What is holding back brands and agencies from churning out quality regional content

Almost every brand is aware how creating local content and layering this onto an existing marketing strategy can be extremely helpful in targeting its regional audiences.

But despite knowing its importance, what can possibly hold back any brand or agency from churning out content in regional languages or incorporating an overall content marketing strategy that is local in nature?

BuzzInContent.com talks to brands, agencies and content platforms to find what could possibly forbear a brand or an agency from exploiting vernacular content. They discuss how they have to equip themselves with a certain skill set and understand the local nuances better. But what still restricts those equipped with such skills? Is it higher investment or is there is an absence of agencies at a local level?

Priyanka Gill

“Content has already proven itself as one of the most powerful strategies for marketing, and we've found localised content that is relatable to specific audiences helps deliver marketing messages more accurately. The buy-in is greater when there's regional audience affinity already. These are consumers who have digital devices, purchasing power, are internet savvy, but are not able to relate to English language content. Local language content is particularly powerful in delivering a dramatic rise in brand awareness and brand recall,” said Priyanka Gill, Founder and CEO, Luxeva.

Regional content for brands, especially playing in the FMCG sector, is of utmost importance as it helps create more relatability with consumers. Thus, brands need to have their own proper infrastructure and expertise in the same space. Brands work along with agencies to understand the nuances present in any particular demographic.

Pawan Sarda

“The agencies are capable enough to gather the consumer insights at much deeper level, but how much they deep dive is the question,” said Pawan Sarda, Group Head, Digital, Future Group.  

Shamik Ghosh

Adding, Shamik Ghosh, Vice-President, Marketing and Head of Content at Paisabazaar.com, said that larger agencies definitely have the resources to invest in developing AI-driven insight tools and they can apply these tools when creating or commissioning the production of local content. These big agencies can easily come up with consumer insights. Collecting these insights means they are going vernacular; the only problem is it is not happening at a larger scale.

But what is possibly holding back a brand/agency when they have the intent to do so?

All brands across industries know the importance of vernacular and if they want to reach the heartland of India, they have to go vernacular. The intent for regional content is very high for brands, especially the regional ones. It's a huge market that is left unexplored.

Bikram Basu

Bikram Basu, Chief Operating Officer, Allied Blenders and Distillers, said the discomfort of brand managers with several languages can be one of the reasons why they are not able to churn out regional content. So, these managers at CXO level have to be comfortable with the languages in which content is being created.

Brands also depend on agencies, he said. The local agencies no longer exist and bigger ones have eaten up the smaller ones. There doesn’t exist any good vernacular agency that is local in its nature and is credible enough, except for freelancers and thus the gap.

Sarda said it is more of an infrastructural issue from the agencies’ end. Agencies are not equipped enough in terms of the skill set to create regional content because either they don't see value in this space or they don’t have enough budget to do so.

“Apart from that, a lot many of the agencies are global or MNCs and they certainly lack the understanding of the local nuances. ROI is equally important to them in terms of what they're investing and what should come out. I definitely feel that they're not investing enough. Maybe smaller agencies are still attempting to explore this arena but, bigger ones are still refraining,” he said.

Ghosh considers this as more of an operational challenge. It is not a high investment thing at all to sort of have messaging in 22 major languages, considering the marketing budgets that most brands have.

“There is an external dependency for brands when they go vernacular. If it is Hindi or English, brands still do have control to vet those messages. And you can ensure your key messaging is right. For any brand marketing guy to explore 10 languages and have the control to ensure that whatever messaging is going out there is uniform across the mediums, demands external dependency. I can ask agencies to translate the messaging, but I won’t be able to vet that as I am dependent on external agency and thus my core messaging can be disrupted,” he said. 

And when it comes to tricky content like financial services, loans or mutual funds, it is more challenging for the brands to translate. A little here and there and you might end up misleading or misinforming the consumer.

Ghosh said it is important for brands to have good content people in-house as well in the agency to have that explicit trust with messaging, irrespective of how many languages it is being translated in.

Watch the space for part-2 of the series that offers tips and solutions for brands eyeing to impress consumers by talking in their language.