Category Archives: In Business Press

How to leverage India’s MarTech boom [Forbes India]

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(c) Namrata Suryavanshi, Priya Narayanan, and Aditya Bhamidipaty

This article was first published online on May 23, 2025 in The Forbes India (online) IIM Kozhikode Thought Leadership section and is available here on the publisher’s website. The article below provides an updated version of the infographic from Scott Brinker’s Marketing Technology landscape.

Namrata is Director – Consulting & Customer Experience at FirstHive, a Customer Data Platform. Priya is Assistant Professor of Marketing at IIM Kozhikode. Aditya is Founder & CEO at FirstHive.

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Imagine this: you’ve just landed in Barcelona after a gruelling 24-hour flight. You’re exhausted, and all you want is to check into your hotel and rest for a while in those soft new fancy pyjamas you bought for this trip. But then, reality hits—you realise your baggage hasn’t arrived. Panicked, you rush to the airline authorities, and they assure you that your luggage will be delivered to your hotel… in two days. Frustrated, you turn to social media, venting your anger and tagging the airline. Within seconds, you receive a response. But instead of empathy, you’re greeted with the last two words you want to see right now. Any guesses? “Thank you for sharing your feedback.”

Now, your frustration multiplies. The airline seems robotic and indifferent—completely out of touch with your situation. You might even vow never to fly with them again. So, what went wrong here? The airline relied on automated technology to send an instant response, but the message lacked context, empathy, and personalisation.

Could the airline have used smarter technologies to gauge your frustration and tailor a response using generative AI? Absolutely. And that’s exactly what we’ll explore in this article—how marketers, particularly in India, are adapting to MarTech. We delve into the unique challenges Indian marketers face, especially when bridging gaps arising from multiple cultures, languages, and geographies, and how technology can be a game-changer in delivering personalised, contextually relevant experiences.

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Zomato’s healthier options: Now what? [Businessline Brandline]

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© Priya Narayanan, Assistant Professor of Marketing, IIM Kozhikode. Views are personal.

This article was first published online on June 9, 2024 in The Hindu BusinessLine BrandLine and is available here on the publisher’s website. The article was published in the print newspaper on June 10, 2024.

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Food delivery app Zomato recently introduced a new feature that suggests “healthier options” when customers select food items. Considering that Zomato has long been providing options for healthy eating, be it salads, desserts, or vegan food, the new step is not surprising. At the same time, this news raises the question: How far should a platform go in helping customers choose healthy?

The question of healthy and unhealthy food choices is not an easy one, for a customer or for the platform. Consider the following:

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Next Diwali, Let’s Avoid the Condescension of Doing Good? [Financial Express]

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© Priya Narayanan, Assistant Professor of Marketing, IIM Kozhikode. Views are personal.

This article was first published on May 27, 2022 in the Financial Express and is available here on the publisher’s website. In this article, I present my take on the “condescension of doing good” that is visible in recent Diwali advertising, and urge marketers to put human values first.

The version below includes links to the relevant advertisements that I discuss.

It was Cadbury that hit upon the idea of brands doing good during Diwali in a seriously big way – the 2020 ad from Cadbury Celebrations showed how small local stores that were hit by the pandemic could be brought into the customer’s consideration set through geography-based hyper-personalization. “This is not just a Cadbury ad,” they said, and so we believed: the ad nudged us towards local stores. Thus it was that in the midst of the pandemic, Cadbury found a way to do good and be good, and yet gain marketing momentum.

But the next year, as the prestige factor was upped, Shah Rukh Khan’s charisma was deemed essential to do the same job for a similar ad by Cadbury. In this ad, Shah Rukh Khan names local stores in his voiceover and this, again, was powered by technology. It wasn’t too bad, except the realization that our purchases of Celebrations were funding the expense incurred in engaging the celebrity actor.

But this year? With its #ShopsForShopless ad of 2022, Cadbury has, despite its best intentions, fallen prey to “purpose”, the new catchword in marketing. Somebody (or worse, everybody) at Cadbury seems to have decided that for Celebrations to stand out, it had to be tagged with purpose. So, now that good old eating and gifting are not enough for Diwali, the Cadbury ad tells us to scan a QR code on the sweet box, help roadside hawkers set up virtual shops, and buy from such shops. For the kind of “help” that they received, the gratitude in the eyes of Damodar (not Damodarji?!) and his helper is nauseating in its excessiveness.

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Why the Netflix business model will take more than a quick fix [Forbes India]

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© Priya Narayanan, Assistant Professor of Marketing, IIM Kozhikode. Views are personal.

This article was first published on May 27, 2022 in Forbes India and is available here on the Forbes India website. In this article, I present my take on the key issues at Netflix and a consumer-centric ecosystem approach to solve these issues.

Here is the full text of the article (caution: long read ahead!).

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“You can have mine”—be it a pencil during a kindergarten exam or one earpiece of a pair of earphones, or even a Netflix password, the tendency to share is innately human. A business model that views sharing as a threat is simply swimming against the current.

Netflix’s loss of 200,000 subscribers in less than 100 days to March 2022 has been surprising and yet, in hindsight, quite inevitable. For over 20 years, this much-vaunted disruptor of the movie industry has played the same game. The decline in subscriber numbers is just another indicator that it is time Netflix recalibrates its business model which is no longer the recipe for success that it once was. Indeed, the growing young population in the so-called emerging markets might well have been prolonging the death of a cracking business model that has ceased to be about customer value.

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The Customer Unmasked: What the Indian shopper will buy when the pandemic is over and out (Economic Times Brand Equity)

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© Priya Narayanan, Assistant Professor of Marketing, IIM Kozhikode. Views are personal.

This article was first published on March 15, 2022 in the Economic Times Brand Equity Blog and is available here on the ET website. In this article, I present my take on what the “customer unmasked” would be like. Here is the full text of the article (caution: long read ahead!).

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With the pandemic on the decline, it is a good time for marketing managers to gather their thoughts on what the future will bring. Shopping behavior of customers is going to change, but in what way? Five key insights tell us what the post-pandemic future of shopping could look like.

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