 Hello everyone. Good afternoon. It's a pleasure to be here today and to host this wonderful panelist. Thank you for joining us and giving me this honour. To E4M for bringing back the Bangalore edition of HCMO. It's always great to have events in Bangalore and bring together some wonderful minds and personalities in one room. And to my lovely audience, without you we wouldn't be complete. So thank you for being here and listening in on our discussions. So as I said, Jay we're diving into a very intriguing topic and talking about designing mobile for strategies for the modern consumer. That itself has so much meaning in it. So as I launch into it I'd like to define a few things and then we get down to business. So in a world that's now led by the most accessible screen which is the mobile and the large landscape that it is. Characteristics, preferences and expectations of this modern consumer allows for and should be spoken about. Most importantly, how are we as marketers, as media folk and as publishers approaching this and how important is this medium to us. So just like I mentioned defining this, the consumers who are born in the period when internet became widely available and are highly adapted to the use of internet in their decision making for buying goods and services. This is the search result for a modern consumer. I think we can all agree that's the most simplest and very well defined search result. So today taking this dive into it about the expectations of the modern consumer and to ask the most important question is the modern consumer essentially a mobile consumer and how are we engaging this. To just understand the landscape of the telecom or the mobile world that we're living in, as per try there are 1.14 billion telecom subscribers. So that's just setting the stage of scale and opportunity. So let me open this up now. So my first question is to all my panelists so we'll go around in turn for a quick round. What would this mean to you to be in a mobile-first world and to design mobile-first strategies in a world where consumers interact with multiple channels? You can go around the table. Thanks, Altia. Good to see you here. See you said two things. One is a modern consumer. Another is mobile-first. So these two words itself are so interconnected. When you say modern consumer you also assume that they're a younger audience. So what does mobile-first truly mean? We all know everybody talks about mobile strategies but if you ask me it is as simple as your consumers seeking information, interacting, communicating, everything on mobile. If you also look at the digital ecosystem right now 90% consumption is on mobile. The content consumption 90% is on mobile. When you run campaigns your 90% of impressions are served on mobile device which means unlike your 30 plus audiences or your millennials who also have a hybrid behavior the younger audience do not look at any other device which means your content, your strategies, everything need to be done keeping mobile-first kind of approach in mind. We all know this but are we really doing this? No, I mean I belong to an agency therefore I'm exposed to a variety of brands the Evergreen, FMCG brands to your technology brands So if you look at the kind of work that's been across your content is there but I think brands also know how to approach that but if it is being done full-fledgedly, no. You still have scenarios where a TVC is shot and that's run on YouTube or on social platforms that's not how it's going to work going forward. You really need to understand what kind of content your consumers are looking at therefore data is very important, analytics is very important you need to have digital-first assets to be created now there's a lot of research data that is required I mean digital allows you to do a lot of A.B. testing as well so my plea always to brands is don't just replicate your TV strategies on digital because if your target yes I mean I'm not saying it's a kind of a blanket statement if your consumer still is 35 plus which is still okay they're both on TV largely on TV and they're actually getting used to you know digital consumption but the younger audiences are not they're not on television so why are you creating assets where your consumers are not it is just for your own feel good therefore the entire thought in terms of what mobile-first really means what are your consumers doing and therefore slicing and dicing that you know that entire asset into various fit to format you know understanding you know the ecosystem better understanding what they're consuming how they're consuming you know context the environment in which you are in that all that is really important I think we all know about it but our brands and agencies really you know working that path I think it's a long way to go yeah just to sort of continue from where up and now left off I think that especially as marketers right over the years before this whole advent of mobile marketing and mobile-first a mobile-first approach there used to be the law of averages right where you had a consumption TG and you had a communication TG and you would design your comms in a certain way keeping in mind the communication TG but non-essentially the consumption TG right I think now with the advent of the mobile phone and internet penetration and all of that we have come to a place where it is where we need to start the averaging things what I mean by this is that whether it is the kind of content that we create whether it is what we optimize our campaigns for right earlier on the campaign optimization pretty much used to be are you getting a good job of mind are you getting good awareness is there good consideration intent to purchase on and so forth but now as the you know the line between performance and brand marketing is slowly sort of getting eliminated you optimize on performance for in-app actions right and similarly on brand as well you cannot shy away anymore from the fact that you need that consumer to do something on the mobile phone which is an immediate sort of a reaction to what you are putting out there so I think that the lag time between doing something to reach out to the consumer versus the consumer actually