 Well, ladies and gentlemen, after that incredible partner AV, it is time to move on to the last session of the day between Naval and Hoja co-founder Exchange for Media and Suparna Mitra, CEO of Watches and Variable Division in Titan. Well, Suparna is an electrical engineer from the Jaadapur University and an MBA from IAM Polkata. She has an extensive business experience mainly in lifestyle retail marketing area. She started her career as a management trainee in Hindustan Unilever. Subsequently, she joined Titan where she has worked on several roles in marketing both international and domestic. The next hint was Talismar Khor as a director of product marketing. She moved on to then becoming the business head in Arvind Brands Ltd. She rejoined Titan and became the global marketing head Titan where she was responsible for all the marketing in India and international markets. After this hint, she was the regional business head south for Titan Company Ltd where she was heading all the businesses of Titan Company Ltd, including watches, jewelry and eyewear for the south region. So ladies and gentlemen, please help me and join me in welcoming Naval and Hoja co-founder Exchange for Media and Suparna Mitra, CEO of Watches and Variable Institution Titan. With this, the station screen is all yours. Over to you. Hello and welcome to this special session with Suparna Mitra. As you know, Suparna is the CEO of Titan Variables and Watches. Suparna joins us today in this keynote session just before we start the award ceremony. Thank you, Suparna, for joining us. Thank you, Naval. Thank you. Thanks a lot. And I also want to thank you for spending significant time with us to chair the jury for the Indian content marketing awards. Content marketing is a space that has evolved significantly in the last few years. For those of us with some gray hair will remember television used to have a format called AFP, Advertiser Funded Programs, that started some 30 years back on Durdarshan. And that entire piece has now evolved various shapes and forms on digital. We will touch upon a few areas in content marketing today during this chat. And I want to divide this conversation in three broad buckets. One, look at what's been the impact of COVID on companies that we call non-digital native, how they are competing with digital natives, what has been the impact on marketing of these companies, how brand building is being done now. Suparna being a leader can throw some light on how the role of CEO has changed in the last one and a half years. The second we can look at, especially since we have the pleasure of Suparna being here and she herself has been an ex-marketer all her life, is what is the change, a meaningful change that is, that COVID has brought about in the change of a, in the life of a marketer of a CMO. We can look at that. And the third part, since today's theme is content and we are, we are in jam, we'll also touch upon how brands have transitioned through the journey of television and print advertising into this new age content from 30, 60 second television commercial eras. We have now come to three second eras and what are the implications for brands on that. So thank you again for joining us. Let me get off ground straight away Suparna and ask you, how have the last 18 months been for Titan? How has the role for a CEO like yours seen change? Yeah, Naval, thanks for that intro. And like you said, the scene has changed a lot and from there was a time when, you know, any advertising, any marketing campaign would start with the 30 second or the 60 second television commercial. That would be the start. And then there would be print and holding that would support, then there would be a radio that may support, then there would be something called activation that you would, you know, think of consumer, you know, oriented, you know, contest or some kind of engagement. And that would then become the BTL, which would be, you know, that's a traditional way in which we used to do this. I think this movement has been already in progress in the last one and a half years have completely cemented is the starting point is not the 30 second commercial. The starting point is the insight. And then we think of what are the various touch points of the customer with the brand and how each of those customers a provided consistent expression of the brand of the launch or whatever it is doing, but also equally importantly, completely leverage the possibilities of that particular medium. So for example, I often talk about this, there was a time when there was marketing was just one way, right? The company or the brand would just say, this is who I am, this is what my product is by me, by me. Today, it is two way. There is of course, social media, Insta, Facebook, Twitter, all these platforms in which consumers equally contribute and talk about it. There is the whole thing of influencers, which are some kind of firm customers who behave like brand ambassadors. And then there is the whole piece of information. Whereas earlier, the information would be something that the company would dispense with bit by bit, dose by dose. Today, all of the information is right there, out there on the net, right? And in the zero hour, everything is out there. And that leads to people browsing, people searching, people trying. And then that leads to user generated conversation that leads to ratings and reviews. I often tell my team, no matter what you're doing on TV, the ratings and reviews are what determine customer purchase. So people are going everything, not just services, it could be products, it could be tech, it could be non-tech. I don't go to any restaurant. I don't go to any hotel. I don't buy anything in any platform unless I see the ratings and the reviews. And I actually go through the ratings. I mean, the ratings need to be minimum four plus, but I also go through the reviews. The people who are unhappy with that product, am I likely to be unhappy on that dimension? Or is that something that doesn't matter to So why would we imagine that other consumers like us would not behave like us? They do behave like us. And content, since this is about, you know, the whole thing is about content marketing, is that the nucleus around which all of this rotates. And I would even argue that at some level, even the 32nd commercial is actually a form of