 And with that, let's get our next panel discussion started as well. We've got three of our speakers joining in and another very interesting panel discussion on understanding what builds a retail brand, brand versus retail, that's what we're talking about. So first up, I'm going to invite our moderator, session moderator on stage. We have the CEO of Domino's, Mr. Pratik Pota. If I may please invite Mr. Pratik on stage. And then we also have the CEO of Nature's Basket, Avnidavda. If I may please invite Avnidavda on stage. And the Chief Marketing Officer with Titan Watches, Suparna Mitra. We also have with us Mr. Sadasiv Naik of Big Bazaar. So he's also going to be joining, he's the CEO of Big Bazaar, so he's going to be joining in as well, which is going to quickly make the arrangement. Let's have a special round of applause there to invite our panel member, Mr. Sadasiv Naik. And with that, I'm going to hand over the proceedings to our session moderator, Mr. Pratik Pota. Over to you sir. Hi, good evening everyone. Let me first start by apologizing for what's going to be a difficult session from a voice point of view. I've lost my voice yesterday and I've been struggling my way through hot water gurgles. Thank you Vikram for the recommendation. And this is where I've reached, so I'm going to inflict this voice upon you for the next 30 minutes. Apologies for that. If I may be allowed to start on a slightly personal note, I was introduced as somebody from Domino's, but it would be fair to say that for the large part of my career, I've been an FMCG person. So when Sam came to me some time back and said I should take a session on building a retail brand, I thought about my last one year at Domino's and I thought it would be a good time to step back and reflect on how the journey has been and how the last one has been different from the preceding 24. And what made the invitation even more attractive and compelling was the fact that I was going to be talking to and conversing with an evident panel that I'm very, very privileged to be a part of. These are all touring leaders, thought leaders in the industry and some of whom I can also count as friends. So if I can start off the session, go around the table and if I may ask, all of you are part of very, very strong retail brands, Nietzsche's basket, Big Bazaar, Titan, how has been your own journey of building your retail brand? What have been the challenges that you've been dealing with? How have you grappled with those challenges, wrestling them down to the ground? And how have those challenges, if you will, sort of help you draw some conceptual learnings about what it takes to build a retail brand? Let me start with you Avni. Thank you Pratik and it's great to be here. I think the sessions have been quite enlightening and informative. A reference to your question, I think about reflecting on how brands are built in retail specifically and how are they different from a product journey. I think I've had some experience both in my stint at Starbucks before that with Taj and now with Nietzsche's basket. I think in retail, Pratik, one of the fundamental learnings has been is that it's not just a particular attribute or value that you can associate with a product. I think it is an entire environment or an experience that the customer leaves with. While the transaction is really about the sale of a product or a service, I think there's a lot of different things that go into building a retail brand. In my last almost two years at Nietzsche's basket, I think we've tried to build a journey. It's a very loved and iconic brand, almost considered to be very premium in the grocery space, but if some of you have noticed over the last eight to nine months, we've really changed the way the brand looks. We're in the midst of a transformation and we've really tried to shift away from being a premium, overly aspirational, expensive brand to a more daily food delight and a more neighborhood kind of a brand that we're trying to build. And I think some of the learnings that I can share is that in retail it is, when you start working through the industry, it is about a lot of detail in every aspect of the environment. It's a lot of detail in the communication that you want to get through. So while you have a product and you have a certain set of values and attributes when you're dealing in FMCG, in retail you have to walk through the entire customer journey, whether it's online or offline. But there are several touch points. So a discipline is very important, a very narrow focus on what you want to get communicated. You cannot afford to de-focus on it. By de-focus I mean that you cannot expect whether it's online or offline. Any person or any customer to engage with more than two messages, maximum at a point, right? Whether it's a person selling something to you across the counter or you're on a webpage, I think the two is a good number to stick with. So discipline in terms of messaging is very important. And one other learning is that when we talk to consumers in India or around the world, I think a few years back when I was working in Starbucks, it was always that talking about price is very sensitive. People generally don't want to approach the subject and more so when brands are pivoting from being premium to mass premium or aspirational. In my limited journey, I believe that the Indian consumer or any consumer