 Okay folks, we have a esteemed panel with us, I guess we should start with a quick introduction so that everyone knows the context we are speaking with and Bevav should we start with you? Sorry, I caught you in the middle of... Okay, not a problem. Yeah, my name is Bevav, I am into marketing at cash repayments, we are a payment aggregator, I am a power and business director in the payments space today. Lovely, thank you Rahul, how about you? Hi, my name is Rahul, Rahul Karthikeyan. I lead the marketing business for... I think I just want to change that definition. I am an internet marketing, I think that's what we follow in our organizations as well. We don't really follow the titles, it doesn't matter to us. We want to be a stable couple. My lead data is for the scale of business, it's an internet company. We are maybe 3-4 years old now. Hi, good afternoon everyone. I am Prashant, I am director of marketing with AOSWIT. So we are into manufacturing of water purifiers and geysers. We have been operating in India for the last 15 years now also. I am Viswas and I head marketing for the Hindu group. We are a media publishing house and I take care of four brands. Of course the flagship brand, the Hindu, I am sure like most of you are aware. And must be loyal readers. Then business lines, sports car and front line. Thank you. Good afternoon everyone. I am Ankur, I take care of marketing and TTK prestige limited. It's India's largest kitchen appliance brand. So all we do is talk about food and anything to do with food. Lovely, lovely. You had me at food, but we are here to talk about something about marketing, right? So folks, I guess in the last panel discussion, the panel already towards the end touched upon it. But we will sort of hopefully go deeper, also requesting the panel to share examples and anecdotes. To make it very real for our audience. So folks, what we are essentially talking about is how does one approach this whole personalization game when we talk about Omni channel marketing, right? And we'll start from the very top. Prashant, in your opinion, what does this personalization mean in the context of Omni channel? And do you think it is important, not important? Are its claims exaggerated? What's your opinion on it? It's basically creating a consistent and uniform and personalized experience for the consumers. That is what personalization is all about. It helps you to improve your matrices in terms of cost per engagement, in terms of your cost per clicks, click through rates, etc. And it all basically culminates from a very clear segmentation that you do for the consumers. So creating very distinct consumer profiles. And then targeting them in terms of the communication that you're doing, in terms of the service delivery that you're doing, so that you first of all deliver what is required for the consumer and also get a better ROI. I think in a very plain simple word, this is what personalization for me is. Got it. And Raul, how do you resonate with this whole concept of personalization? See, there's a little thin line on personalization. Sometimes it can get creepy as well. I'll tell you a simple definition of why is it creepy as well. Most of times it is useful. Imagine a scenario where you just landed on to a website. You're just browsing it. You've not given a consent. Now in India, it's not highly regulated. We do remark it. I mean the moment you kind of landed on to certain pages and you'll see that banner everywhere. Wherever you go, the brands will follow. It's a very creepy way of doing personalizations because you don't have a user consent there. So for me that's a very thin line in terms of what is very, very useful and what is creepy. As a brand, we want to kind of stay towards the useful side of it but though we sometimes falter on the creepy side as well. But that for me is personalization. When you understand at what stage the consumers are looking for that particular brand and want to engage with that particular brand, that is personalization for my part of it. I don't know. And because you folks run such a heavy offline business, how do you as a company or a brand even achieve this? So personalization is not a new term in marketing or for organizations. I mean from the time companies have started selling products, personalization has been present in one form or the other. Now from the olden days when people used to go to the stores and engrave their names, the storekeepers. And they have cherished that. They have given that as door is in that time to the kids going to other homes. To now when people are going to online spaces, to stores which are present offline and through some mediums are being part of only channel. Personalization is here to stay. It has always been. So for us it's very, very important because consumer at whatever stage of journey he's engaging with the brand has to feel that he's wanted, he's valued for and whatever is invested in the brand stays with him. Now I gave you an example in form of what engraving is to mean at that point in time. Today once the consumer has bought our product, let us say offline space or in online. And online happens to be an important space for us today. It's a substantial part of the percentage of business that we do today because consumers are searching online. It's not if I as a consumer see a product in an offline space the first habit that I would want to do is to go and check at least prices online. It's not only stock set pricing, it goes to reviews. It goes to the generality of the product. And then see if the brand stories that the consumers are speaking are true and genuine to what the storekeeper is telling. So for us it's very, very critical. Post-purchase behaviors are again as a brand engaging with them. Example if I'm selling a kitchen appliances, talking to him about some recipes. Post-purchase, telling him when the upgrades are supposed to happen. Telling him what was well with that product. He feels wanted, right? So it's very, very critical for us as well. Alright, very interesting. Anaprajita, you yourself run a such a strong legacy