Building Brand Love with the Power of Language - The New Age Mantra to Digital Marketing Success

The year 2020 witnessed a new world order. Countries began to order nation-wide lockdowns, people gathered in their balconies to perform sing-alongs, some took up grocery shopping for the elderly, and the world stood as one to pay tribute to the frontline health workers during this massive crisis.

Overall, coronavirus proved to be a crisis that brought out the best in people. And if done right, it can bring the best for businesses too. The year 2020 not only witnessed changes in human behaviour, it also reshaped consumer behaviour trends that inspired businesses around the world to adapt to changing times.

According to a survey conducted by Adobe, 58% of Indian consumers increased their online shopping frequency, with an additional 74% inclined towards changing their shopping habits in the future. The most notable shift however was that over 88% of consumers preferred to engage with small businesses and online retailers, and extended to offer support to them.

Driving Business Growth During a Crisis

To grow your business during a crisis, the most powerful agenda advocated is “Brand Love”. Talkwalker analyzed over 800 brands globally and concluded that brand love is one of the most important marketing strategies that businesses can use today. Combined with the power of social listening, businesses can successfully build a foundation for long term customer-to-brand relationship.

Active Social Listening

Social listening is one of the biggest tools that brands can use to analyse, track, and respond to customers. The ideal course of action is to monitor social media channels for mentions of your brand, products, competitors, and other essential keywords related to your field of business. Once you analyse this information, you receive new insights on the various opportunities to act upon.

Rapidly Changing Social Media Habits Among Users

ShareChat witnessed a rise of 15% in daily average users and a rise in content shared during the Covid-19 pandemic. Topics mainly revolved around covid related news and health based information. Similarly, Facebook and Twitter also witnessed a surge in covid related information with #coronavirus becoming a trending hashtag across all platforms.

Brands that changed their Marketing Strategies during Covid

1. Amul India

Amul, India’s fastest growing dairy corporation, is known for its smart campaigns. Always topical and localised, Amul stepped-up with its brand campaigns during the Covid crisis as well. Releasing the fact that the ideal way to connect with the vast majority of Indians is through the power of language, Amul ran multiple campaigns in ‘Hinglish’-- thereby showing that the brand truly cared for the safety of its customers.

2. Go Ibibo

The travel industry took the biggest hit during the pandemic. With all forms of travel coming to a complete halt, GoIbibo had to think of innovative ways to continue promoting their services. And they sure did… with the Power of Language!

3. Harvest Gold

A popular food processing company in India, Harvest Gold, embraced localization and used the power of language to connect with India. The Covid crisis witnessed the brand making use of multiple campaign creatives that stuck to the local languages of India. These ads not only addressed important issues like social distancing but also established a sense of brand love among customers.

Why Vernacular Languages is the Way Forward

As per MMA and Group M report, over 75% of Indian internet users will be consuming content in vernacular languages by the year 2021. Further, the number of Indian language users is expected to reach over 50 crore by 2021; thus, making India one of the biggest markets with the most internet users.

Businesses and digital platforms are well aware of this changing trend and are widely focusing on catering to the vernacular customer base by taking over a regional tone. Tech giants like Google and Facebook are already focusing on vernacular content, apps such as ShareChat allow audiences to consume content in multiple languages, leading content generation apps are focusing on Hindi and other regional languages, and over 90% of all YouTube videos consumed in India are in regional languages. This exponential increase in vernacular content has led to an explosion of content consumption that simply cannot be ignored by tech giants and digital marketers alike.

ShareChat Interacts with Brands Across India

Building brand love during a crisis can be challenging. It requires brands to conceptualize, ideate, strategize solutions, and overall, have a powerful marketing game plan in place. In order to address this issue, ShareChat partnered with Exchange4media for its event- Pitch CMO Summit, on 28th May, 2021. The event brought together several dynamic business tycoons from the brand community. ShareChat CCO, Ajit Varghese, held an engaging and interactive session, where he answered some of the most concerning questions by brands around the country. Highlighting a futuristic view for business growth with the Power of Language, he also revealed how ShareChat stepped-up and assisted several brands to connect with consumers across India during this crisis season.

Take a look at the video to gain insight on building Brand Love with the Power of Language:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rX3mm3t5psc

A Wrap Up

India is a multilingual country with over 22 languages and 1600 dialects. Tapping into this vernacular language user base is a billion-dollar opportunity. While tech giants around the world are adapting to this new normal of internet communication, Indian internet ecosystem ought to strengthen its foothold with multilingual marketing to accomplish the dream of “Digital India” in its true sense. Nelson Mandela once said, “If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.” It is now time to reach the hearts of 130 crore Indians, cause let’s face it, by the year 2025, India will touch nearly 100 crore internet users—the largest user base in the world!

WRITTEN BY Jasmine Philip