Ever wondered what your favourite brand would like if it was a person? There is a unique persona of every successful brand we consume or come across on a regular basis. A brand like Harley Davidson will resemble the traits of a rebel. Similarly, you can see a sophist in Dove, a defeater in Nike or a caring guardian in a brand like Johnson & Johnson. To build a better connect with consumers, marketers have made constant attempts to communicate the brand’s personality in many ways with brand endorsement being the most common route. Finding a celebrity who resonates with the personality of the brand and associating with them to make the brand more human is a trend that has been exploited over the years to build stories and initiate conversations with the target audience on platforms like television, print, radio etc.
In the past one decade, there has been a paradigm shift of consumers from conventional to digital platforms. In line with the trends seen in digital media consumption, digital advertisement spend (in India) outperformed expectations in 2015, growing almost 38.2 per cent over 2014 to reach Rs 60 billion. It is expected to cross Rs 255 billion in 2020. Interestingly, 25 per cent of the digital advertisement spend has been incurred in the segment of videos. While endorsement through celebrities worked wonders in traditional mediums, the digital medium is dominated by a category of people called “influencers”. They are not famous movie stars or cricketers, but they have an exorbitant virtual clout with people following them on various digital platforms solely because of the content they generate online. This faction of influencers started off primarily with the concept of blogs where they shared written content to gain followers online. The recent growth in consumption of online video content has paved way for a new category of influencers — vloggers. A vlog is nothing but a blog which is in the form of a video. It informs and engages at the same time. Moreover, this form of content is convenient for creators as well as consumers. While the former can easily shoot it on a laptop or a mobile and upload it on free video hosting sites like YouTube, the latter gets information which is interactive and easily relatable because of the human connect that they have developed with the vlogger.
The increasing manoeuvre of people towards vloggers for consuming content has redefined the way these brands personify themselves. More and more brands are associating with famous vloggers to reach out to their target audience and gain share of mind. Beauty brands like L’Oreal, Estee Lauder and Chanel are frequently mentioned by vloggers such as Pixiwoo and Beautycrush who each have over 1.5 million subscribers to their channels.
Domino’s used the high-profile influencers Viners Hue Samuel and Leslie Wei for a “Pizza Quest” campaign where the duo searches for the ultimate slice of pizza. Vlogging culture in India is rapidly catching up with the international levels with famous vloggers like Shradha Sharma (singer), Aditi Mittal (comedian), Varun Pruthi (actor and humanitarian), Shreya Jain (beauty and makeup vlogger) being the pioneers.
While there are contrary views which suggest that vloggers are a good source of entertainment but cannot be vouched for when it comes to brand promotion, vlogging as an industry holds a huge potential and is bound to grow. Mobile is paving the way for vloggers’ content.
Meenakshi Mehta
Head, strategy-Marcom, Kestone IMS
