In-store Experiences Are The Backbone: Motorola’s Shivam Ranjan

Execution of experiential marketing initiatives holds a different kind of significance for brands, across categories. 

For Motorola, one of the leading brands in mobile technology and innovation, the focus on experiential marketing is primarily at the stores wherein it focuses only on conversion activities at the retail level. The brand, through its retail experiences, ensures that it has a promoter, props, demos, etc. that help demonstrate the features of the brand’s range of products, well to the consumers. All this is kept in mind considering that the store is where the consumer visits with an intent to buy.

With its first ever True Wireless Stereo offerings in India, the moto buds and moto buds+, the brand recently launched the ‘Sound of Perfection’ album, a first-of-its-kind Intellectual property (IP) by a mobile phone brand. For this, Motorola collaborated with Spotify, where it brought together five popular music artists from across the country to create five distinct tracks in five different languages, culminating into a fusion track “Haq Se” bringing all the artists together to deliver a one-of-its-kind musical experience for the audience.

Talking to Everything Experiential in an exclusive chat for our BrandCraft series, Shivam Ranjan, Head of Marketing, APAC, Motorola outlined the experiential marketing strategy of the brand, its exclusive Flipkart Experiential Store, banking on tech innovations and more. 

Edited excerpts:

How is Motorola integrating experiential marketing into its strategy to enhance customer engagement and brand experience?

Experiencing the product is important in the final purchase decisions. So when it comes to awareness, that is the first time the consumer gets to know about the product. 

When consumers consider the product, they can do their research as well. But when the final purchase intent happens, and specifically for more premium price points, experiential plays a large role. If it's a lower-cost product, consumers are still okay to buy without experiencing the product. But the higher the price point, the more the consumers want to have a touch and feel and experience the product in hand before making the final purchase decision. So experiencing the product is an important part of the consumer decision-making journey and hence we are investing in it.

We are investing at the point of sale, especially at retail, where you will see us present across modern retail, modern trade, as well as general trade across thousands of stores with warm bodies, which are our promoters, who are there in store with our fixtures, with branding and demos. That’s because the people need to see the phone in action and also props that can demonstrate the features. For example, there are AI features and camera features that we want consumers to see and understand.

With props placed props in our stores, consumers can click a picture to understand how the feature works; we have props that can showcase how an AI feature works to give them the complete experience at the retail store as well. 

Apart from that, we also do experiential activities in and around retail catchment areas to drive footfalls to the store. For example, we have done experiential activities at Reliance Digital stores where when launching a product, we have done activations, and consumer engagements at the store venue itself and in the catchment area to be able to drive footfalls and drive engagement with the products.

Brands are building on associations/sponsorships with big-ticket events such as sports events, food fests, etc. How does Motorola look at such associations/sponsorships with events in terms of aligning with its brand values and experiential marketing goals?

As a philosophy at Motorola, we believe in ensuring a return on investment (ROI) in everything we do. We believe that sponsorships are not the best approach for our brand from an ROI perspective. That is because typically an event is around a certain particular activity where the brand will be integrated. But it's not something that would essentially promote the product. 

At the end of the day, if you look at our business, it is not to create brand imagery or brand awareness. Our business is actually to sell our products. Sponsorship doesn't give you the ROI when it comes to doing that because it tends to have a placement of the product in a contextual setting but is not hard-working enough to deliver results in terms of sell-out and hence return.

Even if you look at our entire marketing strategy, it is primarily focused on product campaigns. And the brand automatically has a rub-off. When you sell products, it is an obvious indicator that people are aware of the brand.

And when you talk about event sponsorships - because the event is about something else, it is difficult to bring alive the product capabilities. And people don't buy our products till the time they understand the product capability or experience the product. 

So, at least in our industry, which is the smartphone industry and at least for Motorola, where our priority is actually to build and sell products, that is the end game of marketing.

On-ground activations are an essential part of helping a brand reach out to consumers and get them involved directly with the brand. How does Motorola leverage on-ground activations to connect with new customers and create memorable brand experiences?

We don't have ongoing activations, and we keep them limited and linked to the product launch. Again, our focus is on ensuring that we can tap into the right consumer at the right touch points.

And specifically, if it's a feature that requires demonstration in a big way, we look at doing that. 

The other significant thing is that we do consider on-ground activations typically because the reach of on-ground activations is limited - it is there only in and around the catchment area. 

