 So we'll join the RP Sanjeev Goenka group with the responsibility of leading the FMCG business. His journey in the group commenced as president of business development and growth in 2016 and was instrumental in the launch of Brand 2 Yam. Ladies and gentlemen, his deep experience in investing, having previously co-laid McKenzie institutional investing practice in India enabled the RPSG group to set up their first consumer-oriented early-stage venture fund, RPSG Ventures. Please give a big round of applause as we welcome on the stage Sunil Sameer. It's interesting, let me actually start with the disclaimer. I don't know marketing too well at all. I am right place, right time, and lucky enough to run a FMCG business and it's been an incredible learning journey for me as well. As you've probably heard, my background was actually consulting. I was a partner at McKenzie and I used to actually lead a very different sector. I used to work in clean tech, all the climate change, carbon emission, renewables is what I used to do. And two years back I had this brain-fed moment on I wanted to launch something from scratch and that's where I joined the group and started the FMCG business. I think what I am going to try and keep this short. What you're going to hear is a lot which you will already know, difficult to tell audience like this any rocket science on digital marketing, but I'm hopefully trying to go through some of my personal examples and some of my experiences, not necessarily from 2M, in fact very little from 2M. The team which created this document had put in lots of videos of 2M, which I have not to their liking removed from the presentation because I actually don't feel 2M is a great example of what can be done on digital marketing. So I'm going to borrow a lot of examples from brands I like, borrow a few examples from startups you may or may not have heard of and try and do this. First a few disclaimers and given I'm from McKenzie I will say three. We always have three points in McKenzie. So the first one all images are copy pasted so please don't hold me accountable for what you see. I think the second which is as you can read this is the work from two of my very very lovely brand managers who I think slogged a lot of time last night to get this ready. And I'm going to keep text at a minimum because I've always feel when you have text on the page then people don't listen to you. This is marketing 9080s and we had a very lovely conversation in the other room around how marketing used to be early age of course I don't need to talk a lot about this but you can get the just a lot of TV, newspapers, radios, etc, etc. And from there I think the world started thinking about digital and I think but it was a very I've always thought a lot of companies do a very half hearted attempt at digital right because you look at digital and you say e-commerce only accounts for one percent of sales right. So why even bother right and sometimes people confuse e-commerce with digital they are of course not they're related but not necessarily anyway close to being same. But I think even internally as we are as a group we are looking at other categories beyond snacks which are more e-commerce friendly but the first question everyone asks me what is the percentage of e-commerce sales and I think my conversation with them always is a relevant question because whether your sales will come from e-commerce or not but where is your consumer right he is on his phone he is on his laptop and he is not necessarily watching us as who serials on TV right so and therefore digital becomes important recently I came across this data which basically said you don't need to make this story any longer because e-commerce is not only influencing spends but e-commerce is or digital is not only influencing spends but a lot of the stuff will be bought digitally right so and again a lot of these numbers you will know beauty wellness and personal care is a 17 billion dollar industry in India in 2020 70% of this will be influenced digitally right so influence digitally means either bought online or researched online before you buy it at the store right so so this is a big number and roughly half of the internet users will be actually buying products online right and this is a big jump from even today because today this number number of people who buy online is around 160 170 million right so this will become three two x in the next three years and and again this is forward-looking data but even if you look at past this is exactly proved by how at least in this category beauty and personal care how e-commerce has grown right so or how digital buying has grown the amount of stuff which was bought digitally last year in beauty and personal care were roughly three and a half thousand crores and this number was 450 crores two years back right so so this is this is the space which is growing incredibly fast and will not only there is a part a of influencing spends and there is a part b of like how do you actually start buying online I think what I am going to now do is lot of sort of try and put in context the five phases I see digitally evolve over a period of time and and take you through phase by phase I think this is phase one which is old world thinking people will look at product online and buy offline right which is what some of some of my colleagues who are doing old world businesses like selling fans and ACs etc the first thing that it was let's create a website let people compare features etc etc let's get them make the decision offline and then sorry make the decision online and then they will go to the store and they will find where is the closest chroma and buy the product from there right so it was a important step in the evolution but I think a lot of more people have moved from there to at least stage two which is at least start selling online right I have an option of buying from your website list on like whatever 10 15 platforms Amazon's Goki or whatever is relevant for you and start telling there I think these two steps literally are table stakes right so if your business is not doing these two then it's a cause for concern right so and this is where 2m is unfortunately I think we've just done step one and step two but there is a lot more which goes beyond this on doing digital well right so this is this is not even digital this is just having online presence so people can discover you and this is just like basically piggybacking someone else piggybacking someone else to sell your product on their platform right this is you can literally treat this as one more retailer for you I think step three which is where it starts becoming interesting is when you are using digital to a identify who your target audience is and try and connect with them and engage with them I think I'm just going to actually