 Hello and welcome to exchangeformedia.com. My guest today is a CMO who has not just done exceedingly well in India but has also been recognized globally in many best CMO lists. He has recently been promoted and he is a CMO who needs no introduction. Please welcome Mr. Ravi Santanam, Group CMO, HDFC Bank. Thank you. Thanks Ravi for taking out time. Let's start on the good note. You have recently been promoted. Congratulations. Tell us more about your new roles and responsibilities. Thank you. Thanks for the wishes and the congratulations that you sent on the day that it was happening and now also. See what we have done at HDFC Bank is marketing should not be alone about communication and creating preference for the products that we sell. It's also should be a direct revenue generating function. That is the ambition that we all had when we joined this place also and the combination of digital and the fact that we what we do is finally at the end of the day provide a lot of services which necessarily does not have a physical form allows it to be very very clearly be digitally sold and digitally fulfilled. So over a period of time we at HDFC Bank has done a lot of work in terms of creating journeys for completing all the things that a customer would like to do with the bank digitally. So what has now happened is that has been formalized as a direct to consumer business and I've been asked to head that business. So in addition to all the retail products of the bank even the SME products of the bank that we can directly sell in the digital form will all come under this banner including our new age app only products like for example in the payment space like smart app, a base app and Vyapar which is for the merchants and all this will come under this business and we want to run it as a separate profit center. Okay. You know, mentioned this new thing that you're starting under digital. I noticed that your campaigns were very active on digital and in last few years there's been a clear shift. So if you would like to give us more details about your media mix you know when it comes to digital versus traditional. How much have you shifted to digital in the last two, three years? See for us the media mix has always been a function of two things. One is a specific campaign which will have a very clear business objective and there will be a marketing objective and there will be also a campaign objective. So when we look at what this the business objective sometimes you might want to create at a brand level a high level of preference, a high level of awareness for a specific product. These two are very different. So depending on what the objective of the business, what's the marketing objective as well as what is the specific campaign objective the media mix model gets defined for us. So when you're talking about festive treats for example, this is more at a very, very high brand level because what we are creating is an offer for our customers right across the ecosystem of products and services that we provide. So there we will try and see from our perspective. What is it that we need to do? So there will be a little more preference for the traditional media because it allows us to get to reach very, very clearly and quickly and fast. So even press comes into fact in a play in many of the same because you get a very quick reach and awareness and it's also a short period of time. So you want everybody to come to know about the offer on day one to the extent possible because you have a 15 day, 15 or 45 day festival period where we want to maximize the ability of our customers to avail of these options. So that's how the media mix gets defined. When it comes to the direct to consumer business for example, there are two roles that we need to play for today's consumer. It might be more about digital because at the end of the day I'm targeting a very specific cohort of customers who are wanting to go ahead and experience HTFC's banks production services. But for tomorrow's consumers, it will be more about brand because we need to create the awareness that these are all the services and the products that we have for offers for you as a customer. And whenever you think of it, maybe you might think of purchasing a home maybe three months down the line, six months down the line. At that point of time, if I'm going to come and reach you and say I have an offer and that's not the time to create that's not the time to create the preference. So we would like to do a lot more of brand investments. So we look for whether it is a today's customer or tomorrow's customer. Today's customer is more going to be digital in my view and tomorrow's customer is going to be more brand which always lends itself to more traditional media. But tomorrow's customer is also much younger customer. Is he not more available on digital than traditional? See what we are trying to see, for us younger customers I wouldn't want to go by demography of age as a criteria at all. At the end of the day for us, all this is a mindset. So what we want to do is to reach consumers where they are present. So if you are present in the digital media we'll reach you there. So if tomorrow's customers are going to be in the digital world we will reach them through the digital means. But if tomorrow's customers are going to be seeing more of television like for example sports this is an opportunity to do a lot more leverage during the short window of opportunity when it is available. And if you look at people who will consume banking products and services you'll obviously see that if they are going to be available on those media are they going to consume those media then we'll obviously go there. So we are right in the middle of the festive season we have just, Diwali was just behind us and Christmas and New Year are on the horizon. Just tell us, you know how was festive season this time for