A 15-year career commencing as a management trainee with ITC limited in India to brand and marketing stints in Reliance Communications, Diageo and brand and luxury marketing strategy consulting with Open D Group, Pulkit Abrol has a deep understanding of consumers in developed and developing economies bringing both executive leadership and real-life practical experience. Pulkit Abrol heads the Marketing and Planning function for ACCA (the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants, the global body for professional accountants) for its emerging markets directorate. We present to you the ‘BTL Baatein’ of the week which is powered by VISCOMM with Santosh Jangid speaking to Pulkit Abrol about Below The Line (BTL) advertising and promotions for the educational sector and the balance between ATL (Above The Line) and BTL
How important is BTL to your overall marketing plan?
ACCA is the leading body for professional chartered accountancy qualification and we have over 110 years of experience in the world of building and creating opportunities for accountancy across the world and we work with approximately 80 global accountancy partnerships across various offices. Our marketing strategies are usually integrated and BTL is definitely an important part of our activities. It is integral to our work and our marketing tasks. Specifically in India, it does feature as an important part of the work that we do with our partners and various stakeholders.
Can you also specify the range of activities that you undertake as part of the below-the-line advertising and promotion?
The range of activities that we try to integrate in our ATL and BTL activities across our campaigns would be location-based outdoor programmes, which are highly targeted around universities, colleges, employers and our learning provider network across India. We also do tele-marketing which goes in tandem with our digital efforts and digital customer journeys. We also believe in supporting the customer journey with what we believe as a moment of truth in retail visibility programs. We do have a wide range of learning providers and universities where we support them with events, educational fares and we also conduct road shows or information sessions in physical locations.  We regularly conduct finance and accountancy workshops for a wide variety of stakeholders such as teachers who deliver the qualification, corporates who want their finance talent to be globally relevant, CFO’s and finance function leadership who focus on corporate governance, assurance, risk management and so on. We also encourage and regularly hold interactions with student counsellors through roundtable discussions, debate and understand the key trends in the future of education, skills development, work readiness, employment and career opportunities in the finance and accountancy profession in India.
Can you give a broad idea of your spends pie of ATL v/s BTL?
That really depends on the audiences and the target segments across the various markets that we operate in. It depends on the campaign that we are running. Since we are  building our presence in India, it’s an incremental pattern that we see. Historically, if we look at the figures, we are constantly increasing our BTL funds year-on-year and that will go up.
Do you prefer to do this through BTL agencies directly or via your existing creative/media agency?
We believe there are components in our marketing work which require specialised BTL agencies. These would be those agencies who work on customer journeys or retain customer journeys. We believe there is a role in our customer journey through specialised agency and there are other agencies such as our media partner Adfactors which supports us on outdoor and various location-based targeted key cities in India.
In terms of generating results especially from consumers and in B2B, do you find BTL a more sureshot avenue than ATL?
There are two parts to this. We do have a sizeable stakeholder audience in B2B, so we usually have direct response efforts such as programs which are either digital lead generation or event based marketing. We participate with bodies like the Institute of Directors, India and have a working relationship with the Institute of Cost Accountants of India. We do have a B2B-led management programme which is event-based where we do see conversions, we are also in partnership with CFO India Network where we run a series of roundtable discussions with the finance leadership in the country making them aware about this qualification and how it adds value to employers. As far as B2C marketing is concerned, we do believe that to drive salience and to drive awareness we do see an important part of the consideration aspects of the brand coming through with all the work that Adfactors supports us with in outdoor and location based marketing.
While sales and salience are good indicators of its success, what are the attributes you look at to measure the success of a BTL campaign?
For BTL, there is a broad range of measures that we look at. Some of the tactics that I mentioned are difficult to measure while some have very direct hard key performance indicators (KPI). If we are doing something on telemarketing or digital or road shows or information sessions, we can directly link that to conversations, opportunities, conversions. When we try to drive awareness and our target audience are more fragmented we use outdoor, which would be opportunity to see, locations, investments to support that end.
Given rising media costs, do you see BTL managing on its own, without ATL in educational sector?
There is a growing trend in India that we are accustomed to that a lot of product launches, especially in the consumer space does tend to have a lot of awareness building, promotion tactics done through the BTL channels. For ACCA, our conversation is slightly different. For us, when we are engaging with our B2B audiences, we have to have conversation about how the qualification supports the employer and how universities and the academic fraternity can engage with the professional qualification because there is difference in academic qualification and a professional qualification. As far as B2C is concerned, there is probably a greater tendency on having in India BTL-aided campaigns, but we believe that given our brand and the evolved marketing strategies today, which are mostly integrated, you need to have different messages, different conversions, considerations drivers across different paths of consumer’s journey. When you are looking at making a choice for an educational qualification, there are various factors into place. If you’re looking at making a career in finance and accounting there are various factors such as what is it that you are considering, what are your sources, what are your friends doing. There is a lot going on in the head of a key target customer for us and the to add to that there is teacher’s role, professor’s role, parent’s role. so all these factors come into place so we not only have to bring appropriate value proposition across the customer journey for all of these audiences but also work on some of the new media which is available to converge the aspect of physical learning as well as the digital environment. So, it is a shifting terrain and there are media costs in BTL which will increase. For our brand it will be difficult to say BTL would 100% help in obtaining the desired results. The task for our organisation is to support the public interest, to talk about our membership , to support students across India and to work with employers and this will not happen just by ATL. It does require some investment in BTL as well.