reacting to that and doing something on your platform that lag time has significantly reduced and brands need to understand that a mobile first approach would also mean that you have multiple ways to reach out to the consumer on performance which is whether it is SMS, WhatsApp, push notifications etc right but brand typically used to stay away from that right because you used to want to build a story around it, build a narrative around it it just needs to have a lot more call to action especially because there is no lag time anymore between you serving something to the consumer and you understanding how well it is doing you don't have to wait that one, two months for you to get that lag effect or whatever you spoken about so yeah I think the averaging for me would be one big thing that at least as a brand marketer I am working on that and I would advise people to sort of look into that as part of the mobile first strategy Hi thank you for having me in the show See look at the look at what's happening in Indian market today we talk about 1.2 million mobile devices out of which about 800 million are smart phones every year we sell about 150 million smart phones in the country this is extroding the second hand smart phones which are really catching up in the market so that presents every brand every market year millions of opportunity every day now let's fall into the coming down to the brand level for a category like auto which is a higher normal category and replacement cycles anyway between 8 to 10 years are you looking at a constant period of looking at what product should I buy so therefore my consideration cycle is not just like an FMCG brand when I am looking at 15 days or 20 days you need to be at the top of my brand silliness while auto brands need to do that the challenge that we face is that how do you keep the consumer engaged for such a long time therefore my mid funnel which is a concentration funnel I call it as constant cycle of concentration needs to be evolving every time and as a brand I need to appeal to the audience in the right way I just use barriers, concerns and driving the aspiration towards a brand it's a continual process for me while I say this the topic of this discussion is mobile first but I say I would say consumer first as Aparna said lots of people suggest on mobile phones they are always looking at the TV but it also depends the kind of brand that you are example say in auto category for a scooter category that I come from probably all my consumers fall between 25 to 34 and therefore TV forms an important media for me to drive the fun but once you get that awareness to a certain extent I would go over misting on those medias and probably look at what are my concentration drivers and then invest there probably is a gateway to me gateway to whatever experience you are having around the world across platforms, across screens, what do you take and that becomes very very important when you are looking at a time frame for one year of concentration first of all thank you so much Dexinch for hosting this it's a very interesting topic for me and I was with 3B4 and now I am with a B2B with a razor pair it is a very different story for me back in Triggy when I joined I remember at 2015 it was about 40% of the orders were mobile and it rose up to 95% in a year and it was always more than it was mobile so the default way of me thinking is anything to do with the device is always mobile be it conversion optimization, choosing channels, distributing content everything was formed around mobile and it is very very important but it took a very u-turn for me when I moved to raise a pair it was a long hand to believe that we always spend time on desktop with this mobile but how we and raise a pair look at things is look at the preference of users from a device perspective look at their stages, needs and craft those strategies for example what we have seen is small sisterly businesses, merchants who look at evaluating certain solutions start from educating themselves about the payment or reading through a particular report etc are we heavily consumed on mobile versus when they want to take an action or uploading a document or doing KY certifications we prefer to do on a desktop so I think it is important to understand the different users what their different stages needs and try to craft that strategy accordingly versus only looking at obviously there is I mean again I am not saying mobile versus desktop be it the channel, be it WhatsApp, be it Facebook or LinkedIn whichever the channels that you are reaching out to I think it is important to understand what stages they are and what kind of users we are talking to accordingly place theirs and help them to have that right experience is what I think mobile strategy means to me I think in India to the app to any other asset a text of the consumer I think it makes you feel go back I think one of the great examples of how you know brand like Swiggy has been leveraging that was a quick note on Swiggy I think a lot of people having some good experiences with the brand it has come from around 10,000 sets of test and control experiments we have 100% agreed first of all thank you for having me here at TI so I will articulate my response in two halfs and I will build on to what all the other folks have spoken about so when we think about mobile first the way I would think about it is that we can talk about experience part of it and how should your experience or how the experience of the consumer should be when you are thinking mobile first and ultimately how does it tie back to your growth because all of us think about growth all the time so you know and I am going tactically here so one of the things from our understanding and our learning has been that when you are thinking mobile first your handshakes between various devices and within the devices on website and app has to be very seamless right if you do not do a good job with it the experience breaks and the consumer has to do the entire journey all over again and that embers the consumer experience so what Spiggy does very well just to build on that other example that we just spoke about I think their handshakes are very good I think