Why aggregation is the new secret sauce for growing a business

By Shivaji Dasgupta

Marketing and advertising have been driven by segmentation, with behaviour and attitude being used to separate customers into minute units. Modern marketers, however, need to focus on exactly the opposite to induce brand consumption: generalising customers to the maximum extent. Aggregation, an outcome of dominant online engagements and service economies, is the new secret sauce for business.

Thriving on divide-and-rule, segmentation was the logical foundation of the ‘positioning age’. Here, access to brands was highly segregated by purchasing power and the regulatory environment (barriers that were truly normal in society). All this really began through the orchestration of a mental divide between ‘ours’ and ‘theirs’, a scenario in which self-image was influenced deeply by a messaging that was seemingly customised. Advertising strategies were built resolutely on such principles, mirroring choices in popular culture and relationships.

This, however, is no longer the case, thanks to a transformation in the last decade that has been powered primarily by the digital revolution. Today, every successful online brand — Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Twitter, Uber, Amazon, Google — thrives on universal access. Everybody uses an identical interface for outcomes that are vastly different (but applicable to all socio-economic sub-segments). This is further fuelled by the device economy, where the same brand offers a continuum of features for every price segment, and additionally reinforced by the last-mile service infrastructure, addressing an exhaustive cross-section.

Inspired by Bollywood and cricket, experiences are increasingly becoming deliberately inclusive. Customer expectations are being dictated by best practices across contexts, no longer just by intra-category comparisons. Every app is compared to Uber or Amazon or Airbnb for convenience, every search feature benchmarked against Google, and every service experience weighed up against American Express — or the applicable airline, insurer or hotel.

Luxury and mass-market customers now find common ground in the quest for defensible value, with both BMW and Maruti being sold through EMI schemes. Brands designed specifically for women are continually being viewed through the lens of customisation, references drawn freely from the larger brand universe.

From sharply-demarcated product-dictated groups, we have, collectively, become an experience-led aggregation, amply inspired by both technology and societal evolution.

It therefore becomes imperative for businesses to master aggregation by developing an understanding of general consumer behaviour. Touchstones of experience, both emotional and rational, must be established, and these should be constantly monitored. Then comes the scrutiny of innovations, particularly the rate and quality of their adoption, and, more fundamentally, evaluation of common behaviours and attitudes, where any suggestion of scalability is likely to impact hitherto-unconnected categories.

Moreover, unlike current practice, we should not consider youth or women to be bottom-up sub-sections but instead reconnect common behaviour patterns to the establishment of a customer base that is scalable. And every company must invest in a ‘general consumer discovery’ as an ongoing part of customer analysis, a guidebook that can be the basis for designing sharp services and products.

Armed with insights from aggregation, the time will come when specific brand experiences, founded on need and portfolio opportunities, will be curated. For this, we need to create a bridge-to-performance strategy, connecting general patterns to specific offerings, pertaining rigorously to category and brand. So, a new player in the ‘affiliate marketing’ space will use aggregation as the starting point for enhancing its unique proposition, while an incumbent in the premium QSR (quick service restaurant) arena will factor every popular service brand into deciphering its value proposition.

Then, each upcoming app-creator will learn from every other cross-contextual app while merging product-level relevance with general-appeal differentiation. And, identifying the most fulfilling experience will entail the highest levels of classical rigour, drawing deeply from an understanding of usage. As the world becomes a smaller place, people are behaving more similarly than ever before. So, the age-old practice of segmentation must quickly give way to new-age aggregation.

(The author is founder, INEXGRO Brand Advisory)