irrespective of the market that you operate in, price has become a very, very important conversation. The value that consumers are placing on that part of the conversation shouldn't be taken lightly. So just discipline, two messages, different touch points for a retail brand, and price is definitely at the center of the conversation. Thank you Avni, it's interesting that you talk about price right off the bat. And we'll come back to that a little later. But if I may turn to Soparna, your experience. So for being the way, the difference I really see between building a product brand and building a retail brand is the number of people who are in control of the product brand. So the product managers who are deciding the merchandise, the product mix, pricing, advertising, etc., etc. It's very, it's a small group of relatively intellectual people. And you can guide them and they will be able to get the brand. The challenge in retail, and I'll talk about the brand World of Titan, which is the store chain, 480 stores and 210 towns. And most of which are franchisee, owned and franchisee, managed. And their employees who are the people who are finally interacting with the consumers. And at best they get paid 10,000, 15,000, 20,000 rupees a month. They've not been to business schools, they don't understand a lot of concepts. But they are the ones who are dealing with the consumers. And for them to get what your brand is about, what your product is about, for them to display the product they're in and they're outright, to be able to communicate right, your brand can get scattered. And it very often does. And we say that what we plan in the original pristine form of, say a product or a campaign launch, if it is 100, by the time you go to town number 210, it's probably a 35 to 40. And there is a lot of laws. So that's very tough, it's very operationally intense. It needs training, retraining, just a lot of execution. And that's, I think, a very big difference that I see. Thank you, Zopana. And I guess the challenge will be no different for Big Basket. Big Bazaar. I'm sorry, my apologies. Is the shadow hero effect of Big Basket, my apologies. So, well, we see it as a large opportunity. And I think if you really look at, I mean, I would put retail as equivalent to the cha-chi or the mommy would come home. I think she would have traveled all the states of Jaipur and Rajasthan and Gujarat. And she would always be seen as, I mean, I'm narrating personal experience, where you'd kind of see her as a well-traveled person or a well-traveled man. But when she came home, she would kind of sit down with you, have the food with you. Hatsik hatiti, laddu latiti, for what slangs boltiti. So I think we see retail as that brand, which is very, very local to that catchment. So we see that as an opportunity. For lack of time, we will not talk about it. But for us, the largest brand manager, for us is the store karta. We call the manager the store karta, who really executes the brand at that place. Big Bazaar may mean many things to all of us. But what it means in Agartala stays in Agartala. What it means in Virar stays in Virar. So that's really the first messaging to say that it is that person who's traveled worldwide or traveled the country, is a leader. But when it comes down to the local catchment, she gossips with you, he gossips with you. She kind of enjoys all the local nuances of that particular catchment. I think for us, therefore, it has meant three things. One, and Shiv Kumar really bashed up the MBAs in the earlier session. I think we had to kind of come out of this whole term called segmentation. Maybe it's more particular to brands like Big Bazaar, which is really straddling across categories. But we kind of really talk about a concept of unsegmenting. There is no segmentation within us. We are welcoming everyone. You will have the, in certain occasions, we'll have the India too, people from the slums will come. And then suddenly you'll have a very different audience who comes into some of our mall stores. So, unsegmenting is one lesson for us. I think right now we're on a journey where we're trying to personalize at a large scale. The scale of Big Bazaar, we're trying to personalize enough data on hand, enough big data, all the cliches are there with us. But how do we personalize? And personalization could mean, if you look at the business of apparel, what is the shirt size which is required in northeast? It's not very different from the shirt size which is required in Rajasthan. And so how do you kind of factor that in that personalization? And when it comes to food, I'm sure Avni would know that literally across 50 kilometer, you may have a very different rice being consumed in a state called Tamil Nadu or Kerala. So how do you personalize that? And that's personalizing to scale the second messaging. Third, what we're really gearing up for, and I think it's a journey which personally gives me a lot of, what should I say, positive jitters, is we're trying to include as many people as we come. We've created a day within the brand of Big Bazaar for senior citizens. We don't call them senior citizens anymore. We call them young elders. So there's a whole track being run to get young elders into our stores. And as we speak, we're gearing up to be ready for people with disabilities to shop with us. So for us, the brand, how does it expand more and more and get