brand, right? And everyone knows what to expect from this brand. And you know, because it has been there standing strong for so many decades now. But tell me how do you now leverage such a strong legacy brand along with the power of data analytics or machine learning to sort of create this personalized messaging but still resonating with that mother sort of brand that you have. Okay, thanks. We are into news business and we have a moral responsibility to show the significant and important news to you. It might not, I mean you must know it. So there are these must-know news where we still have edit intervention and we believe that it will always remain so. However the entire personalization we are doing in terms of say the good to know news which is basically news of interest where we are using data analytics and machine learning to create localized segments and then we are giving, providing the right content to the right audience. But of course every day we are developing our data capabilities and you know, right now we are feeding machine and there are a lot many projects that are in the stage of experimentation. Okay, Rebha, let me come to you. Payments is such a sensitive, such a space of vertical where entrust is of utmost importance. And whenever we talk about personalization of course there is that data signals that you would want to widely leverage and given a payments company like yours has so much of data signals tell me what are some of the ethical concerns about this whole personalization you know, on privacy or risk of creating you know these filter bubbles what are your thoughts on that? So yeah, no I think as a brand we are very responsible in you know, how do you look at data and what are the data points on which you want to make a decision making. But as a payments company we craft experiences which help our businesses offer personalization to their customers. So you know, for example every time you are making a purchase if I already know what is the address where this is going to be shipped at and I can give that as a capability. I see that my merchants can see a conversion rate that could increase by up to 40%. So as a business we are building capabilities of allowing our merchants to offer personalization to their customers and that's something that has worked for us. But apart from that we look at data, we have risk engines to read the signals which can help prevent frauds and stuff like that. So that's what we are working on. Okay, thank you. Rahul, you know as an end tech company at least I'm keen to know how do you balance this whole thing of automation versus human interaction in our only challenge environment right? So back in the day you would walk into the store to buy a product or a service this would be a store which is near your house or your office you would possibly know the person there and you know there's that inherent trust but in today's only channel experience if you're selling an education service or a product what's the balance of automation versus human touch? That's a good question actually it's pretty difficult in today's world even now I want to I'm talking from a student point of view as well I still want to interact physically with an individual sitting on the other side and want to know more about the product right? So that is still exist now in some way both automation and personalization have to play together what we'd like to do is see my personalization point if you have a scenario in terms of where things can go wrong and things can go right as well I'm sure most of you must have had an experience where an end of person's name would have come to your inbox saying that thank you you've kind of subscribed for this product and we would like to relive this so you probably have that experience you must have tried interacting with a sales person whenever you get to since here listen I'm getting a very long information this is not the individual I'm on that you're sending out emails can you please stop it today's it is very difficult and that's where automation becomes a big problem statement so forget about personalization automation journeys when a brand is pulling off you need to be very sacrosanct in terms of how these automations are being built and you need to ensure that user consent is always taken and it is rightly attributed to the persona as well so for me that's automation part of it yes if you saw for that next personalization point of view yes a sales person they won't get to interact with a human figure it can be one of the co-founders or we have our own sales representatives as well but the initial nudge from their side if there is a small message as to what's happening to the conversation coming from their side which has an individual's name and probably asking for a certain time if there is sort of an empathy given to the consumer I feel in many ways that personalization can be built and I think a lot of our TG is now becoming digitally accepted and then accepting the digital nature of conversations now we don't really step out to interact with a stranger we interact in a digital ecosystem these days so I think some way the communication automation has to play together otherwise it can lead to a disaster but in many ways it does lead to better efficiencies as well from an organization point of view it is a lot of savings in this review a person is not really travelling to an A to B as well business point of view it makes more business sense as well if we can automate a lot of these costs and Vishal, any examples from your current or maybe earlier in your career yeah, so what I believe is that between automation and personal intervention there should be a defined line because sometimes when your lead is say for example in our category if someone is coming onto our website and asking for a product or wants to know a little bit more about certain product features which can be easily automated through a chatbot or something like that but when he is in extreme winters when he is having a product bought he is going to kill me if my chatbot keeps on interacting with it so at that time you