content, not the way we had originally imagined it. But if you think of content as anything that the company or the brand puts out there, and is a reflection of who they are, and then that, you know, the entire ecosystem kind of builds on it, then that's really what content is. So it has been the last 18 months of COVID have been a big accelerator of trends that are already forming. And consumers have completely, it's been the tipping point and consumers are completely comfortable with interacting with brands and products in a very hybrid, fluid and digital kind of way. They seamlessly go into online, back into offline, back into online. Some people purchase the whole purchase, journey cycle is online. Some people continue to remain who are end to end physical, and that's fine too. So I think it is really a very big democratization of the marketing process where marketers no longer control things. And any marketer or any brand that's still trying to control it, they're not going to succeed. You have to let go, but you have to build those conversations, build the content, and then, you know, hopefully that will generate that kind of interest and become a force to reckon with. So that's really how I would put it. Yeah, and democratization for consumers, and, you know, the brands need to follow that. And given that, you know, there's been significant democratization, how does, you know, brand realign their strategy for a consumer reach out, you know, today, as opposed to say 20 years back, as you mentioned, they used to be limited set of platforms to reach out to consumers. Today you have dozens or perhaps more. On top of that, the entire consumer journey is being done on in many cases. Then the third part of the mix is the consumer attention is both fragmented, as well as very short, right? So it's like the entire matrix has changed and become significantly complex. So given all of that, how do you see brands realigning their strategy to, you know, study the consumer better, to reach out to the consumer better, because, you know, advent of digital has made sure there's no place to hide, you know, mistakes get sort of come under spotlight very quickly. If you, if, you know, the chances to do iteration are not as many as they were in the past. So but fundamentally, what, what should the brand do to sort of keep pace? I think, as you mentioned, digital is pretty ruthless in the fact that it is out there and everybody can see it and there's nowhere to hide. But equally, the, the opportunity in that is that you don't have to go separately looking for insights. The insights are all there. It's there. It's the, just as the company or the brand is putting out information by every single action of theirs by every single post to every single reply. Equally, every single consumer is completely unbilled and is totally talking about what matters to her, what doesn't matter to her. That's invaluable information. You know, earlier again, launch cycles of products would mean that first you do, you know, a big research and you go door to door and you collect the data, then you do a quality, then you do a quantity, then you put it together and the whole cycle would be months. Today, entire campaigns are actually while the product may take months because there are products where there is a certain time that is required to build it. But the, the actual inciting process to arriving at the creative, arriving at the content, producing it and putting it out there is a matter of days. It's not a matter of months, not even a matter of weeks. A lot of people, especially companies that are not digital native that are continuing, that are transitioning from all physical to a hybrid kind of model, they still think of weeks as a good, you know, timeline, but really agile companies are doing this really, really fast. So one is the speed, the second is that it allows you to do many versions and very fast. So for example, you know, in the old days that one 30 second or 60 second commercial would take, you know, a whole production set up and, you know, the cost and the timeline and the location and the, the whole Jingmen. Is it happening? Yes, it continues to happen. But we know, and we know specifically sometimes when some event happens and overnight, literally over the night, the next morning brands are posting stuff that's relevant, which is interesting, which is bringing them into the radar. So in a way, it has become easier, but in a way, it has become harder because if you're given many chances, you know, some of them will work, some of them will not. And like I said, every single arrow that is released actually has an impact on the brand image. So it's a very interesting place. I think brands and brand teams, marketing teams need to be much more agile, much more year to the ground. When I'm saying ground, the net, also the ground and much more willing and flexible, much more creative. I think creativity is also something that, you know, there was a time when brand logo would be only one color. And that's it. And that they would stay with that color for 100 years. But now, you know, we know brands because it is digital, you can literally have a rainbow of colors over a week or 10 days and celebrate different aspects of the brand. So really, some, many of the formula have, formulae have changed. I do think and it's important for me to mention here that the principles remain the same. And the principle number one is be focused on the customer. The how, the when, all that has changed, but be focused on the customer, deliver the customer what she really wants, and deliver it in the language that she can, and on the platform that she anyway consumes. And the rest of it is, you know, the, the basic principles of what you're trying to do is not that different. Absolutely. The fundamentals always remain the same. And the important thing is to try on the fundamentals and not get distracted by all the noise around. I was doing a conversation a couple of weeks back with Mr. Bhaskar Bhatt. And his, his theory was that, you know, a marketer's job used to be difficult. It's not that it's become more difficult now. Yes, some complex complexities have got added. But like you rightly said, it's also easier in some manner data collection, getting information, getting feedback, you don't have to go through, you know, months of research