform for delivery partners to showcase their talent by uploading videos on popular video-sharing app TikTok. These videos come under the categories of acting, dancing, singing and musical instruments. Since the campaign was targeted at delivery partners, we created a robust social media strategy in 11 languages to grab their attention and encourage them to participate in the event. The campaign resulted in an outpour of uploads onto the video-sharing app, with a whopping 44+ million organic views, reaching a pan-Indian audience and giving Swiggy the uplift it deserved. #SwiggyStarhunt is also a testament to the fact that leveraging new social media platforms like TikTok, along with the relatability of vernacular content, is a great way to connect with consumers.
4G has taken India’s markets by storm, and Indian service providers are eager to capitalize on this moment to drive user and customer engagement. Augmented Reality can be used in a multitude of ways, changing experiences across different sectors, be it retail, live events, museums, real estate, education or automobile.
Facebook introduced Spark AR this year for the general public, which allows users on Facebook and Instagram to create filters and upload them online. Other users can then save these and apply them to their stories. Facebook has been seeing a lot of success with the launch of this product and this will probably ‘spark’ AR trends even more. Google had already rolled out Google Lens which is an image recognition technology that uses the point and shoot feature to show fitting search results. These two giants have showcased the diversity in the use of AR and how successful it can be when implemented right, driven by function.
VR will also start to pick up more as we enter 2020, but since VR devices are still too expensive for the Indian market, it is unlikely that it will pick up at the same pace as AR will.
E-commerce is the way of the future, and with search interaction having increased, leading companies will find voice a profitable technology to drive sales and revenue. This has already been evidenced in the huge investment Amazon has put into Alexa and Google into Google Home and its Google Assistant. Businesses will see voice user interface as an innovative tool that enables faster, more efficient customer engagement as voice commands surround every sphere of life, driving purchases, payments and more. Voice ordering, already a popular phenomenon in the US, will start picking up in India as well. Brands are also tying up with new-age start-ups like niki.ai to engage with the next billion internet users. These AI powered start-ups build user experiences that are not just intuitive but also in a language that the customers in the Tier II and III cities are comfortable in, making it easy for them to place orders using voice commands.
Looking for a few tips on voice search marketing? Here’s our tell-all guide:
It’s quality over quantity, always. Which is why many brands are now wanting to capitalize on their first-party data, instead of opting for second and third-party data. First-party data allows for exact, valuable insights into a customer’s direct engagement with the brand, whether it’s their individual interests, which ads they engage with, or how much time they spend on the brand’s website. This information is unfiltered, specific, and relevant, which helps to build an audience profile that is an exact match with the product or service in question. It is also cost-effective, as it’s free, and is lawful and transparent. Nike is one such company which has already announced that they will be selling only directly going forward.
Artificial intelligence fits into this equation as it can prove to be extremely beneficial in sifting through these data sets, which for a team of actual people, can be daunting. AI could uncover insights that could have been missed otherwise, identify critical data and trends, and all at unmatched speed with extreme accuracy. Thus, AI and first-party data may hand-in-hand serve to drive more personalized communication soon.
Social media platforms have seen quite a few changes this year, which were a little surprising for everyone. At one end, there are platforms like TikTok and Sharechat, which incentivized influencers, and at the other end, Instagram rolled out an update that removed the like count. The Advertising Standards Council of India has also announced that they are framing new guidelines and rules in a bid to protect consumer interests, which will include influencer marketing under its purview. With the aim to curb forms of misleading information, the reach influencers have, the kind of information they put out, and the engagement brands have with influencers may all change in 2020.
It is commonly believed that as the world became increasingly digital over the years, physical stores began to see less engagement. But this doesn’t hold true for brands that rely heavily on location, like hotels, restaurants, and auto dealerships. For such brands, online to offline attribution is extremely relevant and useful, as this metric helps brands to trace and identify which online ads can be attributed to driving in-store foot traffic.
While Google Store Visits is already live and being used across brands, other platforms will also start leveraging location data, combined with first party and CRM data, to showcase what results digital is driving for retailers and offline stores. This can be a game changer for traditional brands that did not have digital as a key aspect of their marketing campaigns. The start of the next decade will likely see a lot of brands who are not yet using digital come online to use this tool to engage with customers better and drive sales insightfully.
Store visit ads were an integral part of our campaign with retailers like Malabar Gold, Khadims and Specsmakers. We leverage a mix of Google products using detailed demographic targetting as well as geo-fence the retail stores. The ads used online to offline attribution data to measure the increase in footfall to their stores. The below case study of Malabar Gold showcases how thousands of shoppers were targetted and tracked, for the recent Brides of India campaign.
All that being said, the trends predicted show a range of exciting opportunities to be used for growth. We at Social Beat are definitely eager to see what the start of the new decade has in store for the digital marketing sector and are excited to grow with it, scaling new heights.
This article was originally published in The Economic Times Brand Equity.