many more customers in without really having the word segmentation, as I told right at the beginning, is very important. The underlying theme, of course, is for many of our categories, we are actually the brand owners. I mean, you may, we have brands, strong brands for watches. We have strong brands for soaps and detergents. But who will sell more backpacks in the country? Who will sell more for burner gas stoves in the country? They aren't too many brands. So Big Bazaar becomes a brand which says we will create our own labels, we'll create a brand. We will sell more flowers in the country. I mean, there's a lot of fasting and feasting which happen in the country, but they aren't enough kuttuata. So who will sell those flowers? So really Big Bazaar becomes a brand which becomes a brand owner for many of these products and categories. So that's been our journey, very, very localized. And we see it as a huge opportunity rather than a challenge. We found our own ways of kind of managing the brand there. No, thank you. If I may just sort of pose a counter question to that. It's very interesting. But, and at the risk of being a little provocative, if I may ask, wouldn't a brand like that run the risk of trying to be all things to all people, to be inclusive to the extent that it fragments its messaging? That's the first part of my question. And the other one would be, how do you ensure that the experience that a shopper gets in Agartala is a seam that he or she would get in some other part of the country? Is that really important in the first place? Or would a brand or retail brand be okay with, you know, people feeling different parts of the animal differently? I think we're quite okay. I mean, I won't call it tolerance, but we've designed such that the local nuances overpower any amount of standardization. So I'll answer your second question first. So if you think about a store like Guwahati, which is a store for us and a very profitable and large store in Guwahati, there is, we run during the local festival there, a ticket size offer, which will give you a fish to pick up when you achieve so much rupees in Big Bazaar. Now, that kind of a tactical activation, we'll never be able to think of it sitting in Mumbai, never. But mind you, the brand becomes very, very strong during that month. We have tons and tons of people coming and shopping for that fish there. The first one, I think really about saying, are we at risk? Frankly, as I told you, there's always, when we kind of look at a decentralized operation, there'll always be that little bit of tolerance, which one will have to bear. But category after category, when we go back and see what you've done, I think the merits of having a store, which is a brand, which is alive in that catchment, overpass everything else. I mean, overpass everything else, be it celebrating Pongal somewhere, be it celebrating a women's day somewhere, everything which is relevant to that particular catchment, the benefits we get are overpowering. Maybe a very specific thing about Big Bazaar is we actually define our category structure as Roti Kapada Makhan. We are present in all three categories. Unlike many of the other formats which we have studied, I think the mix from each one of them is very large. I believe we are one of, we are surely the largest volume producers in a parallel at Big Bazaar, in a parallel. And food, of course, we are there. So if you look at the Roti Kapada Makhan approach, I think we kind of naturally inclined to say, let's get many more, many more customers. We can't really be focusing on one particular segment or we can't focus on one particular age group. Everyone's welcome. I think what remains constant to your point, Pratik, is really a lot of values. I think, be it about democratizing consumption, I mean, the only conversation when a new product comes in saying, how are we going to sell 200,000 pieces? And that's the conversation. So whether it is price as a lever, whether it is a combination as a lever, whether it is using our big data as a lever, that's the conversation which happened. The democratizing has been a large value. Anything which comes, we have to make sure that 5 lakhs, 10 lakhs, 6 lakhs people buy in the country. And so that's been a fairly constant theme for us. That makes a lot of sense and I must sort of give you credit because as a shopper, if I go to a Big Bazaar store in Phoenix Mills here or in Sahara Mall in Gurgaon, I see no difference. I experience the brand as one. So clearly you sort of defining it as Roti Kapada Makhan seems to have transcended the possible divisions. From my own point of view, going back to what we were discussing about FMCG versus retail brands, I think the one huge difference is that as a FMCG marketer, how I perceive the brand is dependent on how I am communicated. So the communication piece is a big driver of perception and brands are built largely by communication and this is the right forum for talking about that. But I dare say how I experience the brand is how retail brands are more predominantly built. And going back to Subarna's point about therefore ensuring that the experience in whichever part of the country is uniform, I think that becomes as much a brand-building challenge as it becomes a customer service challenge. So in your experience Avni, how do you ensure that that moment of truth when the shopper walks in, the premium