their whole I mean there are four or five businesses that they are running internally but all of them come together and for consumer it just feels like one singular habit right so that is one I think another is that we touched up briefly upon the content part of it again but I think your messaging your value proposition whatever for the various segments of customer that you are targeting has to be consistent across your various touch points in the mobile first because consumer may interact with you on website, on mobile they may also see some messages on the ground etc and all but how do you narrate that how do you stitch all of it together so that you are building a cohesive story for them is another important part of the experience piece the third is that I mean how are you optimizing your mobile flows because a lot of flows which used to work on the website may not necessarily work on the mobile so when we are designing things they are going to be always thinking mobile heavy because of course 99% of our business now comes to mobile so we build mobile first and then we have to extend it to the website so that is very important and the fourth is that and this is now a little bit over abused in the last few months but how do you use ML etc to make the life of the consumer pretty easy so using some interesting techniques tactics which you will see in the coming months I quoted to use the device that is there in your hand to capture a photograph because logistics is a complex piece depending on what kind of goods you are moving from we move from envelope to elephant is what we call it internally and depending on what goods you are moving from where you want to drop etc etc so how you use all of that to using the mobile device to make the booking experience seem less is another important thing and very briefly touching upon the growth if you do all of these things right they add to the growth part of it but specifically on the growth I think when you are thinking mobile first from the performance point of view you should have granular data on your event so that you are able to optimize your ads and are able to extract the maximum R1 and the last but not the I mean we started investing a lot on it what is how do you really A-B test almost all the flows etc all the small big changes etc that you thought may not make any difference in the life of the consumer also makes a lot of difference so and what you believe is that you don't really know from day one what does the consumer it's only those incremental improvements one after another is what entirely adds up so those A-B testing abilities on the transactional flow right from the sign up transaction was extremely important to drive the growth these are the things I feel are important when thinking mobile first just to add to what you said about 8 to 10 years back when the mobile phone was catching up smart phones there was a hypothesis saying that on mobile phone high value transactions cannot happen examples that people would not buy products above rupees 10,000 and there was a hypothesis being formed saying that nobody buys things on mobile phones yes obviously one was a transaction but fundamentally what was happening was that people were not able to have a kind of experience that they want to have to know about the product buy it right and therefore there were a lot of drop offs and people were saying more conversions on desktop rather than mobile phone now it's completely possible purchase happens on mobile firstly thank you for having me here so I mean taking some of the discussion regional see I think most of you might not have heard about brand we are a OTT brand operates with promise of 100% local entertainment for Telugu and Tamil so started in 2020 and we are pretty much the number one OTT app in Telugu right now being promoted by family of other origin some of you know and my home group was big construction company in Hyderabad so for me in fact OTT itself is an experience on mobile I mean you know entertainment today has been consumed the most on mobile our data shows that 70% of our consumption happens on mobile and you know taking that data further we have about 50% of our consumption in internet users in Telugu thanks to data revolution that has happened everybody has internet access with limited data and etc for me everything happens on mobile because you know the content deliveries on mobile I mean while I'm not ignoring the experiences that has to be translated from a small screen to bigger screens like TVs and living rooms but mobile still is the most important you know device for me for example using mobile in a day is huge you know at least 50-60 times a day you pick up your phone and people are spending 4.5 hours plus on mobile each day while this is happening you know as a brand we are actually fighting for the same 4.5 hours of time so that has to lead to making customized strategies because you know the potential spans are lesser how do you make sure that user experience is amazing on the phone and how you are making sure that the purchase decision is happening faster thanks to you know mobile even purchase decisions are mostly happening on mobile right now as how much how soon can you make the purchase decision happen on a mobile from you know intention to subscribe to make a purchase decision how you can you have to reduce the number of steps that takes to make a purchase decision as well so likewise in the product this thing also is that over a period of time I mean if you have noted if some of us you know notice this as well that the content consumption has moved from horizontal to vertical like you know people are scrolling up so that is also giving us a lot of you know insights into what kind of content we have to develop and what kind of experiences we have to give for example we at AHA apart from the shows and everything that we have we have introduced short form content on the app so that you know somebody is not watching the content but you want to retain them for longer time and you know you give them short form content alongside we also streamline channels on mobile so that their reason to go out of your app is getting you know reduced so that's why we are