and on ground feedback, gathering, I mean, it's right there. And that brings me to my next question, which is about how companies, especially as I started by saying, are not digital natives, are using information stroke data for their own sort of, you know, customer reach out efforts because data is a huge black box, you know, what you input in it. And the important thing is how you read it, what is the output you're gathering. Tell us, you know, a company like yours, how does Titan, you know, reorient itself to become an info company that uses data information in a very meaningful manner, in a manner that kind of is very useful for, you know, your CMO to kind of do marketing activities on the fly, to tweak product reach out, to tweak positioning, or even give feedback to your, you know, product teams to kind of, you know, keep tweaking what they're doing. Because this is not, this is not built into your DNA, right? You did not grow up. Data and analytics is not hardwired into many companies. Yeah. Having said that, it's been a few years. And I think one of the things about data is that, yeah, there are all these things of data as a new oil, and people just do things just to capture data. It is a bit of, you know, data, data everywhere, where is the insight, the data by itself is meaningless. So the drowning in data syndrome, one has to kind of pull one's head out of that data and not allow oneself to be drowned, come out and say, how is this data important? How is it useful? What are the insights that are coming from it? So we use data in a multiple ways. We, of course, have a lot of stored data. We have in the Entiton company, we have more than 1,900 stores close to 2,000 stores in our division and watchers and variables division, we have close to 750 stores. So there's a lot of data on what people buy, when they buy, you know, a lot of consumer behavior, customer behavior is actually apparent there. The other source of data is that within the stored data, we have our loyalty program call in circle, there's a CRM program customer relationship, and we have a lot of information as well as insight about the customers. Now, one very interesting thing is that it's not just the data alone. The data has a human face. So the way we, for example, reach out and I'll take a simple example, something that we do quite a lot is quite, you know, it's quite pervasive in the company is birthday celebrations for our customers. So how is it, how does data help? Data will throw you the birthday celebration, then there is a process. And also that process is an undergone chain due to COVID. So you're the, but who reaches out to the customer? There is something on the mobile, but our store stuff, the one that knows that customer, what she buys, what class her daughter is in, when her anniversary is, what, how well, how much she liked the last Draga, what she wore and bought. So it's a very personal call. So the data is fed to a human face, a human body, not just a human person. And that person then reaches out and says, Veena, ma'am, tomorrow is your birthday. We would like you to come to our store. We have a small celebration. Please bring your family along and do, people do. It's not just an impersonal machine generated. There is the machine generated. I'm not saying that. But then it is wrapped in human human touch. And that is the kind of data that really works for us. So we get data from the apps we have, we get data from the customer database, we get data from many, many sources of data. So one is, like I said, wrap it in the human interface. And I think the other is to join the dots to, to uncover the important patterns instead of getting lost in that data. So if I am just giving another example, we realize that the, for example, both last year as well as this year post the COVID waves, the recovery was better in the, or the growth was better in the smaller towns. Now, that itself is meaningful. But if you start going into what for people buying, when they were buying it, was it for gifting? Was it for sale? Is the smaller town in the North region behaving exactly the same way in South or East or West? Are there cohorts of consumers? So I think the, the analysis and the inciting of data is what makes it meaningful. So if you ask the question that you ended was that we don't have a history of analytics. It's yes and no. We have an analytical mindset. We always have. That's right. So yes, the kind of advanced AI ML that is there right now was not there 10 years back, was not even there five years back. But as, as a team, as an organization, if you're more analytical minded and use data for driving your decisions and it's not just data, you're also interspersed, like I said, the human inciting process. And then you can come up with a very robust process and very good results that could come out of that. Yeah, absolutely. And you know, analytics data information has been used in many forms in the past as well. Maybe the backbone was not as much technology and hardware or software. I recall an example. I read the thing three, four weeks back about traveler gifted to the Chinese emperor some 2000 years back, a strap of, you know, strap to be tied on the wrist, which had beads to keep track of, you know, the moment of the sun and the days and the moment of the moon, perhaps the first variable device ever won by anybody in the world. These were happening even before, you know, Apple came by or Amazon happened, right? So, so the world has been and like you said, it is about insights, it's not about data, it's about using the data in a very meaningful manner. Let me come to, you know, what is relevant for today's topic of discussion, which is about content and how it's evolved. Tell us if you can about one of the two, three legs on which your content marketing strategy stands. What are the few pieces because, you know, content marketing is now a very vast field. You're doing, you're interacting across so many platforms with customers. And, you know, I always use this example, TV is linear in so many ways that you once you make a 30 second ad, you're pretty much running the same thing across maybe 500 channels with a few tweaks here and there at most you'll hire a different superstar for south versus, you know, the northern regions. The content marketing pieces that you do on digital require dozens of iterations, building