These are based on what I saw and experienced, and hence more subjective than objective. I’m restricting it to three aspects that bring out some good and some not-so-good points.

Relationships: (Client, Partners) I have seen some fantastic relationships with clients and partners, based on mutual trust. Add to this, a great view of publishers and platforms (both traditional and digital) and the agency is in just the right place to make a difference to the client’s business. The flip side is that many a time, these relationships are taken for granted, by both sides. Campaign based thinking and last minute briefs coexist with half-hearted work cobbled together while waiting at the client’s reception. This extends to the agency’s partners as well. One possible way to fix this is to set expectations clear on both sides and understand long term implications of short term choices, but there are constraints, especially in an age when agencies are willing to undercut and bleed to get business.

Scale: (Industry, organisation) In many cases, the agency handles huge budgets, across diverse platforms. Once again, this puts them in the perfect frame to bring about changes that can alter the course and behaviour of entire industries and to begin with, at least their marketing domains. But I haven’t seen that happening a lot. One possible reason is that the agency structure is rather silo based and there aren’t a lot of people having strategic and operational experience across traditional, digital and social platforms. The interoperability of these silos is not really the best. Therefore, whether the current setup is capable of providing one cohesive, platform agnostic direction aimed at business outcomes is a question worth exploring.

I also think that the concept of value has somehow been irretrievably tied to scale, probably a baggage from the traditional media era. The themes of the digital era – experimentation, agile marketing, brand storytelling on digital etc – are reduced to near-zero significance in the narrative that the agency presents to the client. From the agency perspective, to quote Stalin (or Mao/Lenin/Trotsky!) “Quantity has a quality all its own“, but whether it adds the best value to a client’s business future is a question often unasked. When the agency itself is hesitant and rather unwilling to change, where does that leave the client?

Talent: (Workforce, Skills) One of the reasons I decided to explore the agency side was for the experience of working with multiple brands across domains. That remains a huge advantage this side offers. I have also seen GroupM do a bunch of things to expand and sharpen the skills of its workforce. The issue that I noticed is that the sheer scale of the organisation makes smooth implementation a challenge. Also, both discovery and navigation are far from easy. For example, there might be great work done on some brand, but how easy is it for a person to know and then attempt to be a part of it? The other challenge when all sorts of verticals and horizontals (account leads, domain experts, regional bosses etc) collide is accountability. To create systemic checks at this scale is not an easy task at all, and this might be a downer for a lot of people who are used to different standards.

So, why would you join the agency side? I can provide a few scenarios based on career stages. Early in your career (0-5 years) if you’re relatively young and would like to get some cross domain exposure of how a brand and its media vehicles function before you specialise, this would be a good place to explore. If you have 5-10 years of experience, but would like to shift your domain (say, from traditional to digital) an agency stint could help you do that. After a decade of experience, if you want a different perspective, exposure to more domains, or even a reduction in pace, the agency could offer that as well. As with every other job, a lot depends on your intent, but my take is that irrespective of the career stage, you will need at least 2-3 years of investment before you can start driving your agenda. Before you ask, it doesn’t work that way everywhere, I have had three jobs that taught me otherwise.

If I had to sum it all up – agencies and the clients they deal with – at the risk of generalisation, I’d have to go with

Creating, correcting and maintaining brand perception and resolving customer issues were fundamentally the objectives when operating in the customer care and brand domains respectively. But this was not an end in itself. The end objective of the business is revenue, and that makes up the remaining story.

3. Product: In this context, it includes the website itself, and the various features/enhancements/new products (eg. gift cards) that get introduced on a regular basis. Including social buttons on the home page and product pages were a given, though getting them above the fold was a mission I lost! The first major change was switching from FB Connect to the Open Graph. The potential applications, using social and interest graphs, are phenomenal, but we never progressed that far. At a basic level, I had slotted activities in this domain under acquisition and retention, and we have only implemented a small portion of the former. The easiest application of the social graph was using it for social proof. Kuliza’s Echo made that job relatively easy for us. It not only helped seamlessly amplify word-of-mouth, but also gave us a lot of data on consumption. One of the plans was to integrate this with Elevate, another Kuliza app – but inside Facebook, to try and beat FB’s throttling of organic reach. Another application of Echo, which should soon see the light of day, is a Fab-like social feed. If a user has registered on Myntra using Facebook, he/she would see the actions (Likes, Purchases, Wishlist additions) of his/her friends on a separate feed inside Myntra. Our expectation is that this would prompt more social actions inside Myntra and accelerate word-of-mouth inside FB further. This was actually a Phase 1 of a larger plan I had in mind. Let me explain.

While brand and customer connect can provide a strategic advantage on social, I’ve always felt that it was in the product domain that social could provide a sustainable strategic advantage. This came from my notion that ‘loyalty’ existed when the exit barrier for a customer to leave Myntra was high enough to beat any sustainable offering from a competitor. ‘Brand’ is one standard way to achieve it, but it is relatively less tangible, and in a commoditised marketplace, it would take more time. Generic discounting is not sustainable. I think, in this context, ‘Product’ can reach this ‘barrier’ in lesser time, and at lower costs. An ideal in my mind was using the social, intent and interest graphs of users from across various platforms to build a personalised experience, and through that, a gamified customer acquisition and retention architecture inside Myntra, (thereby minimising dependencies on other platforms) and then using social media to amplify relevant actions to further drive acquisition. But this approach has a high dependency on changes in the existing product and every new product/feature having relevant social features baked in (or at have it in the vicinity on its roadmap) to contribute to the larger agenda of the architecture. It also takes a mindset and backing. I did have a rough blueprint, but at this point in the e-commerce wars, this approach probably seemed a nice-to-have.