retaining most of them you know that's why we are you know strategizing mobile as a prime device to you know consider great thank you I think we picked up analysts really well everyone's mobile first but some key takeaways I think about statements about how you should be creative communication and adapting to what is at hand I think that is more important and I think we are all thinking it but action speaks louder so good luck with all of that but yes diving into a few points now of what we've touched on and to be fair I think there's a lot to be talked about but we'll pick a few so as a publisher we've noticed users patterns and how they create certain opportunities for us to help them utilize their time better you know fulfill their needs and be safe in this interaction for example we have seen like how an IPL especially on the weekend we've seen a 42% surge in call engagements with restaurants, pubs FNB services we've also seen booking apps go up by about 59% on match days or the weekends in the evening because people are either catching up with friends or they're going up to a pub to watch the match this is really behavioural patterns so my question is for you Racheke being in the space of content and entertainment picking up on all these behavioural ways would be key to your business mobile usage would be primary a primary means to engage and understand these behaviour patterns so with this in mind what have been your experiences with the impact of mobile usage on consumer behaviour sure so I'll take our business as an example for this so for us to watch a content or a movie piece you need a lot of internet data on device because most of the users are on mobile with probably data limits of 1 to 2 GB per day except for the people who have privilege of Wi-Fi and larger broadband so the limitation of data has become an important part in delivering the right experience because for us as a task how can I deliver a full experience within 1 GB data extremely critical part we take our data seriously so we do our consumer research regularly so the most frequently being talked about issue is that data consumption what we have done is that over a period of time we have perfected our content deliveries and video encoding texts so today we are able to give our experience of 200 hours within 1 GB of data so such things have because you want to give full experience you don't let customers craving for more content at the interval of a movie so it doesn't really fulfill the experience so such things happen the other thing is that early adapters for OTT has been 18 to 35 and for us now the task is to build a category and the category building will happen when we move from urban to tier 2 and tier 3 also requires going more vernacular when I say that the language of navigation on the app you will be interested to know that we have Telugu as a language navigation app navigation in the app not just Telugu but also Tamil and also when you open the app of AHA you don't see content that is in Tamil for Telugu user interface we build custom interfaces so that your user is not confused particularly keeping in mind the behaviors of tier 2, tier 3 audience who wants easy access, simple experiences and all that that is also there also over a period of time urban to rural shift is happening so now the price consciousness has come into picture willingness to pay has come into picture cutting cable cord has come into picture so with considering all this what we also has done is that we have been consistently bringing price points which are mobile mobile only packs so that you encourage mobile usage faces the experience and behaviors of the consumers in the past so such things also has been happening great thank you I think AHA is doing a fantastic job with getting regional using languages like you just mentioned in the most productive way to kind of get that engagement going but definitely listening to your user set so we are looking forward to more from the brand and thank you for that Pranesh moving from a tech to a tech plus auto world now I can imagine would bring a lot of interesting learnings it would also have you be creative in terms of educating, talking about building on your brand and also talking to your consumer said to bring them on board so as a brand crew caller has never had a problem with scale running second after meta but more importantly for us knowing our users trust us they come on board for a purpose and building a certain respect with that is where the growth is so my question to you is you built on trust handled inquiries and used mobile strategies to build your brand story on mobile thank you I'll bring my response to 3-4 categories one is obviously the trust we are in a very new category where there are a lot many brands we have been in the country for decades and there is also a brand in the category which was in other categories actually so we never had the awareness before you can't build trust without awareness so for us an interesting fact that I want to share is we put out our first product in the market in 2018 but we had a community from 2015 onwards so we co-built the product in India and we have taken the quality to such a notch people don't believe that we are an Indian brand so community has played a large role in terms of what we have done so far and what we currently do even today we co-create a lot of stuff with our community and therefore there is a lot of trust even if I stop my market today I am counting on my consumers of my community to fight for over the next 3 months on social media whatever goes wrong second part is the ecosystem when you have to build an ecosystem when you have to build trust for a category like we are a lot of things have to happen to address the barriers so before we walked into this room we spoke about the charging issues that people have in the country today we are the brand which has put 1400 fast charging grids across the country and we are by far the largest by any brand in the country including all brands tool has put together by far exceeding those targets the third is the product without product you can't build trust we are just having to say that we built a good product unless the product doesn't