Samrat Mukherjee is an extraordinary young maverick and the founder of Crow’s Nest. Crow’s Nest launched itself as a full-service digital agency and eventually became immensely successful in the digital space in Kolkata.
Mukherjee talked about brands and consumers and how a brand could become a good or bad influencer. So, the brand has an active way of reaching out through the various media to its consumers. Nowadays, people are utilizing their time on diverse channels like Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hotstar, YouTube and so on. These are the platforms where the channels are acting as media for the brands who are trying to reach their consumers.
There was a time when people followed the print media and the brands promoted their products through print media. However, now digital media has become so popular among the masses that the brands are taking advantage of it to reach to their target audience. Different brands are influenced by different communication strategies. Samrat believes that for any communication to reach out to the larger audience, it requires a platform and it requires media.
Mukherjee contended that articles, photographs, videos, infographics constitute the ways brands communicate to the audience. Basically, these ways try to push consumers to buy the products offered by different brands. From this perspective, Mukherjee said, “They reach out to us and convince us about the products and services that lead to business. So, all this is happening because of the brand reaching out to us through these media.” In simple words, brands want to convey about the product and consumer wants to know. So, the common area is marketing.
The significant thing is content marketing. All they need is strong and fascinating content. A brand should place content for consumers where the consumers are willing to give their time to connect with the product. Mukherjee noted said that a brand has three types of content to create – earned content, paid content and owned content. Earned content is unfamiliar to many people. Earned content is content that the brand hasn’t created for itself and is usually offered to them. Although this type of content is always published by a third party, there are ways marketers can position themselves for earned media opportunities.
Advertisements are being pushed primarily through social channels. When people actively search, the brand can come to their notice through searching keywords or advertisements or search results. Accordingly, the brands target their audience via Facebook, Instagram or some other social media.
Mukherjee said that brands are becoming publishers. When they place the brand as the leader in the category and make the brand aspirational and humane instead of being transaction-focused, multiple content consumption drives better recall. On the other hand, contextual relation, database traffic and low cost can also lead to business.
According to Mukherjee, people are living in digital times and brands will increasingly use digital media to reach out to masses and run their business effectively.
The author, Manushree Maity is associated with Adamas University Media School.