shopper in your case, looking for a very specific assortment, a specific product and looking for more information, that person in that store is able to disseminate their information accurately, credibly, succinctly? I think the difference really for anyone working for a product company and I think she kind of reflected on it a while back, is that you have a defined set of people and then you put it out there through your distribution all through media and you talk about ROI and stuff like that, right? It's very tangible, it's maybe measurable, there's a lot of debate on that. But when you move to an experience like in a nature's basket, which is a grocery experience or a big bazaar, I think the touchpoints are more diluted and when I say diluted I don't mean that the message cannot be given in a focused manner. What I mean is there's a lot of human factor that comes in. It's almost like an analogy of working in an army, so there is a set of people that decide how the war will be fought and then everyone has to fall in line to do it. But unfortunately, unlike a war in a retail environment there are a lot of human factors that come to play. So the training of the people or largely where you get the people from and what they understand of your brand becomes very, very important. So in the moment of truth, whether you're looking for a refined cheese or you're looking for that particular wine or simply buying an atta or a chaval, it is either that POS material that you have or the person behind the counter who influences that transaction. And a lot of miles have to be walked for that person really to translate and experience. In my previous company, I think Starbucks, we used to very humbly say that the company is very, very fragile while it's a very large retailer. In retail, most large companies will admit that whether it is a human influence, the company is very fragile because if the person is not having a good day or how much of a training he or she may have received, the moment of truth does get messed up, right? Whether it's a beverage they are making or the cheese that they are selling to you or the particular promotion, like in Big Bazaar, if he runs something and the fish runs out, that's the end of the promotion, right? You may have a thousand customers waiting, but they will not have a great experience. So I think for retailers, one is we have to be very humble in accepting that focus is required so that rather than giving out 100% and the 210 store having 35%, your entire journey and the entire time that you spend is to ensure 99% is delivered at every store. Is it tough? Yes it is. I think it's very, very challenging. And today the environment, Pratik, is also very different, right? Look at Amazon Go, or we had a colleague from Big Basket talking about how she could track every minute of what is happening on online screen. So for me, the time is great. I think it's the age of the consumer. They literally are not just the king, they are very promiscuous. They are in a space where they have the luxury of choice and as marketers or business people or as growth managers, I think our challenge is to maintain that discipline, to have the humility to understand that the job of communicating in a product company or in a retail company is going to be challenging. And I think we should by and large try and love it because it is going to continue to get even more complex, right? I was watching, talking to a friend who actually went to the Amazon Go store at Seattle and he actually tried to flick something just to know what are those little gizmos and cameras. He took something and put it in his colleague's bag and just to see who has to pay for it. And he got charged for it, right? So Amazon Go is almost a humanless store with almost 134 cameras is what I read about. So technology is also another big challenge that we should look at as an opportunity and embrace very quickly. So that's my two bit about where, you know, brand messaging or the moment of truth comes. I think it's an exciting time and the faster we embrace it rather than looking at it as a big question to answer and enjoy the journey, I think it'll be more fruitful. Thank you. I'm gonna make a mental note of that. The consumer is a promiscuous king. Okay, so if I can turn to you, Soparna, are there any best practices that you have, I guess, over time, arrived at for ensuring that harmonization of the moment of truth? Anything that you've done at Titan? So I'll give an example, which is a very successful example. And I mean, I'm admitting that there have been many failures and but I wouldn't, I'm not giving an example of a failure. The successful example that we had very recently, we did in Titan Raga, collaboration with Masaba Gupta, who's a designer. And it was, we thought a very good association because Raga is known for, it is the only women's watch brand in India. It's known for a very specific design language code. It has a very specific consumer base. However, we felt that it needed a newer younger audience, you know, base coming in. And part of it is also the position of Raga because it is seen as a more ornate and a more feminine watch, which would be worn on special occasions. And it goes really well with Indian wear. And what is happening is a lot of young women don't wear Indian wear anymore. And we felt that Masaba was a designer who's really able to connect and