run a video this is Durex if you've not seen Durex's social media handles all of you should I'm incredibly impressed with what work they do and I don't know how do I play this video can you play from there Saudi Arabia Morocco and Tunisia a wonderful opportunity for Durex Arabia why because countries playing in major sporting events often experience baby booms nine months later as fans celebrate their team's victories with sex the problem is in the Middle East contraceptives can only be advertised on highly regulated social media channels and any mention of sex can provoke powerful negative reactions but what if we embrace their risk and turned every game into a reason to celebrate with sex not just the victories but the losses the draws the red cards the unforgettable goals and more from the first game to the last we were able to hijack the twitter conversation during every match with cheeky new names for our condoms plant posts that celebrated expected moments and tactical posts created on the fly during the game became reasons to celebrate with partnering with the region's biggest e-commerce site then allowed us to drive themed Durex bundles for discreet purchase and delivery with every post while hardline conservatives reacted as expected the majority of our audience loved it the engagement rates smashed twitter's benchmarks by 900 percent in the biggest market of Saudi Arabia while e-commerce sales rose over 250 percent over the same period the previous year and twice as much as valentine's day at the same time offline retail sales jumped an incredible 28 percent across the region a media cost for engagement 90 percent below the average meant we were even able to refund 75 of the media budget after the campaign on twitter the organic follower base lifted 128 generating almost twice the sales leads as valentine's day the peak time of the year this made us one of the most talked about brands on twitter in the region during the world cup with no official sponsorship or media coverage whatsoever from being one of the least followed durex arabia is now one of the leading durex twitter profiles in the world the most important result though we'll only know that nine months after the world cup was lifted and you should if you if this topic interests you you should go through some of the work durex has done it's i think first thing you have to get right when you're doing digital is actually treat digital as a separate medium and we are having again this conversation digital doesn't mean i've created a tv ad let me play it on my social media handle right the content has to be different the objective of digital is engaging with the consumer right it's not let me show him my ad and run awareness for that tv will probably always be the cheapest medium to get to the consumer the objective of digital is like get consumers hooked on to content create a positive net promoter score etc etc right so i think there is another example of kfc but that i'm going to skip but i think in 30 seconds what kfc by and large was able to achieve in uh india is to increase their they did a lot of these challenges rj hunt they ran few design your own bucket this is all done around the last world cup and i think what they were able to achieve was to do a 50 percent increase in nps scores on the website on increase number of followers as you can expect but more importantly drive 20 percent of their sales during that period through online right so i think there are lots of interesting stories i'm happy to go through them later but i think the the fourth stage which is why are you doing this right eventually everything comes down to how can i drive sales right so i think the step four which is a which is the important link and parts of that were actually in the direct story as well is how do i convert this engagement into sales again if i'm not going to play this ad not because i don't want to but i couldn't find a copy which i can embed in the video but if you've not seen the burn the burn the whopper or burn that ad work by sorry by burger king then you have to see it it is one of the most it was one of the most talked about campaigns last year it was a very simple campaign right it was like mcdonald does a lot of ads and lots of boards etc across across the country wherever you see a mcdonald board just take out your phone and there's an app which you've installed which is the burger king app so first thing you're driving app app downloads every time you see a mcdonald ad anywhere on a digital hoarding on a newspaper just point to the app and press a button and the ad will burn itself it was augmented reality and a and a burger king burger whopper will come on the screen and one out of every five consumers will get a free burger right it was a pure and you may say where is sales because it's free burger but you're effectively a creating a lot of social media buzz engagement around yourself but you are potentially getting a customer who was to go into a mcdonald to come into a burger king instead have a free burger i'm sure but he will not come alone he will come with five friends have four more burgers maybe he's not even tried the brand right it was it was incredible they run ran this in brazil they've taken this this year to us and they're taking this this year to canada very very interesting examples and there are a few more but i think the most obvious one is use of augmented reality and digital in creating virtual trial rooms i don't know all of you know what a virtual trial room is yeah okay so this is a of course helps you engage with the consumer but i think some of the interesting numbers i was talking to one of my colleagues who used to run this for mintra is like the amount of time a consumer spends on the mintra app which is one of the way their financial investors evaluate them it has gone more than doubled right because people are even if they have no intention of buying they're just browsing through apparel and figuring out what do they like not like how will it look on them and of course it is leading a to more impulse buys but more importantly the conversion on each cloth suddenly goes up because half the times you like a particular dress but you don't know how it will look on you etc etc and you just leave it right so and and this is very very interesting and this is done the technology behind this now there are two or three people who do this but is basically created by a bunch of kids who are like 25 year old out of college this is not a very rocket science technology but i think embedding this on a digital platform is is like one of the ways the sales have really really increased i think this is now we've talked about just pure visibility be available visible hope to get offline sales sell online on other people's platform we talked about engagement we've talked