Tag Archives: customer data platform

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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Marketing Meets Technology – Bringing Marketing Practice to Academics

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

This article describes my new elective course that focuses on how Technology has impacted Marketing practice, across four major dimensions: consumers, omnichannel marketing, martech, and marketing strategy. Besides discussing the use of caselets shared by two companies, the article lists a set of useful resources in this domain. Comments from participants of the course speak to its practical relevance and academic usefulness.

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In May 2021, I decided to teach a PGP elective course The Digital Customer at IIMK. The idea was motivated by my sense – vague as it was – that the customer in the 2020s was no longer the customer of the 2010s when I did my MBA and PhD. We covered quite some ground, the students and I, but I was sure there was a lot more to my “sense” that things were changing rapidly.

I then offered a different elective Marketing to the Digital Customer in 2022, which, in hindsight, was even less satisfying in its ability to capture the goings-on in the market and in the field of marketing. Students probably guessed this, because the course found no takers.

In 2023, after much rework, the course reappeared to PGPs as Marketing Strategy for the Digital World. This course resonated with Executive PGP students, and with PGP students in 2024, as some of the course alumni who might be reading this post might agree. If you do, pls share in the comments!

But marketing strategy for the digital world was, after all, what every company was doing: adding a digital flavor to everything marketing. So what remained besides regular Marketing? What was it that was worth learning about from a student’s or manager’s point of view?

To me the answer was closer to a “reinvention” of marketing. That too, very likely a bottom-up reinvention, because technology had begun to touch each element of marketing and transform many of those. Marketing as traditionally understood and taught through the standard b-school perspective needed a relook. It was a bold and semi-substantiated view to take, but bottom-up changes necessitate top-down evolution in strategy. This, for sure, was worth studying!

And so, the course Marketing Meets Technology came into being. This is what Marketing had been doing for the last decade! I first wrote about the course on my blog in June last year as the course started taking shape. The very first innings of the course with over 80 participants from the executive MBA program was wrapped up late last month. The course consists of four modules:

What we covered in the first innings of Marketing Meets Technology
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