AI, Gen Alpha & Digitisation To Take Centre Stage In Marketing

On unravelling trends in modern marketing, industry experts spoke on the ‘Future-oriented marketing in 2025: Trends and Predictions’ for a leadership session.

Talking about the importance of understanding marketing from the perspective of someone running an organisation to know what role they expect marketeers to play, H S Bhatia, Managing Director, Daewoo India shared his 30 years of experience in the marketing industry. Looking back, he noted “Marketing has not just evolved but transformed and it changes every two years to something. In the past marketing was largely about analysis and presence on platforms like billboards, print media or television.”

Bhatia mused that the introduction of chatbot was a miracle at that time and added, “Now we follow where customers go. They’re at a particular platform, we go there. And we have so much data about a consumer, we know their habits, their behaviours, the brands they like, and we capture everything. We create content with them. And with the coming of AI the total scenario has changed. With predictive analysis which can give us the entire trends and always be ahead of the herd now.”

Further, Sandeep Mahajan, Chairman and Managing Director, Goodyear India emphasised understanding the perspectives of stakeholders in the global market. “In any MNC today, there are five or six clusters globally where growth happens. India, China, South-east Asia, US to an extent and everyone is expecting India to be a growth driver today, growth for volume as well as for sustainable profitability,” he said.

Talking about future trends in marketing, he highlighted that digital marketing will be one of the biggest disrupters going forward. Role of AI and machine learning which enables rapid segmentation of the market is expected to grow, in marketing trends like hyper local marketing. Mahajan elaborated about use of conversational AI by beauty brands that take pictures of customers’ faces and gives recommendations of products to suit one’s skin or lets them check products on themself, and even help in fraud detection and inventory. He mentioned, “There is a move of brands wanting to work with nano rather than micro influencers as their following proved to be more loyal.”

Mahajan noted that with Gen Alpha, sustainability is on the rise. “Optimising mobile content to make it more interactive and reaching out to kid influencers should be prioritised to appeal to them”, he further added.

As social media continues to play a huge role in marketing, Bhatia emphasised on responsible marketing and said that 30 to 35 per cent of most company budget goes to digital marketing.

While ensuring privacy of data of consumers while balancing the need for personalised advertisements is a struggle, Mahajan stated, “Only taking sufficient data and using consent data is a good practice that companies can follow”. He observed that the government has become more vigilant about company’s using personal data of people, and companies should cooperate with them.

“The future of marketing requires a good team that is young and know the latest trends. They must be master the human psychology to understand the psyche of customers and must be tech savvy using social media at least one to two hours a day”, Mahajan concluded.

Ruukuonuo Liegise

BW Reporters is an intern with BW Businessworld