As part of our new series, ‘Marketers Playbook for 2020 Post Covid-19', Venkataramani Suresh, Chief Business Officer - Wedding Services, Matrimony.com says it’s important for marketers to understand the evolving consumer trends to take informed decisions. The speed and scale at which the Covid-19 pandemic has hit the world is something that we have seen so far only in the doomsday movies. As we are seeing it today, this is way more frightening than fiction. The costs are going to be unimaginably high and the worst, it’s going to end up having a long tail too. The economic implications of shutting down large swathes of the world are going to be steep. World Health Organisation and the World Bank estimate the impact of such pandemic to be at 2.2% to 4.8% of the global GDP (US $ 3 Trillion). In India, the impact of this pandemic could lead to slow-down in domestic demand, erosion of purchasing power due to job losses or pay cuts and trickle-down effect of demand deferral will have a longer-lasting impact on some other sectors, especially where demand is discretionary in nature. Barclays estimates India’s growth to be around 2.5% from the 4.5% predicted earlier. The world order is changing and changing dramatically. Consumers are living in unprecedented times. Consumer behaviour has been forced to change and change on a massive scale. Physical, social distancing has led to phenomenal growth in virtual social togetherness with almost 20% increase in time spent per user on chats, social media and news during the lock down period. Given the above context it’s important for marketers to understand the evolving consumer trends to take informed decisions. Let’s look at a bird’s eye view of some of the leading trends post Covid-19:  

• Confined to their homes, Indians are spending more time on their television and mobile devices, as per data released by TV viewership measurement agency BARC India and global measurement and data analytics firm Nielsen.
• The total TV consumption has increased by 8% across India, while the total time spent per user on smartphones is up by 6.2%.
• TV reach went up by 32 million new average daily viewers to touch 592 million viewers.
• News apps witnessed 8% more users.
• Time spent per user on video streaming services is up 3%.

How will this impact the marketers and brands? What we are witnessing is a black swan kind of an event and following are the likely trends:

• Marketing spends are likely to be unpredictable and short-term.
• Paradigm shift to performance-based marketing/advertising from generic brand promotion.
• Challenging all assumptions and zero-based budgeting.
• Focus on deep customer insight.
• Digital first will be the way forward.

At Matrimony, we are using our insights from artificial intelligence& data analytics to arrive at our overall marketing strategy to add value to our customers, Mandap.com and Matrimony Bazaar partners. As we are focused on our vision of happy marriages, we have started our TV Campaigns as more and more families are spending time together at home during this lockdown and to help them find the right match. Having been the dominant market leaders in the Digital Matrimony space for over two decades, we are leveraging our domain expertise to enhance personalisation, user experience and are running campaigns on various social and professional media to acquire profiles to ensure best match for all our customers. As the saying goes, ‘There is an opportunity in every problem’ and ‘The Tough gets going when the going gets tough’.