Not an easy question to answer, but as we’ve said before, we never promised to ask easy questions. Hehe. Here goes Dr Bhaskar Das in the August 8 edition of Das ka Dum. Read on…
If you wish to access the archives, please go to the Das Ka Dum tab on the website’s top navigation bar or click here: https://www.mxmindia.com/category/columns/das-ka-dum/
Q. P&G and some other big marketers are reported to have increased their marketing spending as per quarterly reports released month. Do you sense similar winds blowing in India as well?
A. One can’t generalise on the basis of one company’s decision to increase spends on marketing. That optimal communication (including other marketing spends) are a ‘given’ for any business in a marketspace of cacophony of parity claims. They are important for developing brand affinity and usage amongst ones’s served market. That one has to constantly evaluate the ROI of all promotional investments is stating the obvious.
Even today most of the consumer-facing businesses (or communications directed for other corporate objectives or for statutory reasons) are engaged in regular communication with their stakeholders, albeit at different intensity (depending on the PLC of their brands or for their corporate/ business imperatives). This is evident from the rising ATL investments in India. I am not taking into account BTL investments as there is no authentic public domain database on the same. So, no new winds of change are required in the conviction of the marketers in india.
Having said that, there is much headroom for growth if we compare advertising spend as a percentage of India’s GDP vis-a-vis other developed countries.