deliver today if you look at your mobile phones the battery which is there probably fits at the 10% you still have that anxiety whether I can consume the next 10 minutes before I reach a charging point today what we offer a large scooter is not just a commute device but also an extension of the mobile phones which actually provides assurance to the team example say I show the battery percentage is 5% and I also indicate the kilometers you can travel with that and that delivers to the team you reach 5 kilometers only then the battery drives and you don't end up on the road without having any charging grids so that's why we built the trust the second point is the education even today though the penetration of EV scooters along the scooter buyers about 20% that's fairly high we have an early majority stage as far as the technology adoption is concerned but still people are questioning about what does EV bring to be of course people know that it's a greener scooter the total cost of ownership is very very less compared to the normal combustion engines scooters but it's not just a scooter that used to be about 5 years 10 years back today the EVs that are coming into market has got to do more with technology technology because we want to provide a different set of experience to a consumer and therefore it is not just an auto it's an extension of your mobile phone and an experience that we provide on the scooter so that actually forms a core part of our strategy when we look at our consumers where we say that okay we are not providing a commute device but we are talking about taking the tensions out of your mind example say every morning you probably may look at your mobile phone to see the traffic but what if it is there on the dashboard of the product the third part is that how we built about the mobile strategy it's been core to our strategy right from day number one that we started even before we had the product all the community that we had the convention that we had was on our mobile that we did and we do today is on the mobile a lot of things that we do as an experience is built into the mobile phones we do today we provide a mobile app I think everybody in this room are aware of the acquisition channels how do you nurture the leads and what do you do post acquisition of the customer for us post acquisition of the customer the experience that we provide on the mobile mobile app is very very important and it is very ingrained in the DNA that we build whatever it is about our consumers and that actually is being delivered on the ground for example say today sitting here I know where what kind of battery is on my scooter because I am an app how many kilobits can I travel if I travel from here to Mysore can I charge it on the way so I can configure my route there is the kind of route that I take I can also know how am I riding my scooter whether I am making efficient utilization of the right battery whether I am riding it the right way so a lot of technologies are built into the app and therefore the entire experience of the scooter the way we look at this category mobile happens to be the core of what we do today but it is all about how we redefine the experience of a scooter for a consumer so today the kind of expectation a consumer has towards scooter is going to be drastically different from what is going to be in the next 5-10 years and actually Aether is defining that one through all the mobile experiences Fantastic I can't wait to see what you all are going to do in 5 years I had an experience actually once when I was in a traffic at a traffic light and I could hear someone talking and having a full blown conversation and I realized that he was talking to the mic because there was a call connected and there was a full blown conversation and for a long time we were all wondering where these voices coming from so were we losing it or were we hearing it but thank you for that I think it's a very interesting space like you said you can have the product but I mean you can talk about the product but you've got to deliver it and when you do that you've gained the user for life and a customer who trusts your brand and kind of works with you thereafter so continuing on trust there is a porter Mohit balancing performance marketing and brand building surely has challenges and can also be an art if gotten right my question to you in this unique consumer business of porter how does the mobile first approach work to balance and use branding and the performance marketing so you rightly said that balancing the performance marketing and the brand marketing is a complex piece I think it requires that fine balance and very honestly I think this is one of the most debated topics within the team internally at least and for the large part of our journey till let's say 2021 we were always organizing in 2021 we decided let's go ahead and invest on the brand side and traditionally I think we are also guilty of it the thinking has been that when you invest investing in performance marketing is very different and investing in brand marketing is very different they probably don't meet with each other but I think that thinking has reward when we did our first brand campaign last time last year which is delivery OJ and it was pretty successful but I think what we realized in our performance marketing as well that our CPCs were lower our CAGs were lower we had thanks to some of the agency partners we were we had implemented ADH inside where we were able to see the data on how the brand marketing or the investment in that campaign is helping us in improving the performance and we saw and we saw some reasonably good results I think and then we realized that you know all of this while maybe we were not thinking it right so my increasing sense is and what we have started doing is that now everything that we consider we have at least moving to that is all of the assets that you are putting out there all of the conversation that you are putting out there all of the content that you are putting out there is all should be passing through the lens of the brand the performance marketing thing should not thinking about okay I will just get those thousands of customers etc and I