about getting some of those converted into sales i think the last part of the puzzle is which is how do you use influencers and and content creators to drive sales i am not i again i'm not necessarily the best person to talk about this but again one brand you should all check out is this brand called mama earth has anyone heard of mama earth very few people so mama earth is my favorite brand it started as a it started as a mother and baby personal care brand i think they've gone now much wider and become a wider personal care brand but but all their marketing actually 80 percent of their marketing budget is actually spent on influencers and the way they do this they do two things one they work with communities of moms so they have this thousand mom's network going where each new product is actually tried by the mom first all those thousand moms get a free product they try it out figure out whether it is working or not give feedback product is changed and then they are the people who are selling it right so these are people who actually use the product they've actually used it on their children and they are selling the product through their social media handles through their videos etc etc and they get a percentage of sales the second thing which they've done very interestingly a lot of time people ask me how do you really calculate a ROI of a social media influencer and these guys also learned from example from a very bad example and this is no disrespect to Shilpa Shetty she's a great support but every time they used to create content through Shilpa it used to get incredible number of eyeballs zero sale right and the logic was no one believed that Shilpa uses these products on her children right because you need to be credible when you are talking about oh I love this product please use it right so so it was like we've given Shilpa like fair amount of money we've given her a bunch of equity and yeah maybe awareness is increasing but I don't care about awareness right I'm I'm not a general trade selling brand where awareness matters I want people to see me online and buy me online and they've completely stopped doing like content with Shilpa of course I'm sure they have their contract obligations etc but but they've and they've gone on a very other extreme on saying we only work with influencer and the way we work with influencers is very common a lot of you may already be using it is every content which is created has a code you go to the company website only where you can redeem the code and you get a 25 discount so therefore over a period of time they build this database where for every influencer for every type of product they know how much every time I pay him how much he's selling and therefore what is my ROI behind all of this incredible work you should check out some of the work these guys have done disclaimer I am an investor but this is not the reason I put the example out here right so I think just one page of data and this is all self-explanatory so I will not go through this but I think the only thing this says is I think a lot of the world is realizing that influencer marketing is going to be critical unfortunately the amount of money spent on this is still very small right so and and I think it increased 100 percent last year but 100 percent from a very from zero means nothing right so so I think you see a lot more money going into this over the next couple of years I have just one last page has anyone heard of these two companies okay I only see two hands I think the face is involving so fast that like I think I'm still learning digital and the world has moved to video commerce I think this is the next big thing and I'm especially a very very big fan of sim sim if you find time I think they've just launched a google play store version and an android version it's very very innovative I think it's a it's a combination of what you call AI and and digital working together right so the way sim sim works in a nutshell is it says so it's a mere deli boy rich muscle of booze and guns right by and large and and therefore and probably listens to mica and does whatever whatever and dies a bmw right so so they will use this algorithm and your previous history on e-commerce buying to figure out what sort of products you like what price point you typically buy right so there's a lot of AI going at the back end to sort of create a image of what type of a consumer you are I think then on top of that what they do is you go on the website and or on the app and say I want a anti blemish screen right suddenly 10 recommendations will pop up which will all be AI filtered based on what you buy what type of products you buy you buy a you buy a karma or you buy a forest essential or you buy a lack may 10 products will show up these all 10 products will not be like typical as you go on amazon and the product is there and like prices there this is 10 videos of actually content created by influencers you talking about what is good for the product what is bad in the product why you should buy it why you should not buy it and these 10 are obviously curated already for you right and they know who you follow so some of the people you follow if they are one of the people recommending the 10 products their videos will be on top and these are all by the way genuine videos these are not because they don't pay their influencers anything they have a tie up with the brands that they cannot pay influencers directly so influencers only get money as a percentage of sales so therefore as a influencer your credibility and a you should believe in the product you should think it will really work otherwise you will not waste your money in creating the content and posting it because if it doesn't sell then you don't get the money and if it sells and it's not a great product then your followers etc will not stop believing you and will not buy the products you propagate the next time right so it's a so it's a very like you literally see 10 videos load up you go through the 10 videos you select the product and and you move on and with the rate how data is becoming faster and cheaper I genuinely believe sim sim or whoever people will do video commerce and it's not surprising to believe someone like Amazon will do video commerce this will become the next 10 20 billion dollar play right because this is using this is using AI already this is using influencers already it's using video already which is mainstream and what all these guys are trying to do is on top of this ad vernacular right so so for example sim sim already works with 5000 influencers and they ensure that they have at least 200 300 influencers in by and large every state right so it's a lot more and the content therefore is lot more suited to etc what you would like to what you would like to see I think this is all I I think we