These on-ground activations help us achieve 1000-2000 footfalls, whether in a mall or at a venue – which is massive. But if you look at digital, the reach is in millions. So the question is - how do we harness the on-ground event without compromising reach? That is where we try to bring in a fusion of on-ground and digital concepts, which is popularly known as the ‘phygital’ concept.

Whatever we do on-ground, we try and create content out of it. So, if I create engagement out of it, that is then amplified digitally so that we can leverage the reach that the digital platform provides us while also doing something on-ground which can capture experiences. For example, consumer reactions and consumer experiences, which you otherwise won't be able to capture.

How do you use technology such as AR, VR, and AI to create immersive experiences for customers either online or during on-ground activations?

Experiences will become more and more common, especially with the rise of the metaverse and various immersive experiential techniques. Immersive experiences are going to be very significant because that's something that is emerging.

And for us, the Flipkart Experiential Store is an example of that. We obviously would like to create something even more immersive on our website. So that could be a feature that you will witness with more immersive experiences and an experiential approach on our own D2C website - that is something that we could be working on. 

We are also ensuring that we bring in more AR and VR experiences for the consumers to see our products on our digital websites. Additionally, of course, Flipkart is doing it too.

The Flipkart Experiential Store has 3D models and AR experiences built in. But even on our D2C website, you would start seeing us create those interventions to be able to give consumers the real touch-and-feel immersive experience of the products.

Delving into the Flipkart Experiential Store - it was launched a few months back. It is an entirely immersive world and is way bigger than an actual store can be. Our products are placed and our experiences are placed in different locations. You enter the zone and then you walk to one section to experience a particular feature in a particular product, then go on to the next zone to experience a different feature in a different product.

Not all products are available in the experiential zone - we have kept around five or six products - our flagship products - and we showcase the experiences there. For instance, we are one of the only ones in the world to have received a validation from Pantone that what we capture from our cameras are true colours. To experience the Pantone validation, we have showcased AI features etc. wherein the consumer can walk in, tap on the video on the screens inside to play it, tap on the phone to initiate an action and can do and experience a lot of things. 

Right now, the purchase option is not enabled through the Flipkart Experiential store, because it's primarily for experiencing the products. It is a permanent initiative to keep adding our products.

What role do pop-up experiences play in Motorola’s experiential marketing strategy?

As of now, we are not doing as many pop-up experiences as we would like to. I believe there is an opportunity for us to do pop-ups because while we have a retail presence in a lot of malls and a lot of stores and catchment areas, I think there is still a lot of untapped audiences which is out there - which would like to experience our products and at locations where we don't have a retail presence.

We are evaluating opportunities where we can use this in the future.

How do you look at enhancing in-store experiences for the consumers? How do you weigh in about what will work and what won’t?

Currently, we don’t have our EBOs, but we believe that we can provide the right amount of experience in multi-brand stores as well.

But we try to create an experiential zone within those stores where one will be able to find a unique experience for Motorola. Specifically, citing the example of Reliance Digital stores - we have a fixture unit where we can showcase multiple products. So, a consumer who walks in gets a choice amongst a range of products to see, check and evaluate.

The second thing is that we can put in props. For example, if a phone is water resistant, they keep a glass of water which can prove to a consumer that once the phone is dipped a phone in water and taken out, it doesn't get damaged. Seeing is believing – and when you see that happening, you believe it.

Also, for an AI feature like Smart Style Sync – this is a feature wherein if you click a picture of what you're wearing, AI will generate matching options for your phone wallpaper based on the dress that you are wearing. So the phone will look and match with what you're wearing. For these kinds of features, not every customer is comfortable getting their picture clicked. To solve that, we have a prop with dresses being showcased on a tabletop. And once you click a picture of that and generate images, you'll be able to experience what is it that the phone can do. 

The third instance is that of the Pantone Validation, for both - the camera and the display of our phones – the colours captured and displayed on our phones are accurate. By asking consumers to click pictures of anything that is kept on the colourful table top that is provided in our experiential zone – and then to match the colours and display of their phone as compared to a Motorola phone. We can show them the difference in colour and display accuracy.

Neha Kalra

BW Reporters She is the Senior Editorial Lead at Businessworld and majorly covers pieces on advertising, marketing, branding and experiential marketing. She writes closely for BW Marketing World and Everything Experiential.