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Chandar Joshi is Manager, Design, at Ibibo Group.

How digital media can be effectively used to build brands in the contemporary space. It’s about brand building.

Your Organization’s Brand – It’s one of the most important and least understood assets of an organization. It’s more than your logo or tagline and it’s bigger than your product or service – it’s the promise that your organization makes to its customers, and it’s the delivery of that promise through every interaction with your brand from business card to the packaging of your product to the look and feel of your website and digital media tools. Your brand tells your customer who you are and what you are perceived to be in the marketplace.

A weak or inconsistent brand will get lost in the overcrowded digital marketplace, whereas a strong brand will stand apart – instilling confidence, establishing industry leadership, building trust, while distinguishing itself from its competitors. As the digital space becomes more and more influential, the dynamics are continually changing with regards to how organizations build their brands online.  For example, the rise of social media has shifted the power from the organization to the customer, and while some organizations are anxious about this dynamic change, others are optimistic about the enormous opportunity to quickly and efficiently develop potential brand loyalists and ambassadors.

Some myths about Digital
The wonderful thing about advertising is that it is constantly evolving, soaking in new technologies, new mediums and forms of expression, integrating different ways and methods to reach out to the end consumer and trying to engage him in better ways than before. At the spur of the moment, digital is the one offering that everybody is trying to understand.
However, it is not an add on, nor is it an alternative.

I think one constant in brand building is that “one size does not fit all”. Digital may appear “easy.” But just because I drive a car doesn’t mean I know how to build one. Pick the places your brand makes sense and concentrate and capitalize on those before signing up for the next thing. Every flag you plant in the digital space needs to be followed by the question “and what do we do when people start showing up”. Because they will. Maybe once. Maybe twice. But not more than that if you don’t make it worth their while.

I feel like we’ve been in this movie before. TV will kill radio. Cable will kill network TV. The internet will kill print first and then it will take TV down too. First, I think this question underestimates the general public’s ability to “on board” with more than one communication channel. And I think it suggests that a :30 spot is only a :30 spot if it plays on TV. There are plenty of :30 spots living quite happily on YouTube and Hulu and any number of other digital placements. A :30 spot is a great device for telling a story, delivering a message, offering a demonstration. So I don’t think it’s diminished in importance from that perspective. Maybe the question is really “Is it important for a :30 spot to always be on TV?

As Ad Filmmaker, Ravi Deshpande  says on
” Today most ad agencies are focused on TV while ignoring the roaring digital space”

Myth 1
Let’s make 2-3 ’30 second TVCs’ on youtube instead of a TVC to air on Channels.
One cannot be replaced by another. It can be at times similar or even same. However, what constitutes one communication targeted to one audience via one particular medium cannot be replaced by another communication on yet different medium.

Myth 2
Let’s do the digital stuff so kickass and edgy that it can go viral.
Any communication on the digital platform has to be ‘driven’ to get eyeballs. Rarely does stuff go viral by itself. The ‘drivers’ necessitate strategy and creative to push the content in the digital world.

Myth 3
Now that the Strategy & Creative has been presented, let’s see what one can do in Digital!
The understanding of the brand, it’s positioning, and the idea for the communication! Nothing else has mattered and nothing else will matter in the future. Digital is immersive. It has to be part and parcel of every communication drive of the brand.
What is essential is to see what connects with the digital touch points & the brand communication.

Myth 4
The thematic will run on tv, and the brand propositions will for Digital.
For long, digital is inching into every stage of the brand’s communication to the audience, and hence cannot be segregated, deemed lesser in value, or be considered as an afterthought.

Digital is a part and parcel of every communication of the brand identity and communication. It is not a variant but it just is!

Organizations have reason to be optimistic, as the digital media space brings unprecedented opportunities for building brands online due to the instant access organizations have to customers 24 hours a day as well as and the ability to engage interactively with these customers in a two-way conversation. It’s an exciting time to be involved in digital communications, and the potential for brand building online appears to be limitless.

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