give a real fresh twist to Indian wear. So that's how the association started. Now that's just at that concept level than the product, which was something which was very unique. Then the advertising, which was almost all on digital. The interesting thing was the retail presentation and the VM that went with it, the training that went with it and the ability of the, I would say a lot of, we call them customer relationship officers, CROs, the sales staff. A lot of the younger women CROs did an outstanding job of explaining that unique collection to consumers. I think they connected at a level beyond the PPTs and the training. They were able to suggest to a lot of younger consumers, why don't you look at this and this is how it works. And we did fantastically well. It continues to sell and sell very well. I think we were surprised and it's sold in a lot of smaller towns also. So I'm actually now contradicting what I was saying earlier, which is that there are challenges, but sometimes you can be surprised with what potential there is and how retail can be a huge enabler to a quirky idea. And without the retail store and the retail chain, I don't think this would have found its place under the spotlight. It really found a stage and we really were able to explain it and the rest of it was, of course, the consumer was ready for it. Thank you. Does it also happen in this question for everyone? Could it also happen that the limitations in store of the CRO, for instance, become a bottleneck in, or become a boundary condition for the brand that it can't explore the extremities because there is the bottleneck at the store? Has it ever happened to any of you? Not really. I think as I said, we still maintain that the people there really has been the binding force to build brands. I think what's really been holding us back are more efficiency related stuff. And I think this is not the forum to discuss that. We can bring that out. But for us, they have been the custodians to really build a brand. I think what we do, if we have to just share some rituals which we do, I think it could be very small things like there are storytelling sessions within the store where we are not involved. They talk about what they did yesterday for customers. I think it's a very small story. It's a sit-down story. Some people sit on the floor, they normally talk about what we did yesterday for the customer. That's a storytelling session which happens. Two, let's say many of us told on their own do a ritual of clapping the first few customers when they enter the store. From our end, there are certain rituals which we also do and I would like to share an experience we went to a store in Matunga, not possibly the best experience of a store. It was a store which he kind of acquired from another chain. We built, as I said, we're gearing up for being ready for people with disability. So we created a trial room for apparel and we created a toilet for people with disability. And when we walked in there, the store manager came and said, sir, the place is very short. We made a trial room, but believe me, there's only one person in four months. And for us, so we could have said, okay, let's do something. But we said, okay, let's be ready for that. And till they don't come, you can use it for whatever else you want. But whenever that person, he or she comes to buy apparel, a person with disability, we should be ready for it. So those are the messaging and I think small, small rituals and small, small messaging which we do symbolically, but I think which really says that the customer is so centric to the brand, we can't run it out of a home office in Mumbai. So you'll have to run it at your place. We can only create infrastructure for you. So for us, it's never been a challenge from that space. That's an amazing story. If I may switch gears a little bit and go back to Avni, what you began in your opening remarks, you spoke about price. Now classical marketing, and in the school that I grew up in, it seemed to me that, and Shiv talked about it in his speech as well. Excessive discounting, sustained deep discounting, hurts and damages brand equity. But it seems to me now that almost the entire retail industry has been built on a succession of deep discounts. So how do we reconcile this apparent paradox? Any response? I think one Pratik is that when I spoke about price, I think irrespective of, we can debate about how a lot of different business models in e-tailing and others are getting built and therefore both online and offline are forced to have these discount battles. So you look at even telecommunications, a very different kind of price war is being raged in that sector as well. What I meant by price is that today, consumers are a promiscuous and they have so spoiled for choice that you need to very appropriately understand what value you're creating for them. And whether you're a premium, whether you're selling a $50,000 watch or you're selling a $50 wine, I think you have to be very clear of what you stand for and be very open and transparent about talking about it. So I don't think we have the luxury to say that we can launch at a price, let the season get over and we'll discount because today consumers like the West, they wait, wait and wait for your discount before making the purchase choice, especially in discretionary items. But when I speak about price, I think we've always tried