will not care much about the brand and similarly the brand should not just thinking about the brand but I think they mean and in fact all piece of communication is a reflection of your brand and some of the companies that we have spoke about does that extremely well so that has been our learning and frankly the realization is that I think this is that some of the best I mean all of them have been built for many many years of constant investment on the brand so it does not happen overnight and if they just did performance I am not sure what would have happened and that is not even a possibility but I think the start that at least we have taken is that they go hand in all of your assets need to pass through that brand and when you invest in both of them together is essentially you should be able to move your most important metric which is maybe the brand equity which is the restrict that we have in the market in short I think the learning but I think investing in both of them together till now have did good for us and I think we plan to continue on that journey for the next couple of years Fantastic that is good to hear I hope other publishers are listening to them but yeah I think it is definitely a balancing act brand recall being top of mind is important because automatically if I am looking at a courier service or someone to move by goods brands come to mind and if you are there you get that conversion so yes it is an art thank you we are moving from a to C kind of a format to a B to C to a B to B vocal you have the best experience in this space and I think I would like to ask you about you know retaining customers and this also I would say has a certain action in a dedication may be a quest for excellence in a way now at Rezo Pay so my question is what benefits does this mobile first approach offer and how does it impact customer loyalty I will talk about from both the brands actually I think 50% of the attention was influenced by the storefront that being how we visit the restaurant the checkout and cart experience all of that matters to a great extent how we look at retention and liability but when it comes to Rezo Pay the people that we talk to, people that we service the end of users are business owners these are CEOs, founders co-founders and CTOs, Aadipan who takes decisions on it and what matters to them is the technology that they run the payment has to run smoothly that's what they care about, they don't really have to figure out and we have to be smooth enough so that the business runs smoothly so a lot of their attention has been played on that in terms of how ease of integration how securities they think that's right but when we deeply went into the data and figured out how mobile first approach can really bring an opportunity to amplify the retention piece I think what we found is for example when users on board and when later when they founder or a CTO want to look at on a daily basis or a weekly basis then insights when we hosted that on our app we find great results coming from a retention because the use cases are very different when you integrate or when you're onboarding you don't really use mobile a lot but what sort of use cases I can offer on mobile for a particular user that differ from CO to a finance guy to an account it's a very different insights I can give so a lot of insights, a lot of delight factor that we can put it on our app or on mobile which is which serves as a retention value for us rest of them are core or the core technology that went so I think one of the take away that we always look at what is the right experience that we can create irrespective of the devices that we are working on and wherever we can create an experience on mobile we get to report one of the classic examples is also that we have a product called pre-mail links which is an instantly you can create a link and share with anyone the users of these are like tutors or some music teacher these users doesn't have the time to kind of sit and figure out how do I create my whole payment system they need convenience immediately hence the whole payment links as a product has been built only on mobile versus payment gateway where there is a lot of time and effort required trust required that need to build from a very device perspective there is no irrespective devices you have to bend it right so you are looking at what sort of product, what sort of use cases what's the need of the user and building that and take that to mobile is what matters to us and that helps a lot in our especially our retention some of these strategies helped us in retaining customers when it comes to B2B space Fantastic so I think creating knowing your use case and creating experiences matter something I know of Parna that means a lot to you from an experience perspective so here is you know ODU on crafting a compelling mobile story for all the many brands and industries that you work with how can brands effectively use mobile platforms to enhance their brand strategies and attract new users considering challenges like shorter attention spans and the plethora of choice a lot of it has been spoken you know by Mohit hand vocal but a specific point that what my attention on what Mohit mentioned is about you know it's not to not look at you know a brand strategy from a performance angle itself right it's very hard for agencies as well when you want to experiment when you recommend strategies and obviously right owing to you know the current landscape also you need to measure your return on advertising span and then for your monitoring it very closely but I think if you have to be future ready your communication TG I mean he spoke about both sales and communication TG your communication TG today will be your sales TG in the next few years right and therefore if you do not invest in you know your branding strategies right you cannot therefore you know get your performance you know right it's linked especially on mobile it is not like on television it is not like you know that you first doing a branding awareness and then your consideration and then your performance it doesn't work like that context is very different right and therefore I personally think you should not look at