you and for the entire sector for the entire banking sector. I wouldn't know about the entire banking sector because it's too early in the festive season. Luckily for us this time the festive season happened over two different months. If I remember last year it all happened in one particular month. This time at least the Navratri started and Diwali was in November. So it gave us a longish window of opportunity for us to have an engagement across the ecosystem. It has so far so been so good and across our entire loan products as well as the retail assets products we do see an uptake in terms of consumption and even on cards which is a clear lead indicator for us in terms of how consumers are willing to open up their purse and what is it that they are spending we are seeing good traction. This is actually a very valuable input for other sectors also. Our customers there are they spending because there's been this discussion in the industry that you know they're not coming forth and spending. India has many India so it depends on a lot of things. For example premium products are selling far far higher that we see definitely. So the K-shaped recovery seems to have been there but doesn't mean the other side of the ecosystem is not improving that's also improving but if I look at it from a bank's perspective we are looking at a slightly different profile of our customers so when you're talking about a loan when you're talking about a card spend and all those stuff they're slightly well off customers when it comes when it compares to an FMCG kind of a stuff. So where we see there is enough traction and the traction has been seen across all the segments whether I talk about apparel whether I talk about jewelry whether I talk about groceries whether I talk about eating out dining out travel as well as e-com and e-com has actually been doing pretty well. So across all the sectors we see a lot of consumption happening. Okay so last three years and for around festive season under this title of festive treats you've been coming up with a new campaign. So this year it was is Teohar no Intzar. Tell us more about your campaign and how did it do for you? So we have done a small change this year I think all of you would have noticed what we have done always is we have laid a lot of stress on the offers that we bring for our customers during this particular point of time whether it is across the consumption basket of what you actually would like to consume during this festive period. This time we have taken a big leap and what we have said we have put the bank in front of them. So what we created this time is a platform called Expressway and that is going to be the one which will serve the customers going forward. Let me talk a little bit more about Expressway here. Expressway is a destination that we have created for all our customers both the bank customers as well as the non-bank customers to come in and see what kind of personalized offers are available across the bank's product ecosystem. So you will see all your pre-approved loans that you have whether it is an auto loan or a personal loan or a home loan or anything that we have already have a pre-approved for an existing customer you will see it. For non pre-approved customers also they can start the digital journey and that's what I said when direct to consumer business has been formed primarily because we have digitized all our retail journeys and you to bank customer can apply for a credit card and get a credit card. So all these things we have within the framework of Expressway and in there in addition to all the banks retail products to open a savings account to open a current account or take any of our retail asset products even to the extent that if you want to invest in insurance or a mutual fund you can do from this platform directly fully digital. What we have also done is in Expressway we have brought in all the services that are available digitally inside the same platform. So whether it is your KYC update whether it is a pan update that you want to do or whether you want to update your email ID and many more services that is going to come digitally we're all been putting together inside this. Expressway has been a high tech intervention from our side also we have used a lot of technology in this wherein we understand who is coming in because we are asking everybody to log in first using their mobile number and when the mobile number is available I will come to know Nazia as an existing customer of HDFC Bank. We are able to personalize thank you for that which we are able to personalize based on the analytics that we do on the customer base and what is it that you are most interested in doing now? Whether it is a service that is more interesting for you as of now or whether it is a product that we need or if you have most of the products and you are more about consumption today what is the credit card offers that we have? We have brought in all together and that is the way we will reach our customers going forward in terms of digital destination expressway and the same expressway has also been extended to our entire sales force. So the sales force also has been created a QR for almost every sales force in the ecosystem we have created a QR which has got their own details present. So after a conversation with a customer and if they are convincing the customer to go ahead and take a home loan what they just need to do is to show the QR customer scans the digital application gets opened on their devices they can help them complete the form and the sales person's credentials are getting passed on into the application without any intervention and that's what we have done this way this time and we have seen tremendous improvement in terms of acceptability of expressway across our customer base lot more customers are coming and experiencing the new way of consuming the HTFC Bank