A sneak peek into digital futures

Prashant Kumar's book takes a deep dive into the evolution of the media and content marketing landscape in India

Made in Future: A Story of Marketing, Media & Content for Our Times
Author: Prashant Kumar
Publisher: Penguin Business
Pages: 305
Price: Rs 499
 

I open Amazon Prime and the homepage yells: Because you watched Four More Shots Please! you may like Hostel Daze. The moment I enter my PIN to withdraw money, the ATM machine reads, “Wait until we retrieve your favourite transaction … Withdraw 2,000?” Doesn’t it amaze you how dramatically our everyday lives have changed over several decades because of digitalisation? And if we’re curious to know what the future holds, then perhaps one needs a deep dive into the evolution of the media and content marketing landscape in India, which Prashant Kumar meticulously outlines and explains in his book Made in Future: A Story of Marketing, Media & Content for Our Times.

Founder of Entropia (now part of Accenture) and the St Stephen’s, MICA, and Harvard Business School alumnus, Mr Kumar notes in the book that “data is the vocabulary of living.” Sadly, only a few technology and marketing leaders understand the language that originated with technologies’ intersection of the everyday notions of data, information, content, and marketing. Take communications for example. It has become faster, easier, and can be done in a variety of ways. Not that it never existed previously. Only the form has changed, and it’s the form that must be understood holistically to understand how it’s going to inform our digital futures. This is perhaps my biggest takeaway from the book.

Because conventional language lacks the capacity to explain some of these emerging concepts, Mr Kumar designs a new lexicon for this form of marketing which he explains towards the end of the book. He compels technology and marketing leaders to assess the marketplace, customer journey, creativity, and brand experience differently. An example of that “newism” is shared below.

In the first chapter, Mr Kumar explains how a customer would decide to buy something. The purchase decision can fall into any of the four quadrants if we plot the functional and experiential nature of the purchase versus the commitment level of the buyer. He uses this as a segue to establish how in that particular “moment” this customer may choose to go with any seller based on the critical differentiating factors like Network Power, Data Power, UX (user experience) Power, and Brand Power.

And just as life is a series of moments, for businesses to do well they must shed the erstwhile “target segmenting” of their markets. Instead, they must think of their “targeting spectrum” because it’s the age of personalisation. But there’s more to it. Mr Kumar writes, “Personalisation is old, it’s the personalisation at scale that is new—aided by automation and granular traceability—and hence lower cost of sale on digital platforms.”

If you can answer what critical problem your business idea is solving without adversely impacting society, and whether you promise a unique experience and differentiated capability to your customer, then you can build your business into a thinking, living brand. And Mr Kumar’s book can help you understand how to have forward-looking answers to these questions. From the DIET (Discovery, Influence, Experience, Transaction) loop and the pyramid of influence to the credibility-control editorial pipeline to dimensions of creativity, there’s nothing in the gamut of content sales and marketing that he leaves out. He granularly looks at the episodic moments and shares how understanding and analysing such  moments is an opportunity no mar-tech leader must forego.

Mr Kumar also has a chapter on creativity, and he wants you to think about this aspect anew. He writes, “If stories are but a collection of moments stitched together with an engaging intent running all the way, then moments are the best mode for short-form storytelling, that brand messaging often is.” Thus, creativity for brands (or professionals) is an opportunity to become “moment-aware.”

One of the qualities of this book is how effectively it has compressed time and space to tell the tale of marketing and media content of our times. Yet it hasn’t been reduced to a high-level overview of the industry. The fact that Mr Kumar never shies away from addressing several challenges facing the industry in the book is a testament to that. He narrates a story then hand-holds you through its several loopholes. This is how you’ll learn why the idea that TV is the thing of the past is hogwash, or how any business that thinks mere sifting through Google analytics will help it understand how a particular customer or its target audience is making decisions has been tricked by the conventional wisdom shared by influential, metrics-setters of the industry.

Occasionally, Mr Kumar has served old wine in a new bottle, but it must be said that the book is highly accessible and informative. It’ll appeal to all audience segments. Because the truth, as he writes, lies somewhere in the middle, and that’s the space he’s tried to illuminate.