branding and performance separately right it is completely intertwined and you need to keep measuring of course right and which allows you to do therefore data analytics is the key but I think don't look at you know your strategies you know with respect to performance in isolation but you need to also investing a lot in you know your communication your messaging your assets right and then look at how you're creating this awareness over a period of time right I personally buy a lot on Instagram and I don't know about these brands before but I have discovered them on Instagram it's not like I buy in the first shot that I meet them but I know I want I have they have the product that I want they have the color that I want and I like the material and I'm like I know this is for specific categories but I'm saying it's a change in the mindset that's happening so it's not necessary that you have to create a lot of awareness over a period of time to build concentration of course the category that preneces is very different so I can't generalizing it like secondly user understanding user journey is very important right which is why again I go back to analytics and data because where is your consumer dropping out right what is it that they are you know repelling with your communication and messaging what is it that they're not getting it and hence investing in your brand assets right is really really important right it could be anything it could be a social media channel it could be your micro sites it could be your e-com it could be your app anything right but investing in your brand assets and understanding user journey is again very important right while everybody spoke about performance I'm not going to touch upon that because I think they will know it better than me but I'm going to mention something which a lot of which I have not heard in this forum so far is visual storytelling right again look at your modern slightly younger consumer storytelling is important right I mean you need to build your brand narratives for mobile right a lot of brand marketeers you know brands what they say is that I have a 60 seconds so I'm able to tell the story right I will try and do that in 30 seconds but I'm compromising on my storytelling right it does not have to be necessarily a 60 second asset to you know tell your story you can do it in many more interesting ways if you understand the user journey for example my discovery point could be a social media channel right I know I have few seconds and therefore met also spoke some time back about come stopping creatives but I have like you know few seconds to grab my consumers attention but if I'm cracking my consumer I know I can evolve on that narrative therefore what other assets should I invest and build on to continue that narrative so that I think to me is a very powerful strategy that brands can use in fact nobody takes social media post so seriously it's become like a hygiene I'm doing it because I have to be there and therefore my teams also we have a dedicated social media team who's constantly making strategies on social media sometimes they say it's not important to the client right therefore I'm putting something which is you know really doesn't matter I don't even know if my consumers see but I tell them you're so wrong because that specific real estate on a social media is like your full page you know add in a newspaper the only difference is that you need to know the kind of narrative in fact there are immersive technologies which can be used and made you know the social media post can be made you know very interesting and hence which messaging at what stage of your user journey and therefore the context of the environment that you're in so your social media your you know your e-com your app your website your brand assets everything needs to have a different messaging strategy and that you can only do when you have user journey therefore I think visual storytelling to me is a very very important thing that brands need to crack because that's how you will take your brand narrative forward and across multiple formats and you know channels I think that to me is something that will be interesting to see in terms of agencies couldn't crack it nothing like it Thanks Aparna I couldn't I couldn't say it better I think thank you for really setting context on being on the another side of the table and being able to add to what publishers should be doing what brands should also be looking at because I think we all kind of are partners in this journey to play publishers should play a larger role in all this I'm serious because there are ideas there are innovations there are things but then if you are not a lot of times we we wanted to do something but there are limitations what you can do from various challenges that you have I think a lot of innovation also needs to happen on the publishers side because I am discovering the brand there and therefore how I discovered and what is the storytelling I think more formats more innovative formats more interesting options for a consumer and brands to explore I think that's a big responsibility I got myself into that okay saving the best for last I think we can all agree that data is the new gold how one uses it would either accelerate a brand forward or completely misunderstand the modern consumer completely ruining it Prashant what in your experience has been the key matrix with the modern consumer to track effectiveness of branding efforts and user acquisition thank you I guess I am the last speaker standing between everyone here and lunch if I am not mistaken so I will keep it short and sweet so prior to working with MoneyView I am just going to give you two perspectives into this because I was with Flipkart for five years prior to this and we looked at data a little differently there and currently at MoneyView we look at data a little differently but that does not undermine the criticality of how we use that data in the present day and age the common thread is that given that both the platforms that have worked for but that have been a part of their both mobile first platforms you have a lot of information that you get right you have a lot of apographic behavioral