need to shift him back to your customer care where you do need a human intervention so there is a fine balance between the two that you need to have it's a blurred line but it needs to be defined sharply so that you know the scalability as well as the personalization or the empathy both have the right balance I love empathy when during winters I think most of the people who are here and a lot of us here are marketers and organizations today getting customer data in the omni-channel platform it's not difficult because all of us are in the digital space and more and more as the adoption is going up the data coming into the system is not an issue most of the marketers in the country today are at least few of them whom I know are struggling to understand what to do with the data we are talking jargons, we are talking yes generative AI is coming in, we are saying that yes personalization should happen but to what extent, to what measures and if at all we should be doing it for the consumer because we are now getting slowly but surely getting into the irritating space of the customer so making the balance good enough where he is at his leisure space where he is wanting to interact with you and if he or she is wanting to come to the brand and then the brand is talking to them is something that is going forward to make more sense to the brands then brands trying to reach out to them again and again and again in making that space is getting disappeared in the next decade also I mean the sooner it is getting created it may get disappeared as well I mean that threat is horrible I am almost reminded of this a liners company who I went to their website in hindsight it was a big mistake I put in my phone number and this was for my son who was 11 then and this gentleman calls me within 2 hours again the power of how fast we reach the customers and he told me that this is ideally suggested at the age of 13 years and above I said thank you very much I thought the lead is now closed and for the next 3 months every day twice a day morning and evening I used to get called from this company saying that are you interested in liners and I used to tell them that this is what you folks told me so of course my son is and this kept happening for about 3 months until I had to write an email to the founder saying please excuse me I am almost willing to pay the cost of the liners if you stop calling me so finally it stopped I don't think for everyone reaching out to founders or LinkedIn this should be the way right so okay let's talk about some of the uncomfortable topics right so measurement in this entire omni channel measurement in this entire personalization space what's your view on it how does one measure is an attribution a problem how do you know if your bank per buck is coming and is it coming from this channel and hence you should invest more there one of the biggest challenges most and I am speaking for many categories is it that attribution the word attribution it's very difficult to kind of be as accurate as possible to get the attribution now figures correct the most important piece is to get your data infrastructure pretty strong there are very few companies I think maybe gaming and a couple of other place players phenomenal e-commerce phenomenal I think they have kind of advanced themselves but there are many other categories probably there is still a lot more work to be done so it all boils down to the kind of data infrastructure that we have built basis that in some way if you are able to articulate how the attribution is for example now when I am talking to my founders it's very blind Facebook is not working now Google is working let's just pause it but it's a very long way of looking at Facebook as a channel and we did one experiment we just kind of paused Facebook for 8 days there was a direct impact in terms of the organic flow in terms of the Google search volumes stopping as well so there is dependency on all the source what sort of dependency how much can I bring in more efficiency on that now that level of data there are very few brands who are able to succeed unfortunately I don't think even Skillar has done that yes and I am very open about it there is a lot more work to be done there but still our data engineers are constantly at it to ensure that the entire data infrastructure is stable and it comes from one single source and we don't really depend on any external factors which are stored inside that becomes a very big challenge after that comes the metrics because then if you know that infrastructure is all in some way stored your metrics then becomes everything it depends on for example if I have to do brand campaign my metrics will as simple be what sort of traffic business incremental traffic what sort of click-throughs what sort of engagements have we built but when it comes to performance ROAS as well but again it has to go back to how well built your infrastructure is otherwise your definition might be wrong so I I wanted to actually share an example of what we did at Kashmir a couple of years back we were doing email call out breaches and we really wanted to test if we go to the extent of personalizing to the T how good our results are going to be so we went first by line of business perspective when we did a campaign we saw an incremental result then we said you know what the incremental output is so much that let's actually stop everything write emails where every email has an insight about that organization and when we did that results were phenomenal of course it's a function of time and bandwidth and resource you have so that you can replicate this at scale but I think with you know AI coming in and generating AI being there your ability to write better content your ability to use tools like AMV etc your ability to personalize your message to to the customer at the audience of one that is today and like every experiment we have done we've seen like incremental additional pockets and what we have seen is that you know by using data analytics and machine learning we created these live segments for our subscribers and today our