After heading Nikon as General Manager, Sales and Marketing, Sajjan Kumar has been appointed as the Vice President, Imaging Division, Nikon India w.e.f May 31st, 2011. Kumar comes with an experience of 14 years in the field of Sales, Marketing, Product Development, and Channel Development and Operations. Prior to joining Nikon, Kumar was with eSys Technologies and joined Nikon in 2008. In an exclusive interview to India Digital Review, Kumar discusses how Nikon India plans to use digital as a marketing media for its brand.

 How does the digital medium - both internet and mobile figure in Nikon India’s plans to reach out to consumers? How do you see the importance of social media for promoting your brand in India? What are your strategies in that?

Since the inception of World Wide Web, there is a paradigm shift in strategies to reach out to consumers. In addition to traditional marketing engagements there is a sharp increase in interest by organizations in leveraging external partnerships for improving marketing operations, especially in digital media. The increase in user base of social media platforms like Twitter and Facebookhas started making companies take advantage of the digital medium to promote and market their products and services, with Nikon being no exception.

Besides being able to communicate with over a billion people, the advantages of tapping the digital consumers are immense.

The Nikon Facebook and twitter page allows us to:

• Reach the right audience
• Keep potential consumers engaged
• Communicate directly to our target market
• Provides effective feedback
• Provides additional branding and promotion for the company and products
• It is cost effective compared to traditional marketing campaigns
• Measure the success of campaigns

Since the web allows companies to connect immediately, launching a digital marketing campaign can take place more quickly than traditional marketing campaigns and are effective as well. The best thing about digital marketing is that it’s immediate, thus welcoming feedback, input and action from your target market. The ease of marketing and maintenance adds to lure of having digital presence.

Digital presence enhances the visibility and brand recall at large, as more and more people have presence on social media platforms. But the challenge is to keep consumers engaged and feeding them ever more with information’s and updates. Nikon hasstrategized its digital presence keeping consumers our first priority. Being a consumer brand we aim at keeping our customers informed of all the product updates and photography techniques.

In your category, visual brand building works the best. With new engagement forms such as videos coming up on internet, what are your thoughts on visual brand building exercises on internet in India?

The internet is a great place to build or uphold brand equity. Besides being a medium that caters to a sizable population, it also provides new and affective means to connect with the audience. A strong visual identity and branding is of vital importance to any company's success. The trend is nowadays shifting to new engagement forms like videos. The advantage of using videos as a new medium for engagement has helped garner visibility. The videos can have description on a specific product/range, photography techniques etc. helping consumers understand the technicalities and thus increasing customer outreach and brand recall.

Though TV still remains one of the preferred medium for brand building but web-based videos are also getting prominence. I think brands are not fully exploring its possibilities. The content for online web-based video cannot be simply replicated what is being shown on TV. Video should be made creatively it has to be rich and more engaging for the visitor to remain glued to it, and search for the product or the service later. We are seeing brands are also experimenting with new evolving rich media display formats which attract attention faster, and engage consumer better. It should not be treated as a low cost substitute but a serious brand building medium.

Do you plan to extend your latest campaign for the COOLPIX range on digital?

We have received overwhelming response for our COOLPIX campaign. We executed many contests and engagement activities aligning to our campaign. Now we are focusing more on social media platforms and placements on some prominent sites like Yahoo India, Ebay.in, Rediff.com etc. We are also working towards developing some applications for social media platforms like “Nikon Like Board”. It is a photo sharing application wherein we ran thematic contests and the response has been overwhelming. Our user base on this application is increasing, we have now more than 40,000 monthly users on this application.

How important is having an e-commerce presence for Nikon?

We don’t have any plan to directly enter the market through e-commerce but Nikon products are already present on multiple e-commerce sites.

What answers do you seek from your digital advertising agencies and digital media partners while promoting your brand on internet?

We all have recognized importance of digital media. It has become integral part of various marketing initiatives undertaken by brands. Social media is all about market research, promotions, engagements, knowledge sharing etc. Presence on digital space allows businesses to interact with customers and potential customers in real time. The objectives/guidelines we seek while promoting our brand on digital space are as follow:

• New trends in social media& digital marketing
• New metrics to evaluate media spends
• Ways to increase the ROI
• Content development & consumer engagement strategy
• Target audience

People are speaking about mobile being a great medium for brand communication, but still, very less amounts are spent on the particular medium. What is your take on this?

The dependence of a consumer with his mobile has become a powerful tool for marketers to influence behaviour, build loyalty and drive purchase. The mobile as a medium for marketing your brand is still at its nascent stages within the India market place. With over 900 million mobile users in the country, brands have started recognizing how strategically important this channel can become. A mobile campaign although effective, is also very challenging to achieve and very difficult to maintain and while the mobile represents a major opportunity for brands that can earn a place on its home screen, it represents a significant challenge to those unable to adapt to mobile-powered consumer behaviorur.

Thus brands have to be very careful before leveraging this marketing channel for communication. Brands should drive towards developing content and messages that are compatible to the medium. However the mobile campaign should follow the overall communication of the company and should not be treated as a silo thus creating a confliction between the message received by the mobile user from the received via email.

As brands want to reach consumers where they expect greater real-time social connections with them, mobile is the only medium that can deliver on that. We can certainly expect near future to bring huge advances in how mobile is reinventing brand communications in India.

How do you see your marketing objectives aligning with what the online medium offers from two years down the line?

With the growth in online medium offerings we see a trend where organizations will have to align their objectives afresh. Nikon as an organization is keen to engage consumers on digital platform to help contribute towards building a photography culture in India. The consumer behaviour is changing, now they know the requirements and seek products which fulfill them. Consumers these days are more informed and seek information about their requirements online; hence there is a clear direction in putting more efforts in this medium. With the improved band width and easy access on hand held devices sooner internet is going to be mass reach medium.