Advertisment

CMO Special: Now that's some Modern Art!

author-image
Abhigna
New Update

MUMBAI, INDIA: Do not forget the bigger picture!

Advertisment

Not a cliché advice when you hear it from someone who breathes, lives and sells Art.

Hootsuite or CTRs are great, but do not forget the intangible layers that go into making a brand.

It's easy to get hits but for loyalty and real advocacy, a marketer has to innovate.

Advertisment

CMO CIO wars are passé, it's time we talked about CROs.

These and more are just a few of the many lessons that Vishal Lodaya might have equipped himself in stints as Brand Manager, Godfrey Phillips India Ltd. Or Manager, Corporate Excellence, Welspun Group.

And Lodaya has recently donned a new hat as CMO, Chairman and Founder at Artvilla.in while he is also absorbed in incubating new ideas and brands like KorporART (Art as gifting) and ARTours on the offline business side. He has been avidly working towards making Artvilla.in an online art selling hub which provides Art to all the classes alike.

Advertisment

A Soccer- and Cricket-enthusiast, and of course, a passionate Art-lover and Art Critic, he shares some of his strokes with technology and helps us find out why or why not can IT be a good muse for all the imagination and palettes that marketing is waiting to explode with.

What is the equation between marketing function and IT; say analytics or Web 2.0 for an art gallery player today? What have you been learning so far with stuff like Podcart or predictive analytics? Has technology helped you in reaching or pre-empting customer tastes/needs better?

For an Online Art Gallery, the marketing side is about looking after understanding the need of the consumer. A basic insight in our case was the need for the buyers to see variety! Obviously considering that we are a developing economy, ‘Art in the affordable genre' was also a requirement. In addition to this, one very important understanding that we had developed over the past two years was about how buyers get frustrated because they have to depend on the whims and fancies of the Artist.

Advertisment

 

We used the help of IT to cure these two basic problems. An online gallery can provide them variety on their laptop screens. Now, to cure the other problem, we developed something called as Art Imagined, which will help buyers order the type of artwork they want. The process is very simple. Buyers upload a photograph and we provide them with a hand-made painting in their choice of medium and size. We are trying out various things that are unique other than just trying to sell Art. One of them is PodcART which we are using to educate masses about Art. Things like podcasts and videos etc. enhance and improve the back-linking process for any website.

The reason for choosing this over other stuff is obviously through historical data mining or predictive analysis. So the equation between marketing and IT thus becomes very critical.

Advertisment

Has the role of a CMO become easy or more challenging over the past two years with the advent of technology?

I think the role of a CMO has become more challenging simply because you have to handle both offline activities and the digital marketing activities. The bigger task is to make this process of aligning offline and online activities seamless and maintain brand salience across these marketing activities. Digital marketing today has become almost indispensable and especially for an organization like us we cannot survive without it.

While the lines between physical and digital may be getting blurred every day (with every new tool in the market), is it possible that with this whole bandwagon - built around 'measurable, targeted, real-time marketing' and with analytics, algorithms, data scientists, robots creating/offering ads - maybe we are throwing more babies out with the bath water than we realize as we click away from traditional marketing recipes every time?

Advertisment

Like I said, it is not an over exaggerated scene at this point in time. It is very much required and it is definitely the future. You take tools like the Hootsuite or Sendible for instance. They help you improve your efficiency by three-folds. The only catch over here is to not get into that mindset of measuring every minute detail and forget about creating a Brand. Sometimes we get too caught up in improving the click-through rates (for e.g.) and forget the bigger picture!

What's your take on the CMO dilemma of juggling immense social networking/big data/analytics power together with intrusion/privacy awakening?

I think this is a very important question to talk on. The dilemma isn't actually as grave as it is portrayed to be and that is if you use more of pull marketing as opposed to push marketing. We have consciously tried to use innovative concepts like PodcART to get visitors on the website. Apart from that in the next couple of months we are going to have a few other initiatives that shall make our target audience hooked onto us. Of course, HTML emailers to newsletter subscribers and other databases are important. But that, like I said, will get you the 'number of hits' scores up. To get loyalists and advocates you actually need to innovate and make them like you.

Is marketing a science or an art in the current landscape where BYOD, smart phones, mobility, digital and web 2.0 are strong forces? What's your take on the much-gossiped about CMO vs. CIO/CFO turf battles?

Marketing is obviously a science. We use a lot of derived data and the assumptions are based on verified and unverified hypotheses. Maybe, you can call the skill of the marketer as an Art! I think too much is read into the CMO vs. CIO turf war. I have heard a new term these days called as the Chief Revenue Officer. The boundaries are actually blurring and the roles are overlapping a lot. The important aspect is who is bringing business on the table and the compensation/rewards/power etc. should be linked to that. This also varies from organization to organization.