are also almost short on time great to be here if you have any questions I'm happy to take and otherwise I'm done do we have any questions all right thank you very much oh we've got one I have a very basic question partly you have answered it for your category which is primarily food stroke FMC so to say how much role does digital play in product offtake not branding because you spoke about you know real sales coming from digital and that is the expectation a lot of companies CEOs marketers have from digital now yeah so how does it fit in and what is where do you see it going say two three years down the line so I think it's an interesting question and that's something I grapple a lot with especially for a category I think food may be slightly better snacks is probably the worst right because snacks is a very impulse consumption by and large right I want a snack packet I want it now I am not going to go on Amazon and order a snack packet which will show up at my house four days later and then right so and therefore if you don't have a meaningful conduit to buy online it many times becomes just a awareness game and which itself may be meaningful right because a lot of the a lot of the users have actually moved away from TV so if you're a conventional TV advertiser which we are a lot of metro audience in the 15 to 30 age bracket which is actually my code is actually no longer watching TV right so I may still use digital to get awareness in that audience but that's but that's a very like sorry to be blunt to some marketers that's a very marketer way of explaining how money is spent right so and awareness is a metric but awareness for unless it is complemented with potential sales opportunity or at least consideration it's it's not helpful right but so I think I'll tell you how digital helps and I tell you a couple of things from our example I want to avoid to em which have really worked we did a lot of work around the IPL this year on actual consumer engagement which was we said don't run these TV ads on digital and like spend money on it but actually create content we so we created this game called Karare strikers where you can literally take your phone your screen someone will bowl on the screen you play with the bat you score runs and based on the runs you score you get like free 2m deliver to your home multiple multiple things and a few other things a lot of influences talking about it I think what that helped and and interventions those like those still help brands like snack brands is get incredible amount of trials and these are not free trials because we were giving discounts etc so these were paid trials clear consideration to purchase and I think our IPL time sales and which IPL time is generally very bad for snack sales because it's cool holidays it is heat a lot of the snack consumption happens roadside tea shop cigarette shop which comes down our IPL time sales still went up by 27 28% in a month right and and it's of course very difficult to say what led to it but I think this was a big influence and the reason I'm also saying this was a big influence is the other part of my answer which is a lot of hyper local delivery coming in big basket grofer your milk basket and all of that that has actually made the category more amenable to online right because I'm no longer now waiting for two days for my snacks to come but on big basket or milk basket I can get it delivered in two hours right so and then at least the consideration of evening there is a party at my home let me order for that has suddenly gone up right so I think over a period of time I feel that this will become meaningful for example for I think snacks friends and I'll give you a example that's why we are investing so much on it and I can partly already see the reward is for snacks category in general e-commerce and all these hyper locals etc is 0.2% of sales for 2m it is 9% of sales right so so we are we still a very young brand small brand so latest 0.2% maybe like as big as my point whatever 9% but the fact that 9% of our sales are coming from e-commerce without doing any significant investment it is my 5% of media budget right now is that testament to this is moving and this is moving very very fast and the channels are not your conventional Amazon and Flipkart say we will buy but the channels are a lot more hyper market hyper local delivery systems like a milk basket or a or a big basket and they are investing a lot on this by the way right we've got another question hi this is Rohit from Raymond you mentioned that the way influencers operate and we've seen it in a lot of social media and also in e-commerce sites is that discount is a norm right so you're spending media monies or money around influencers you're also offering a discount over here yeah and you have other channels of sales as well so how do you make it a profitable model specifically when it's conversion led no absolutely by the way it's very profitable I think what what we are missing is typically when you offer a code and that's why you have to do it smartly and that's why maybe mama earth is a great example to look at whenever mama earth uses the influencer content to give you a discount it is on mama earth website you can't redeem it anywhere else so a they are driving people to their website increasing followers directly on the website and b when you are selling from a website versus the amazon you're already saving 25 margin which you are otherwise paying to amazon right so and the discount is never more than 25 percent right of course it can be but on an average blended discount is less than that so if you use the influencer strategy plus discounting and drive traffic to your website a you are driving a more profitable sale than standard amazon sale and b you are getting people onto your website and check a much wider resortment your website look and feel your brand story versus on amazon just being able to see the product and the benefits of the product right so and therefore this has to be more thoughtfully done if you even if you give a discount on amazon that's not really helpful right you also want consumer data to come in you also want ROI on the influencer to be calculated and for that you need to give a quote right so so therefore in fact I would suggest if you're ever doing a influencer content you should always give some discount it may be as low as 10 percent because otherwise if there is no discount you just say go on website and buy then you cannot track the ROI of the of the campaign at all sorry I have to rush any of enough can reach out to me later thank you very much any any more questions you can have offline and may I request Mr. Throopthavan a group head accelerate business google india to come on the stage and give a token of appreciation to samir thank you samir for a very interesting session