As part of our new series, ‘Marketers Playbook for 2020 Post Covid-19?, Sudhanshu Nagpal, Associate Director – Marketing (Biscuits), Mondelez India says an organization’s ability to understand changing consumer needs and act on them with agility will determine how well businesses recover Covid-19 is undoubtedly one of the most challenging times our generation is facing. From a business perspective, every company – either big or small - are struggling to keep their financial wheel turning, given the curtailed revenues streams and disrupted supply chains. The long-term ripple effect of this on the economy and heath of businesses will emerge and get clearer over course of time. But the focus for now is to keep our people safe, ensure business continuity and conserve cash, as part of managing and navigating the crisis period. As we plan ahead, it will important for brands and businesses to do some strong future scenario planning for best and worst outlook and start articulating strategies and game plans for them. As marketeers what’s keeping us awake is the humongous change this crisis is bringing about in the consumers’ life. The lockdown and need for social distancing is significantly altering some of the fundamental entrenched old ways and habits, and driving a shift in consumer behaviour. As we observe and analyse consumer data points through various listening sources, there are a few driving forces which we can see emerging and impacting consumers, at least in short to medium term.

• First one is what we all are now quite familiar with, let’s call it “More of everything at Home” – In pre-Covid times, a big part of our life use to be focused Out of home – be it work, shopping, socializing, entertainment or fitness. But during these tough times, consumers are trying to adapt and find ways to manage all these activities in their homes.
• As a consequence, we are witnessing the emergence of what commentators are beginning to call “Contactless Life” in a big way. Strong desire to limit and avoid unnecessary human contact and exposure is resulting in exponential growth in contactless processes including online shopping, online entertainment, online work and even online socializing.
• We are seeing stronger consumer proclivity emerging in the area of “Precaution and Protections” – due to increased vulnerabilities during such times, consumers are shifting to health, hygiene and wellbeing choices and seeking more and more of trust & quality assurance in their choices over all.
• Lastly, as consumers navigate this crisis we see stronger Sense of Community and need for Purpose & Sustainability emerging as bigger consumer sentiments than before

Which of these trends will evolve, sustain and shape the new world as consumers navigate and come out of the crisis, is difficult to predict, but an area of immense interest and value. But in medium to long term, it will be organization’s ability to understand these changing consumer/ customer needs and act on them with agility and sense of purpose, which will determine how well brands and business recover and bounce back. Some of the points we’re looking at, while relooking at our plans, are as follows –

1. Be Truly Consumer centric: Consumers’ needs, their buying & media consumption pattern, a lot of what we knew about them is changing. So, to remain effective it’s critical that we keep our old wisdom aside and be open to understand afresh.
2. Repurpose Brand Campaigns To Drive Stronger Meaning And Relevance With Consumers: Brands should play a more meaningful role in consumer lives in these times. But intent needs to be to build trust and spread positivity. And not just drive short term sales.

For instance, on Oreo, our core proposition has always been “to inspire playful connection among families and friends”. And in this tough time, we adapted our messaging to launch #AthomewithOreo campaign which is not just our way of inspiring consumers to stay positive & playful when at home, but also enabling them with exciting Oreo hacks around recipes, fun activities and DIY craft ideas.

3. Recraft Media Strategy Regularly: Covid-19 is disrupting the media consumption habits and we are seeing some big changes coming through, be it offline/online mix or channel & genre dynamics and more. Hence for brands to remain effective it’s imperative their media deployment plans evolve too. At Mondelez India, we are constantly reviewing media landscape and evolving plans on a weekly-fortnightly basis.
4. Reimagine Role Of Digital: While Digital as a stronger brand building medium will further accelerate, this crisis is a clarion call for marketeers to reimagine the role Digital can play as part of the larger marketing ecosystem. From being able to churn and generate consumer insights from the vast data available online, agile online testing methodologies, tech and data driven personalized marketing to engage consumers more effectively or scaling up online commerce materially, the new opportunities will emerge faster and stronger from here. And it will be make or break for marketeers to not sit on side-lines but jump in to build these new capabilities remain relevant and strive.
5. Relook Innovation: The change of this scale is likely to throw newer innovation opportunities and render few existing ones a bit redundant. Also, with increased uncertainty which is bound to remain in the new normal, teams will have to rapidly adopt agile innovation methodologies in order to reduce idea’s time to market, do more test & learns before going scale etc. So, it’s imperative that marketeers lead and drive this agenda and build the required capabilities within the organization.

Disruption like these are also an opportune time for us to look into the mirror and make some bold changes; changes we felt were needed but were not able to action in order to avoid smaller disruption during business as usual. How soon this crisis will tide over and what will the new normal look like – none of us have clarity. But what’s clear is it isn’t going to be an easy ride. Having said that, we strongly believe India’s long-term growth story will remain intact and as a country we will be back stronger together and better in due course. And the brands which can adapt and reinvent themselves to the new normal while staying true to the larger purpose, shall survive these tough times.