with dozens of platforms, multiple ways of consumer reach out. But there has to be some uniformity in what you're doing, right? There has to be some two, three pillars around which everything is done. So what would be the first two pillars for that? I think the first one I would say is a lot of our marketing is, I would say category and product led and a lot of, I would say the other big mover of that is consumer insights. So consumer engagement, consumer insights. So a lot of the content that that our marketing teams generate are based on these two legs. So if we can make very good content around how product works, could be watches, could be variables, could be jewelry, could be anything. And really what are the advantages? How does it work, videos, the tutorials, the deeper understanding or even the appreciation, like almost like how a connoisseur would go about appreciating different features of assets of product. And the second part is what excites consumers, what is the current theme? How can I connect with my consumers on what they are really talking about, what they're thinking about. And it's all of that trail. The biscuit crumbs are all on the internet. Like I said, you don't have to go. But it can't be like, there is a current trend, it has got nothing to do with my category or brand. And I'm jumping on the bandwagon that I think people understand. They look through it. So it has to be something that is genuinely connected with the category and the brand. And then kind of organize and develop content around that and really take that forward. And tell us how is the role of partners in your ecosystem changed? For example, you've worked with many advertising agencies, you continue to do very good work with them. But evolution of digital, evolution of all these content marketing pieces required you to work with multiple partners at the same time. So how has that relationship evolved and changed over the years? Because you can't now just work, have one agency doing everything for you because you're looking for specialists. So what's your expectation from agency partners that has changed? How do you see agency partners, have they evolved and kept pace with what's happening? So agency partners have to evolve, they have evolved. Of course, we have separate advertising agencies and digital agencies. And we also lean on a lot of other digital content influences. Many other pieces come together when any campaign is put together. So it really works like that. I think everybody has adapted, no doubt. Everybody's adapted, everybody is much more agile. I think it goes back to what I said right in the beginning that each one of us is a consumer. If you are spending all your time in Instagram reels, why would you think the consumer is not there? And that's where the ideas come from too. That is where the ideas are coming from. Absolutely. Let me ask you, I'm told we have limited time. Let me ask you, Suparna, last 18 months I've seen significant disruption in our lives for businesses, for consumers as well. And you've seen the journey from heading categories, becoming a CEO and you were a CEO even before COVID happened. How is the role of a CEO changed in the last 18 months? What are the things that you're doing that pre-COVID would not take your bandwidth and time? I think people have been under tremendous stress and it's just been such a bizarre time because we've lived through it, we haven't. Of course, we also realize it, but this whole digital working and being at home and the whole real fear for safety and safety protocols, vaccinations, financial support for ecosystem partners, we are a big company and a lot of our ecosystem franchises or smaller vendor partners and how do you make sure that they don't go under and they can kind of weather the storm? So I think it has been really like a wartime effort and we are now slowly gradually moving towards peacetime, but wartime efforts require a very unusual holding together of people so that they don't kind of fall apart or get to that stress. I have spent an enormous amount of time both digitally communicating as well as traveling a lot, I've traveled a lot both after the first wave as well as after the second wave, just meeting people and we have factories everywhere, people in the factory are coming every day to work, so it means a lot to them that I will show up and kind of stand there and say that Last question before, Tricky one, social media has come to rule our lives in many ways and brands also end up bearing the brunt. What advice do you have for young marketers for CMOS who work very hard to conceptualize a new campaign and suddenly see it being ripped apart on social media the next day, either being the campaign being disliked or being sort of not like for others and that allows social media narrative to sort of drive your brand strategy. What does a marketer do in such a case? I think one has to have a lot of resilience and it meets a certain coolness, you can't just get totally, you know, taken, it is tough, it can be tough if you're on the firing line, it is, it's something that is hard to predict. So it's a, I would say patience, resilience and kind of if it's something that you are totally convinced about then you should hold on. So there are many things, but it's not easy. I mean, I don't think I have any magic advice to give to anybody. I think each person who has faced social media scrutiny have their own ways of dealing with it. But I don't want to leave this thought, which is a very common thing that people talk about and a lot of it was also talked about for COVID, which are those words, this to shall pass. So don't worry. Today you are at the, you know, the eye of the storm, the storm will pass. And the good thing about the social media is a storm is that it passes very quickly, sometimes in a matter of minutes and hours, so you don't have to wait peak. So thank you so much, Uparna, for giving us your time. Thank you also for sharing the Indian content marketing awards, Judy. Later evening, the winners will be announced and as you will see the winners come from a vast set of categories this year. The content marketing awards saw record participation. We had 750 odd entries telling us how brands have really taken to content marketing like fish to water. With that, thank you, Suparna, for joining us and back to you.