Karthi Marshan heads marketing for the Kotak Mahindra Group, India's fourth largest private sector bank and BFSI conglomerate. In his role at Kotak, Karthi oversees marketing efforts across all the verticals that Kotak is present in, including insurance, banking, brokerage, asset management et al. Prior to this, Karthi has headed marketing at IDBI Bank, and co-founded Sharekhan, one of India's leading retail brokerage firms. Karthi Marshan started his professional career as a copywriter, then moved on to account management at Grey Worldwide, and subsequently produced television content for Sony India. In an exclusive interview with AlooTechie, Marshan shares his thoughts and plans about digital media marketing for Kotak.

How does the digital medium - both internet and mobile figure in Kotak Mahindra Group’s plans to reach out to consumers?

Digital media is steadily growing in significance as well as real expenditure of both money and time at Kotak. From constituting a tiny fraction of our budgets in previous years, digital now consumes a substantial portion of our expenditures.

Which according to you have been some of the most exciting online campaigns that the company has initiated for its brand so far?

We have run a number of gratifying campaigns online for Kotak. For our NRI audiences, we have run a number of programs linked to popular Indian festivals. For example, we built an innovative app this Diwali where people could light diyas online and place them on at their friends’ homes across the world on a night-time satellite map of the world. Thousands of Indians and NRIs engaged in this activity. Similarly, we ran a creative campaign during Holi where people could play Holi virtually by applying colour to the profile pictures of their friends on Facebook.

Another successful instance is when we ran a campaign to understand the changing meaning of money for people in India via a Facebook campaign coupled with a road trip from Chandigarh to Bangalore. During this two week trip we added 50,000 fans and raised engagement levels by dramatic levels.

In the BFSI sector, performance based digital advertising works best. With the advent of new forms of content such as video and apps, what are your plans around this?

We have already experimented successfully with both video and apps, for the examples I have shared earlier. Further, we regularly use video for things like market commentaries distributed by our securities arm, and are finding huge traction for it.

How do you see Kotak’s digital spends moving this year - in terms of growth and focus?

This year a substantial amount of our marketing spends will be focussed on business generating efforts. We already acquire a large number of NRI banking customers online. We expect to apply those learnings in the domestic market this year to acquire banking, broking and investing customers efficiently and cost-effectively.

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

Exactly how old is the person I am reaching? 18-24 is too wide an age band to be meaningful to me. I am very interested in young audiences, but only after they have begun standing on their own feet. Hence granularity in demographics is something I am keen to have access to. Similarly, it would be great if I could target employees from specific companies when they are online, since I may have special deals for them.

How do you see the importance of social media for promoting your brand in India?

Social media is important and there is no arguing with it. However, I am frankly a little unsure of whether it is a promotional medium or something else. My sense is that much more than most other media, social media demands authenticity and eschews hyperbole. Promotional content, no matter how hard we try, does tend to lean towards exaggeration, if only to make a point dramatically and impactful.

I believe social media’s role is primarily one of connections. Customer service is an obvious application. Listening, which is a far richer form of research than the forced models of focus groups that we have used hitherto, can be done in a non-intrusive fashion via social media. Product development, in partnership with customers is a slam-dunk with social media. Hence, I would actually avoid or limit advertising and focus a lot more on these applications on behalf of my brands.

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?

Our country’s communication discipline came from theatre, not from math. Unlike America, where catalogue selling predated television, in our case, storytelling has been the dominant methodology. To tell a story on a two inch screen is very tough, and we are still figuring out how to do it. On the other hand, we have very poor skills in the math side of communications and hence the lag.

With context of BFSI, both online and offline transactions take place. But there is a perception that people research and compare products online and buy them offline. Why do you think it is like that?

In the first place, due to a lack of financial literacy, most BFSI products are still sold, not bought. Most intermediaries sell in face-to-face situations, hence the ‘buying’ is inevitably offline. Further, many purchases also require offline fulfilment by law. Signatures and verification are still physical in nature; hence there is little choice in this matter.

However, when we see BFSI as an enabler of online transactions, we see a dramatically different picture. Online purchases of rail and air tickets, utility payments, virtual credit card usage, mobile topups et al are only growing rapidly every day. Similarly, while the universe of people investing is small per se, the portion of them doing so online is quite significant.

Internet is said to be a measurable medium. What is your take on this? Have we overdone the measurement quotient and made this medium hard to understand for the brand marketers?

I disagree. I know it has become fashionable of late in communication circles to say that digital should be tested on the same metrics as traditional media like TV and print. I think this is a dangerous fallacy. Just because print and TV have got away with shallow metrics like viewership by SEC does not mean digital should too. In fact, I would aggressively argue for the opposite, which is that we task traditional media to deliver on metrics similar to those we score digital media on. And it’s untrue that this is not possible. For example, Roper Starch have been measuring the relative readership power of different positions, sizes and colours in print for at least four decades now, in the Western world. Whereas, here, we pay position premia with no supporting evidence but our gut. Why? To liberate digital from measurement just because traditional is not being measured is to solve the wrong problem.

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

Two years is too far to see. Who knows, Facebook may be dead, tablets may have replaced laptops and PCs completely, Google may have been overthrown by today’s start-up.

All I can say is that the core of marketing interventions, which is about having authentic conversations with your audiences, will not change. How we do it will only get more intense. And new tools and apps and so on will force us to constantly learn new tricks.