to walk away and every marketer or even a business leader is very afraid to take the communication on price head on. And a little while back you said, how does a retail workforce at the store level become an impediment sometimes in the price conversation? So I'll give you an example of our brand. Price, and we never had any price tags. If you walked into a nature's basket two years back, it was all about a great brand, but everybody thought that the aspirational, the who's who bought their grocery from your, it was not a neighborhood store. So really even the staff actually believed and we had instances of customers telling us that I'm an average middle class person, I walk into your store and I feel alienated. It's like it's not for me. So really moving away from that and before we could take the price conversation or the transformation of the brand to the customer, we had to convince the people at the store of what we were doing. And believe me, it was challenging. So the best conversation would be had within the store and tell them this is what our prices are and they would still not accept, especially in categories like F and V or bakery. They always assumed we are far more expensive than the local store or the nearest competitor. So A, when you start talking about the price, our journey has been to convince our own internal battles first before we take it to the consumer. And sometimes it can become an impediment and I think not only focus and discipline but a lot of data is required to even convince people internally. So Banna, any thoughts on this? Yeah, you're right Pratik. In the last, I would say probably five or six years, the amount of discounting as well as the weeks on discounting has really gone berserk. This is true for most apparel and accessory brands and it is partly also because apart from the usual end of season sale season that used to happen in July, August. And there was a reason in apparel, there's always a reason why you have end of season and it's particularly true in Western countries where what you wear in summer is so different from what you wear in winter. So your fresh season merchandise arrives by March and you sell right from April to June and then in July you liquidate and by September you get in fall and fall and winter. Somehow we are now following that and as a result what has happened is we have those four to six weeks. Now on top of this what has come are the Ecom discount days, the big billions and all of that. So as a result all of the brands then are following two or three rhythms of discounting. One was the original one, one is what the Ecom players have actually almost led a lot of brands to do because if you don't participate there's blood on the floor and if you do participate well there's blood somewhere else I guess. So it is a tough choice. And the third thing which is also something that I see increasingly is retailers are doing occasion. It is Valentine's Day so I give discount. It is New Year's so I give discount. It's Christmas so I give discount. It is Friendship Day so I give discount. So it has gone a little hey Var. But brands are of course very mindful that all of this leads to margin erosion and there is always that tussle between growth market share on one side and margin erosion on the other. And I think a lot of brands are now getting into a slightly more sane space because it's not sustainable. Thank you and if I may just end with an example for my own universe. Domino's used to do a very deep buy one get one discounting for a long time until last year. And we were mortally afraid of putting it back. But when we did that we stopped deep discounting and we moved to a more national everyday price. We have seen our sales increase, our brand equity measures improved and of course margins come strongly back as well. So thank you. Thank you folks for a very fascinating discussion and thank you for your time. If I may just summarize and four or five points that we've discussed and placed before you. A I think the first and the most important thing is that the consumer, whether he or he's a promiscuous king or not, has to be at the epicenter of whatever we do, understanding him, making sure that the service experience in the store through storytelling techniques, through any of those training protocols. I think that remains super important. Technology can be a force multiplier. We didn't talk much about that today, but we all know that in retail and an on the channel world, recognizing consumer using technology can be an extremely powerful asset. Brand building therefore in the retail universe has to be necessarily cross-functional. It has to involve supply chain. The stocks have to be there in the store. It has to involve service, customer service team. It has to involve HR, happy employees and of course marketing. So it would be fair to say, I guess, that brand building is as much a CEO's job as it is the CMOs. And in that, retail brands are no different from FMCG brands. Thank you very much folks. Thank you. Thank you. Well, thank you very much. I'm going to request our panel members to please remain on the stage. I'd like to invite Mr. Vivek Sharma, the Chief Marketing Officer with Perilight, to please come forward and present a token of gratitude to all of our speakers as well. If you may request all of you to come together for a group photograph as well. Thank you once again.