Gaurav Mishra: Writer & Speaker at Gauravonomics

According to Mr. Gaurav Mishra , most people today don’t care about brands and branding in a post-advertising, post-materialistic world is one of the greatest challenges for marketers today. The good part however, is that the future as far as social media is concerned has already arrived. What needs to be done is change this ‘unequal’ distribution social media to a very distributed form.

Mr. Mishra then shared his idea of Social Squared and presented the ‘Social Squared Manifesto’ which talked of the visible shifts in branding today and something which clever marketers have caught on with. He proposed the idea of how, now, brands should move from the traditional question of ‘how to increase reach?’ to ‘How is to organises and energise evangelists & help them with scaling their passions so that they in turn, scale our brands?’. The idea he said was based on the fact that marketing now is moving from as inside-out approach to an outside in approach in the age of social media.

Further elaborating on the concept of Social Squared, Mr. Mishra stressed that it is made of two components, namely connecting people (through social media, technology & design) and social responsibility (through innovation and activism).
Mr. Mishra subsequently introduced the idea of a 360 Degree Redux – which works unlike traditional 360 Degree marketing. He pointed to the disconnect in between various campaigns in traditional 360 and explained how a company could overcome it by engaging in six key shifts.

The six key shifts according to Mr. Mishra were moving from an inside out approach to an outside in approach, from being TVC centric to community centric, engaging in long term commitments instead of short term campaign, from interruption based marketing to permission based marketing, from branded commercials to branded content streams and finally from paid& earned media to owned & shared media.
Mr. Mishra ended the session by presenting a case on the Pepsi Refresh campaign which did well to re-instate the idea of Social Squared in the age of Social Media.