Tag: South Asia

India – Authority on brand perception measurement YouGov BrandIndex has released its ranking of the top 10 most recommended brands in India where Shenzhen-based phone brand OnePlus dominated the list for 2020. It was followed by homegrown delivery platform Swiggy, with similarly India-based travel booking platform MakeMyTrip landing as the third most recommended brand.

A total of 260 brands were screened based on consumers’ answers to the question “Would you recommend the brand to a friend or colleague?” The brands that came out in top three had 83% – 85% of respondents recommending them. The ranking data was collected between January 1, 2019 and December 31, 2019.

Indian hotel brand Taj Hotels and Palaces ended on the fourth rank with 83.3%, while US-based food delivery service UberEats rounded the top five with 82% of consumers having a positive perception on the brand.

Meanwhile, Indian consumers showed a consistent affinity with international brands; with Amazon, Google, Zomato, Trivago, and Marriot making it to the top ten.

Mumbai, India – Apple will launch the Apple store online in India on September 23, offering Apple’s full range of products and support directly to customers across the country for the first time. 

The new online store will provide customers with the same experience found in Apple store locations around the world.

“We’re proud to be expanding in India and want to do all we can to support our customers and their communities,” said Deirdre O’Brien, Apple’s senior vice president of Retail + People.

 “We know our users are relying on technology to stay connected, engage in learning, and tap into their creativity, and by bringing the Apple Store online to India, we are offering our customers the very best of Apple at this important time,” added O’Brien.

Apple Specialists will be available on the online store to assist customers from custom-configuring any Mac to setting up new devices. Customers will also be able to get advice, receive guidance, and learn about new products directly from Apple, both in English and Hindi.

With financing options and an available trade-in program, the online store online offers a range of affordability options. Students can shop for a Mac or iPad with special pricing, and receive discounts on accessories and AppleCare+, Apple’s warranty and technical support.

In October, customers can expect free online “Today at Apple” sessions led by local creative professionals, focused on photography and music. Sessions on signature gift wrapping and personalized engraving will also be available for select products. Engraving of emoji or text will be available for iPad and Apple pencil in English, Bengali, Gujarati, and Hindi as well as in Kannada, Marathi, Tamil, and Telugu.

Apple has been operating in India for more than 20 years. In 2016, Apple launched an iOS app design and development accelerator in Bengaluru in support of the country’s engineering talent and iOS developer community.

If you’re in the business of social media marketing, whether independently or as a profession where you are one of the people responsible for a company’s online marketing, it is imperative that you dig deep into what your customers are thinking, where they gather to converse online and what they are talking about because knowing such insights will help build up your social media game and in turn, create a competitive following that could drives sales for your brand.

The thing with extracting audience insights online is that they are only made possible and efficient with the presence of sophisticated martech or social tools. The good news is, a lot of free and affordable analytic tools have continuously been on the rise, making it a sin not to utilize and maximize such tools that are just waiting to be used for the best of your brand. Here are a few reasons why you should start finding the tool of your choice and start leveraging:

1. No technical skills required
This is by far the biggest advantage offered by analytical tools available. You do not need to be a data wizard to use social analytics tools. Commercially-marketed social tools are created to garner buy-ins, thus they are made to become user-friendly.

2. Budget friendly – won’t break the bank
Whether you are a brand marketer just launching a campaign or an agency about to go into a pitch, you don’t need to spend a hefty amount to get the best of analytics tech. Most of the introductory packages of marketing tech provide you with the base level of data for a fraction of the cost. The good thing about the variety of subscriber packages, one can opt to upgrade to more sophisticated versions of tools as one further becomes seasoned on the basics of social data.

Social marketing tools

3. Relevant sentiment trendline
The best social tools are built on hyperlocal infrastructures with enhanced machine learning to more precisely capture sentiments. Mass market tools that are not optimized for local sources and context will provide you a higher rate of inaccuracy which compromises the quality of your data, so it is important to find a localized source if accuracy is important to you.

4. Trend tracking made easy
Brands can observe trends, track hashtag movement, and measure performance based on interest of the social chatter, engagements and sentiments. Apart from hashtags, keywords are also trackable to measure the popularity of brands and products. Using social tools, you are able to identify the most active channels related to specific brands, products or topics of interest and craft marketing strategies that resonate.

5. Identify your brand’s advocates, influencers and micro-KOL
Correctly identifying top users based on the channels is a nifty feature in some social listening tools. It is an undeniable fact that influencers will make use of their platforms to share thoughts and opinions. When an influencer mentions your brand, don’t gloss over the fact that they’ve mentioned your brand, instead, take some notes and study them. Collaborating with the right influencers or micro KOLs can greatly boost your brand image and reputation.

6. Heat map
Some tools also have heat maps which helps you to visualize which geographical area gets the most attention from users using channels with location tracking enabled such as Twitter. It highlights the areas and locations to display contents relevant to your searched keywords or hashtags. Heat maps enable brands to expand the market by inferring analysis on audience based on geographic segmentation which helps to identify potential locations for new outlets

7. Knowing which third party pages you can leverage amplifies your marketing
Most social tools can assist in identifying top websites that have been promoted and advertised in relation to the topic of your query. Since audiences already engage with these third party channels, you may collaborate for beneficial growth and advertise to leverage them for more exposure. For this purpose, having the local sources where natives are active will improve your results even more.

This article is brought to you by Wisesight. 

Mumbai, India – Advertising Standards Council of India (ASCI) has extended its regulatory coverage to monitor digital platforms, and it will be procuring media intel TAM Media Research’s services to run the said function.

The regulation will cover search engines, video sites, news portals and websites for interests like astrology and automobiles. 

Initially, ASCI will track the food and beverage as well as the healthcare and education sectors on digital media as they accounted for 79% of the complaints processed by ASCI last year. 

According to ASCI, digital advertising made up for 30% of the total media spends in India. 

The extended function will be added to the already established print and TV tracking under the council’s National Advertising Monitoring Service (NAMS) for potentially misleading advertisements, which is similarly in collaboration with TAM.

ASCI Chairman Rohit Gupta said, “We live in a world that’s becoming more digital by the day, so a lot of marketing is shifting to such platforms. For a self-regulatory body, it makes sense to expand our monitoring of the offline space to include the online space as well.”

India – Facebook has announced Tuesday that it will now be bringing its news service, Facebook News to India alongside countries UK, Germany, France, and Brazil.

The expansion of the platform’s presence was based on an insight extracted by Facebook, which shows that 95% of the traffic news publishers get from Facebook News is incremental to the traffic they garner from news feed alone.

Facebook News was first launched in October 2019 to a subset of people in the US, offering a personalized feed of news stories.

As the company accelerates its plans overseas, it aims to launch the Facebook section to multiple countries within the next six months to a year.

Facebook said that since consumer habits and news inventory vary by country, it will be working closely with news partners in each country, to tailor the experience and test ways to deliver a valuable experience for people.

India – Deloitte India has announced that it has acquired advertising and marketing advisory and analytics firm, Spatial Access to enhance the organization’s advisory capabilities on its digital marketing and customer services.

The company said that the move was aimed at leveraging the firm’s  knowledge-driven sector expertise. Deloitte believes that this will help their brand marketer clients gain deeper insights on consumers and advertising avenues, and in turn, better position their marketing spends. 

Chandrashekar Mantha, media and entertainment industry lead and partner at Deloitte said, “Our endeavor is to help brands address their business challenges by introducing value added, and differentiated tech-enabled solutions across the A&M value chain.”