ANIMESH ROLA
Head of Marketing Iris Global Services
Evolving Marketing Strategy for the AI Era
Marketing has evolved significantly from being a support function to becoming a business-driving function. The shift has happened because the marketer today is expected to contribute much beyond brand awareness.
Our approach is therefore increasingly centered around understanding what the customer is saying, what the market is doing, and where the competition is moving before deciding what we should communicate. The objective is not to simply launch more campaigns, but to ensure every campaign has a clear business purpose.
With the availability of data, customer feedback, and digital intelligence, marketing can become far more calculative and outcome driven.
We believe the future belongs to marketers who can combine creativity with commercial understanding. Marketing should not just tell the market what a company does; it should help the company understand what the market wants next.
Technology-driven Trust, Partner Ecosystems, and Customer Experience
We see AI as a tool for execution and augmentation, not a replacement for marketing thinking.
The real opportunity is to use AI to bring a marketer's idea to life faster and better. The idea, the insight, and the understanding of the customer still need human intervention. AI can help us analyze large datasets, identify patterns, personalize communication, accelerate content production, test multiple variations and improve campaign execution. But the marketer still needs to decide what should be said, why it should be said and whether it will actually matter to the customer.
Brand Positioning in Competitive Market
We believe there is an opportunity to make marketing far more calculative. Before launching a campaign, we should have enough intelligence to understand the customer, validate the proposition, study competitive activity, review previous campaign performance, and, wherever possible, get direct customer or partner feedback. These pre-checks don't eliminate risk, but they significantly improve the probability of making the right decision.
This is where data becomes extremely powerful. Instead of asking, “How many people did we reach?”, we should be asking, “What did we learn? Did the audience show intent? Did the message influence behavior? Did it create an opportunity for sales? What should we change next?” For us, differentiation is therefore not about having the loudest campaign. It is about having a better understanding of the market and acting on that understanding faster than the competition.