internal data shows that our subscribers are 25 times more engaged than the non-subscribers that's something really great and second is we have been able to do better targeting for our advertisers and of course like we have repeat clients coming back to our business and sites for the business of course and for the bottom line as well attribution again nothing tastes better than the money which goes into the bank I mean but like we are saying it's omni channel the customer is looking for the product in one platform buying from another giving reviews on the third and then putting complaints about the product after usage on the fourth so it's extremely what we have metrics to define that okay this is the cost of acquisition this is the ROAS and all that metrics that we follow but attributing to one platform one type of activity is extremely extremely difficult marketing, universe at least in the country have not matured enough to attribute sales to an exact activity that can happen in the omni channel experience if I do it for a particular channel towards a concentrated effort I can say this activity led me to this particular results but that's very tactical that's short term because over a period of time consumers are not staying on one platform right across brands have to move across with them like most of them told here attribution is a pain at this point in time let me accept it most of you will accept here that it's exactly a pain but yes there are metrics which are slowly evolving and as we go forward I believe that yes something better will happen the customer will write back to you you know that where the customer is going today either for engagement or for purchase or for making decision wherever he is going or she is going we follow them now there are enough data points with us through the data scientist through the metrics that we are following we know where the customer is going be as a brand try to follow them and be present wherever they are it may convert today it may convert tomorrow but if as a brand we follow customers and are with them ok over a period of time there is no way that the customer is looking somewhere else touch on one last topic and then we will open it up for Q&A so folks out there can think of the question they would want to ask the panelists again across the panel what are some of the emerging technology or trends do you most resonate with when you think about Omni channel or when you think about personalization today I will give you an example which we are following there is something called AR that we are using now it is about personalization we have created modules on our web page where actually the consumer can go and visualize each and every of our products in their own space that gives an elevated level of consumer experience to him because across 60-70 SKUs you are getting to test different types of products color combinations in your own kitchen space or a bathroom space and then take a decision to purchase so that is one way in which it is obviously moving forward apart from that obviously there are things like chatbots and stuff like that machine chatbots as they say which we have to really exploit which we are using but we are not exploiting using but not exploiting whatever what do you think I just wanted to make it a little bit more controversial there is a big debate that chatgbt is like a boon for writing content and as marketers maybe it is time for us to start putting a disclaimer that this has been written by chatgbt it is the ownership of that piece of content what do you guys think about that so I think right now with this entire data analytics we have been able to pick data across the channels and especially if I am talking from a publishing perspective see while the reader can casually switch between newspaper to website social media still the channels are different but what we have done is like we could pick data from various channels and integrate them to create localised segments and we have seen early success in terms of better engaged consumers and I think in future we will be able to have better predictions and better segmentation and as you will know Harari said that the extreme eminent change in terms of extreme personalisation will be from intimacy and I think then all of us, all the marketers have to come up with some radical approach we are down to the CPNs now okay we are closing thoughts on the tools that you think are the trends yeah so one point because we started by saying offline heavy the patience of the customers is not there the retail space is becoming more and more expensive so there is one thing, there are a lot of things which are coming up in that space because the patience of the consumers are going there is something like endless eyes I don't know how many of you here know do not keep the stocks that they have they can customers walk in they have the virtual experience of the product and they can order from that store itself so the cost of the cost of doing business would come down customers don't have to wait for it that's one, okay and then in the only channel space the challenge for the brand is to make yourself available wherever they are that's one thing that we continue to strive to make ourselves in the future capable of example website is something we are actually wanting in a journey to make ourselves make it better in terms of that okay which is your turn around with the customer service ability and making customers because the customer is not ready to wait for 7 days for a product how many of us are today willing to buy a product which will come on 7 days which was true a bit just before COVID so we are also in that space where we are trying to make the product available to the customer within 24 hours 48 hours that's what the only channel experience for the customers going forward would enable the brand to be more competitive we now open it up to the audience any of you have a question for our panelists, okay this can be two things okay cool we'll close it here thank you so much folks it was lovely hearing you and thank you for taking your time