4. Sales: Conventional notions claim that social media should not be used for sales pitches, but from my humble experience, I’d beg to differ. It’s just a matter of what-when-how, and how much. From generic product pitches on the Facebook Page as part of the larger content strategy, to custom links on Twitter, we have consistently shown and tracked revenue from social channels. Even Pinterest and Google+ are contributors! I must admit that in the larger scheme of Myntra’s monthly revenue, these are insignificant, but let’s just say that the total contribution are in double digit lakhs every month. In fact, it reached a point where we were given a budget to see if we could scale it. In this context, I have to mention this brilliant idea by S – she used customer generated product images from our Pinterest ‘Shopped from Us’ board every week to make sales pitches on Facebook! Works like a charm.

The area where there were a few attempts, but didn’t really pick up was enterprise collaboration. We managed to build a fairly large community on Yammer, but what I’ve realised is that it needs champions at the highest level in all parts of the organisation using it on a consistent basis for it to be sustainable. I also had this grandiose vision of using Google+ and circles to connect customers, Customer Connect teams, Partner brands and employees in general, but this one was limited to a word document! This is an area that I believe to be a must-have as we evolve towards social business, but in the larger list of priorities, is still a few steps away.

That gives a broad view of what I’ve been up to for two years. The generic point I’m trying to make through the two posts is that from basic business outcomes like customer satisfaction and sales to more nuanced ones like brand perception and sustainable strategic advantage, social can and should play an integral part. There will be differences in terms of scale, strategy, resources etc depending on the domain, maturity of the industry/organisation, target audience and so on, but the important part is to begin because the brand/organisation needs to evolve as well. Social media has shortcuts, I’m inclined to think that social does not. These are days of nascence, and social will continue to evolve – enterprise social networks, social business, big data, the Internet of Things (add buzzwords to taste) and more will all have their hype cycles and age of maturity. By all means, measure ROI, but remember, we spend on movie tickets, we invest in mutual funds. I think we’re clear on the expected time frame of returns in both cases.

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Myntra will remain dear to me, like all the other brands I have worked on, but it will probably have a more lasting signature, because not since my days at GIM have I experienced such a rewiring of my worldview. This stint has given me oodles of confidence, friends whom I hope will last a lifetime, and relationships of trust that I will cherish.

Before I end, the last hat tip – to the super S, who joined the team mid last year and has since then, proven time and again that she’s the best social ‘investment’ we made, and made this little social adventure a total joy! “I used to believe that we are here to teach what we know. Now I know that we are here to teach what we are meant to discover“

until next time, </ head – social media>

Trendwatching made a list, and my favourites in it were #9 and #10 – “Full Frontal” and “Demanding Brands” respectively. The first was about brands moving further on the transparency curve and proactively showing they have nothing to hide as opposed to merely reacting. The second was about brands getting their consumers to contribute to their sustainability and socially-responsible endeavours.

Branding Strategy Insider made 2 lists – Brand and Digital & Media. In the first, I found #5 – ‘The Known and the Branded’ – a very intriguing thought. Brands being thought of as category placeholders, stuff that doesn’t really stand for anything. Understandably, brands will find it harder to differentiate themselves. In the second list, again #5 – omni-channel marketing is something I have written about earlier while on the subject of cohesive experiences.

JWT has their annual 10 trends list as well, and I thought #1 “Play as a competitive advantage” and #9 – “Going Private in Public” were particularly insightful. The reason I look forward to the JWT list is because while they deal with the immediate, they also come up with a couple of nuggets which are really far out. But the thing is, I can instinctively connect with them and am sure that even if not this year, these are inevitable somewhere down the line.

This year, I also found Next Generation Media’s list quite interesting, especially because of their ‘implications for brands’ after each trend. My favourites in this list were #9 and #10 – “New Currencies” and “The WOW factor” respectively. I like the direction of the former, but would have liked it to be pushed further, but that’s mostly because of a more (personal) philosophical perspective on us having no alternatives to money as a currency. “The WOW factor” – related to ‘The Known and the Branded’ I mentioned earlier in the post, and the writing is pretty much on the wall for brands!

Update: Came in late, but Simply Zesty’s list is a must-read as well!

until next time, hope y’all have an awesome 2013.

With Foursquare and Facebook Places, I think that brands whose product/service experience is intrinsically tied to retail outlets are perhaps closest to a kind of interaction utopia I have in mind. Here’s why.

With every platform advancement, the customised interaction potential has increased – from mass media and the static web to social web, location based services, apps and technology like Augmented Reality. But even now, given the tendency to aggregate ‘Like’s and followers, I sometimes feel that ‘social’ as it relates to friends and followers’ overrules ‘social’ as a relationship between brand and consumer. That’s a dichotomy that few brands have acknowledged or addressed. Conformation!

And that’s why I feel retail brands on 4sq, Places etc are near to that utopia – because it allows real-time interaction and context at the place of experience. Social is only a topping, and something that the user will scale by connecting his friends/followers to the experience. The brand/platform just has to play along. Technically, you could say it is possible on FB, Twitter too, but there the Like/follower currency is way too prevalent, so it is easier for brands to get sidetracked. (If we go by a recent report, brands will eventually find that it’s not really getting them anywhere)

Meanwhile, just like FB and Twitter, platform protocols and constraints for brands also apply to apps and location based services. And that’s why, at this level of my imagination, I can only imagine utopia (for non retail brands) as brand ‘controlled’ interactive sensors attached to each product we consume.

These shifts would hopefully drive more brands to define their own destiny.

until next time, CCD, may the foursquare be with you