Ms. Anusha Shetty, Co-Founder and CEO of Autumn Worldwide visited Tapmi on 2nd August 2014, to have an interactive session on ‘Future of Marketing’. Ms. Shetty, a Tapmi alumnus, started her career with boutique advertising. Later with the help of social media, she worked on creating value proposition in communication space.

She started the session with a brief introduction on history of social marketing. She gave a quick overview of how social marketing evolved from Roman letter writing to Pamphlets. Later coffee houses came into picture, which became the new hot spot for social media marketing. Engaging customers by asking questions and paying attention to their responses and feedback actually pulled people to these outlets. People were coming together and talking about brands, this helped in understanding the audience to a great extent.

She further gave insight on how Arpanet’s switching over to TCP/IP gave way to invention of internet. Arpanet was an internetwork of computers that was designed to communicate under enemy attacks. Later Transmission control protocol was integrated into intranet, which made the network accessible worldwide and this is how internet was born.

She then went on to explain how India is headed to be a youth country. According to recent statistics, 50% of India is below 25 years of age and as predicted, average age of India in 2020 will be 29 years. People are becoming obsessed with social media; this has opened a great opportunity for marketers to grow their business via these endless networks.

Also, Habits of networking of new generation are changing. In 2013, mobile internet volume outgrew the traditional internet volume. In a recently conducted survey it was found that 58% people are engaged with social media in their free time and a person spends approximately 8 hours on social media a day. On the other hand, it was also found that a person spends only 1-2 hours watching TV every day. People are also multitasking, even when they are watching television they are connected to social media by one way or the other.

These statistics clearly have given way to marketers to use social media effectively and this has actually made possible for them to extend their reach beyond unthinkable horizons.
She also talked at length about the Impact of social media on brands and also the society. Since consumers are spending more time on social media, they are researching, discovering, and sharing information about products and brands. Social media users are also reviewing products online. Because of this increasing power of social media, brands are leveraging on these customers, to spread word of mouth recommendations about their products and services.

At the end she emphasized on the importance of being active on social media. She added that social media is a perfect way not just to build awareness for your brand and company, but also to promote yourself as a brand to be seen by your potential recruiter. Overall it proved to be a very enlightening session for students and helped the budding marketers understand that how social media can be used to differentiate yourself from the crowd by providing an identity to who you are.