Tushar Gagawe, General Manager at SOTC Travel Services. He delivered an enlightening guest lecture on the topic – ‘Marketing in Different Sectors’. He discussed about various business models and also the importance of identifying customer needs and taking a targeted approach. Mr. Gagawe shared his success mantra with students, which is to ‘Iterate, Validate & Launch Again’. He concluded the lecture by sharing his learnings over the years with the students and urged the future marketers in the audience to ‘Own the customer’.
Apoorva: Digital Marketing is very quick in today’s scenario.Then why is it hard to break even in this area?
TG: Because its a deal driven channel; it is easy to enter and a lot of people are entering the market and a lot of people are funded. They are not discounting from the earned money, they are doing so from the funded money. So that becomes difficult to match with. Suppose you get 1 m and just to acquire one million of cash and just to acquire a customer, you will discount a lot of money.
Apoorva: So, although we drive sales through it we aren’t really making much headway?
TG: Yes, because you will only be burning money. therefore it’ll become difficult for a conventional player to get that kind of money into digital marketing. Because they will be investing their earned money. Whether it’s digital or not,ultimately you’ll have to meet the customers wishes.
Apoorva: My next question would be that since you mentioned that personalisation for each customer is necessary and conversely you also mentioned that only deep pocketed organisations can carry on such marketing strategies, is this a vicious circle?Is there no way for an organisation to come out of it?
TG: I’m saying that there is no formula. Atleast, not right now. I cannot say that we should stop offline and concentrate only on online marketing. We do not know if that is the right strategy. Hence, I keep reiterating that some companies have figured it out. Not all of them are hitting it in the dark. But most of the companies are still figuring in negatives even after figuring it out. So, they probably know where they want to go but it’s a long road.
Apoorva: Can you please elaborate on Customer Social Currency?
TG: By that I mean, everything the customer is bold enough to voice out. The current customer doesn’t shy away, he’s very selective and shy. The choices and moods at all.
Apoorva: Does that mean there is a decline in the unstated needs of the customer?
TG: It isn’t about that. When a customer is associating with a brand, it is very important for a brand to resonate with the customer’s social status. or social expression. Because cracking that will help us find out if a customer wants to associate with you or not. It depends on what you want to target.
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