patterns what sort of media they are consuming so on and so forth so as a brand what you tend to do is that you rely a lot on the transactional data that you see to come up with a marketing strategy which is a little more transactional I feel rather than also combining that with understanding what the psychographic profile of the consumer is so I think that the apographic data that you get is extremely critical in understanding what are the actions that a consumer is taking before the actual purchase or before actually applying for a particular financial product in the two cases is but that is a lead up to that and that is determined by a lot of triggers barriers limiting beliefs etc so a lot of the data that we have on consumers should also be married to some sort of a research that you do from it could be an offline research it could be an online research but research plus data is something that is very critical at this point in time because the data that you have access to is pretty much the data that all your competition also has access to so it is very critical for you to be able to read that data and decide how you want to segment your consumers and how you want to target them depending not just on that transactional behavior but also on their psychographic profile which part of the country they are from which life stays they are in what are their aspirations what are their barriers to adoption so on and so forth it works it is a very strong point both in e-commerce as well as currently in the fintech space as well now coming to the second part of your question which is how do you measure the effectiveness of the marketing campaigns that you do so there is no real simple answer to this but I would say that as a brand especially talking about money view where over the course of the past 4-5 years we have been growing predominantly on the back of performance marketing I think the effectiveness of overall marketing spends will boil down to what is the level of reliance that you have on main marketing channels the more and more you rely on main marketing channels the more you are going to realize that you will hit an upper cap beyond which you cannot scale or beyond which you are not going to have something of a very different strategy as compared to your competition so for me the core metric and I am not talking about brand or performance separately but I am talking as an overall organization our core metric is to reduce our dependence on paid channels the idea is to increase the percentage share of transacting consumers visitors etc who are coming through your organic channels those organic channels could be your website, it could be coming organically to your play store the number of followers that you have on social media, the level of engagement that you have on social media, the engagement rate and so on and so forth so that for me is a very critical metric of course when you look at it from a performance channel point of view there are other uploaded metrics so as to speak but this should give you an overall health of your brand if you are able to continuously reduce the percentage contribution of your business that is coming from paid channels, you know that at least you are heading in the right direction in terms of how you are positioning yourself for the consumer and how sticky your brand is so yeah. Thank you I think being responsible with data is important ideally looking into it and kind of really custom making it as you need build whatever objective you have and across brands that will vary that's important and I think a key takeaway that everyone needs to look at data but to it responsible so yeah lunchtime everyone but before I want to kind of work up a little appetite here don't worry this is a rapid fire end so for Mohit, Aparna and Prashant what would be that one superpower you think necessary to engage this modern mobile first consumer? A-B testing Respective of how much data we have I think a lot of time we don't know why a consumer is not resonating with the brand and a lot of unanswered questions that clients ask are that we don't have answers for that so I really I think can do that since you said superpower I'm going to keep it outside the realm of reality so I think predictability is something that I would really do anything for because in the current day and age you can't really put a pattern even for say 6 to 8 months that because consumers are behaving in a certain way now they're going to continue to behave a certain way even 4-5 months down the line there's so much external stimulus that's driving consumer behaviour and their decision making that it's become highly unpredictable to be able to know exactly what is going to work and what is not going to work so yeah I think predictability is going to be one superpower that I would yearn for Pranesh Rajshikar and Gokul what is your mantra as a marketer to stay agile with the evolving consumer and take advantage of it a big word of advice see for me it is everything starts from customer keep everything from customer first customer second and that drives me sense of ownership and that drives everything I think that's the mantra I always look forward the mantra that I have is walk into any meeting thinking that you don't know anything especially with people who are very close to consumers and those people are our agency partners, the publishers our FGD discussion that we do with our consumers as marketers we need to be open to a lot of new ideas and once you go with an open mind to learn probably you will pick up more than what you study in books great that's it so for me I think in marketing there are no big ideas they happen very rarely so what you have is an idea and you execute it to perfection and make it big so it's not a good idea but the execution so that's what I believe nice thank you so much thank you my panelists it's been a pleasure very insightful I wish we had more time but maybe we should continue this in a closed door room but and thank you E for having us again my audience it's lunchtime thank you for putting up with yeah maybe outside you can catch them people have got flight to take so we don't want to hold them on that thank you so much thank you