Interview: Brand messaging will be consumed in bite-sized micro-videos: Zameer Kochar, JetPrivilege

Zameer Kochar, Head – Marketing & Member Engagement, JetPrivilege takes us through the brand journey, the content marketing space and more.

From glorifying memories, to 'Your Passion can take you Places' to the 'Dream Come True Contest', JetPrivilege has been exploring varied consumer insights and integrating the themes in its campaigns to tell the tale of the moment.

In conversation with Social Samosa, Zameer Kochar of JetPrivilege talks about challenges in building a brand, views on digital video advertising replacing traditional advertising, and how does all of it translate for the brand.

How has JetPrivilege established itself as an individual entity and what have been the challenges?

Post the strategic partnership between Jet Airways and Etihad Airways, Jet Privilege Private Limited was formed as a separate entity in 2014, with the sole purpose to market, develop and grow JetPrivilege – the loyalty and rewards program.  Our core purpose of existence is to drive member engagement and ROI for our partners. In the last five years, we have taken efforts to bring alive our vision of “Fulfilling aspirations through memorable and rewarding experiences” and becoming an everyday lifestyle loyalty and rewards programme.  We have been successful in establishing our programme as a data-led customer engagement platform backed by ‘Miles’ as a motivational currency.

Tell us more about your latest campaign - 'Your Passion Can Take You Places'? What's the thought behind this? Also, how are you leveraging digital for it?

‘Your Passion can take you places’, is aimed at accelerating our members’ dreams and aspirations. For the number of people in the world, there are almost as many passions co-existing. Additionally, many people often have more than one passion. Given this, the central thought of our campaign remains true to the brand ethos.

With the aim of demonstrating the programme’s relevance to the audiences’ lives beyond flying, JetPrivilege through this campaign attempts to create a shift in perception and enlighten potential members about how they can interact across various programme partners and accelerate their JPMiles earning. This, in turn, will motivate existing members to engage with the programme in multiple categories, across activities with a brand that understands and deeply cares about their passions.

We have brought the campaign alive on digital having a mix of programmatic displays and videos, which are suitable to all mobile formats and have successfully reached out to our targeted audiences with relevant creative messaging at scale.  

How much of the overall marketing pie does digital occupy and are the spends expected to be increased this year?

30% of our overall marketing spends is on digital as a platform. We use a mix of Search, Display & Video basis the campaign objective’s and the best media vehicle fitment basis the target audience we want to reach and motivate a behavior change.

In the coming year, our increase in digital spends will be in line with the increase in spends that will happen in the overall digital ad industry which is around 30%.  

What is your digital media strategy like?

Our digital media strategy comprises of a mix of  Search, Display, Video as digital ad formats depending upon the business/campaign objectives we want to drive. From a content marketing perspective, we continue to leverage content discovery platforms to impact the customer buyer journey depending on what decision making the stage of the funnel they are at (Awareness, Consideration to Conversion).

How do you see content marketing and influencer marketing shaping up in India? How's JetPrivilege playing around it?

As we progress, content and influencer marketing will play a key role in driving consumer engagement and create impact. Undertaking a quick search on the internet about reviews for a product/service has become the most indispensable part of a consumer’s journey before taking a purchase decision.

Consumers today are looking for a more reliable and real source of communication to make buying decisions. These trends have given rise to the need for personalization of content, more interactive platforms of communication, more video connect preferably in a story-narrative format and voice marketing. Hence, an Omni-channel integrated communication approach combining traditional marketing along with content marketing is the way-to-go today.

Also Read: JetPrivilege’s ‘Your passion can take you places’ evokes mixed reactions

As marketers are increasingly identifying and exploiting the value of micro-influencers to sway audiences, consumers too are becoming aware of paid advocacy efforts. As a result, the authenticity of their opinions is at times cross-questioned. 

We believe our members are our biggest influencers and advocates and trust their word-of-mouth propagation to reflect their experience with us and encourage potential members to sign-up into the program.

Advertising trends to foresee in 2019?

• Artificial Intelligence to drive Performance Marketing

Organizations will soon realize the need for technologies like AI & ML, which will free up talent from doing routine, mundane tasks and utilize their time on more meaningful, complex and strategic initiatives. Going forward, the conversations will not be Machine Vs Human, but instead how Machine + Human can jointly create impact and drive business outcomes more effectively.

• Digital Video Advertising replacing traditional advertising? 

By 2020, it is estimated that video content will account for 80% of the total internet traffic. Given that the average attention span of a person is short, it is more likely that brand messaging will be consumed over bite-sized micro-videos to spur engagement. With social media becoming an indispensable part of life and video content dominating these platforms, videos offer an effective model for marketers to get their communication across to audiences for elevated awareness and longer recall.

• Voice Search – A Game Changer

With the evolution of technology and continuous change in consumer behavior, voice will become the
new search engine and will change the way we access content and interact with everything around us. It
will be interesting to see how fast marketers embrace this change and work towards creating an
effective voice search strategy to rank for position zero.

Key learnings from 2018 and their applications in 2019?

2018 has proven how organizations need to leverage data to derive consumer-led insights, which can be translated into meaningful and actionable performance-driven marketing initiatives. This will help in bringing an organization closer to its business and growth objectives. Hence, leveraging data is a key learning for me in 2018.

Today, customers are well connected through various devices and social media platforms. Hence, marketers have the opportunity to make their communication extremely targeted, segmented and individually relevant to drive personalized and contextual advertising basis audience affinity. This is only possible if a marketer is able to understand his target audience well enough. The data that is available at one’s disposal through the integration of all sources of data – Online + Offline will help in creating a 360 view of the customer making marketing efforts more personalized, relevant and hence effective.

In 2019, how the power of Artificial Intelligence, machine learning, and data science can be augmented to elevate customer experience will play a larger role. Through AI driven algorithms, organizations must focus on optimization and driving efficiencies by automating the redundant common tasks, predict customer intent basis past historical data to elevate the overall customer experience. This is the way for the future.