After a comprehensive meet, he opened up on the effectiveness of the National F-commerce Summit 2016 hosted by GEEKY Social, a national 360 degree digital marketing company, and how important it was for the little guys in the F-commerce sector and our nation.What is your opinion on the National F-commerce Summit? Do you think it was helpful to revitalise the industry?Yes! It was definitely helpful. When there is a singular and uniform platform for an industry which is organised, it helps that sector grow. Previously, concerned parties were very interested in propelling the SME sector. They organised nationwide events in order to encourage it. The same should be done here.
With regard to F-commerce, the industry refers to those businesses which are Facebook centric. These small business units usually have little capital to begin with, but using Facebook as a medium, they are being able to spur out revenues 10 times more than their initial investment. This, in turn, provides them with the initiative to invest further and gain more revenue. If such businesses are given a platform to stand over, it would inevitably help the economy to excel.
Most startups halt in operations after a year or so of operations at best, simply because they do not have a platform to support them. These startups generally come into the market with unique ideas, but face issues with the implementation of those ideas. The absence of a platform is strong felt when they seek guidance in that area.How would you describe the intersection of digital marketing and F-commerce entrepreneurship? The digital marketing ecosystem and penetration in Bangladesh is led by Facebook. Maximum Bangladeshi audiences are Facebook centric, as I mentioned. The media provides superb communications tools for F-commerce businesses to reach their target audiences, all in a cost-effective manner.
Facebook audiences are mostly dominated by the youth in our country, and they help carry forward any form of movement which requires attention. The youth represents the digital media, and if they are encouraged to be so, the generation which proceeds them shall be even more adaptive to innovative technologies. In turn, this shall create immense momentum in the F-commerce business cycle in the years to come.What is your take on digital marketing in Bangladesh? How developed is the market? In my opinion, the digital marketing sector in Bangladesh has not even reached a stage of maturity, and is following the trends of developed economies around the world. There are a lot of digital inventory which the Bangladeshi market is not matured enough to adapt to as of yet.
The bittersweet truth is, developed economies require decades of research and innovation to come up with new digital commodities and make it available to the world. But as a developing economy, all we have to do is adapt.
The population catches up on such trends quite fast, but if a platform is present to aid businesses to make those trends lucrative, it helps the economy stride just as quickly.
I believe that social media should not be used as a sole platform for business and communication. Facebook makes it efficient to begin operations and connect to your target market, but it should only grow from there into a personal and branded media (like your own website, blog, app outside of Facebook) to which you pull your current and potential customers.What potential do you see for digital marketing in the overall marketing budget mix in the coming days?The marketing budget is calculated by understanding how much money it would need for a company to reach their target audience.
Traditional forms of marketing followed a “spray and pray” theory, where the intended message is dispersed amongst the masses with crossed fingers that it reaches the right people.
Digital forms of marketing allow a much more targeted approach, where a company can reach 20-year-old university students directly when they target, indeed, 20-year-old university students. It may be costly in some cases, but the effectivity of the approach is ensured.
It helps you get the right people, at the right time, with the right product, and by communicating the right message. This helps the customers as well, as their search cost for innovative solutions is decreased.How big is your organisation’s (PRAN-RFL Group) digital footprint?I won't necessarily say that PRAN-RFL Group's digital footprint is large, for the whole world has been engrossed in the digital movement. It would be prudent to consider every Facebook user as a personal TV channel, using which businesses can reach every one of them. Everyone is now live and everyone can play the role of media now.
The traditional media channels have now began to merge/blend with digital media channels in order to provide customers with the best of both. It was previously believed that digital media would result in a conflict between the two platforms, but it was realised that they were actually complementing each other. Hence, whoever begins adapting the earliest, the better it shall be for them.
At PRAN-RFL Group, we are a very marketing driven entity. Our movements tend to be persistent in nature, and as a part of that movement, we have a digital marketing side. We have a separate department for the task, for our products are exported to more than 120 countries around the world. Hence, naturally, the digital inventory we utilise are operated and invested in on a global scale. Here, the role of my department is to make a perfect media mix to reach the brands objective effectively.
For conglomerates like ourselves who are export centric, it has become a necessity to adapt to digital marketing and excel at it. The more time we take to adapt this, the greater our losses shall be.
“Brand is for the consumer. The role of a brand manager/custodian is to give the audience a good platform to interact and build a connection with those brands.”
You can get in touch with Azim Hossain by sending a mail to [email protected]
Tuesday, July 21, 2026