products and services our sales force is very excited and I think the campaign is doing what was expected to do create more awareness about expressway which is a one-stop destination for everything which HTFC Bank has to offer. So Ravi just echoed to me like while I appreciate that you know banking has been made very convenient for most of the customers now but do you also give a kind of brief to your team where to draw the line because you know sometimes you're bombarded with too many calls and mostly it is from some bank or a property kind of are you interested in so is this some kind of feedback that you have on this? So what we all tell all our colleagues across the ecosystem is we need to be the primary banker and most of the people in my view today who are opening bank accounts already have a bank account in my view it's a 90% churn market and there are very few people who are coming into the ecosystem first time to open a bank account then that's hardly maybe in my wild guess it will be upwards of 5% and less than 10%. So since all these people are already having a bank account what makes them open another bank account? Either it is because of a certain reason that they're expecting some payment or they've started a new job in which they have been asked to open an account in a different bank, multiple reasons but most of them have been convinced by a salesperson that our service will be better here our product benefits will be better here and that's a conviction based on which people have started opening these accounts we open almost a million accounts a month, right? Now if you are able to convince those million customers to start the relationship for us to become the primary banker the most important thing for us is not necessarily convenience in my view convenience is extreme hygiene none of us today expect because of the digital world that we are living in to sign a physical piece of paper and go to the branch and do a lot of these things I don't know when you visited your branch last, right? None of us go to the branch for any of these things then what is this physical infrastructure doing for us? Relationship management in our view is the key that we become the primary banker and that's the biggest strength of HTFC bank the ability to establish a relationship with the customer nurture that relationship over a long period of time and once we become the primary banker I am sure if you have a relationship manager and if your relationship is good with the bank and the bank has taken care of all your needs so far if you have a requirement for a car loan or an auto loan or for that matter a two wheeler loan your first port of call is going to be HTFC bank and we see that happening and I'll give you an example of if you want to go and buy an auto today almost in every dealership you will find customers walking in and selecting the car of their choice till that point of time financing is never talked about and the dealers' executives will come and tell you ma'am, don't worry, financing will be possible taken care of they will not even tell you whether we have an association with A bank or a B bank or a C bank moment you finalize the car and you say yes, I want a car loan the first question they ask you is do you have a preference and we see almost every HTFC bank customer says yes, first let me consider HTFC bank do you have HTFC bank here? yes, I would like to meet them first if you are a relationship managed customer you might even go and talk to the relationship manager and say I am looking for a car or there is going to be a conversation between you and the relationship manager and say you fix the car, ma'am we will come later don't worry that's the kind of relationship we want to establish because the profit pools in banking is in this relationship so we are very clear physical infrastructure that we have created is to create the trust in the minds of the customers we want to become the primary bankers for all these customers and that's only possible when convenience is taken as hygiene and a relationship structure is built on top of it interesting so you know coming back to your campaigns most of your campaigns are very interesting and they are like circulated and they do well on social media and on traditional media but one of the campaigns which actually which otherwise did very well Vigil Aunty but there was a small backlash you know people called it against a particular community and all does that affect you as a CMO? do you think you need to change your brief? it worries you, annoys you? see this is part of our life so we don't really really worry too much about it see what it allows us is to go back to the drawing board and start thinking about what was the purpose of what we started off with the purpose we started off when it comes to Vigil Aunty is to create a specific character because of the fact that there is a huge amount of increase in online frauds and as the biggest brand in the country in the banking sector what is it that the brand is going to do for India's citizens it's not about our bank customers it's about the entire citizens day of India how do you know what is happening and how do you actually prevent these frauds from happening for you? every bank, every ecosystem player has been trying their own ways in terms of creating awareness and in spite of all the awareness that has been created I'm sure you would have been hearing never share your OTP, never share your password we get multiple complaints every day wherein they have intentionally shared OTP or they have been gullible enough at this point of weakness whatever is that moment of weakness people have been able to do something to get the OTP, to get the passwords and all those stuff so our idea of creating Vigil Aunty is to create more awareness about how to protect yourself from the various kinds of scams that keep happening in the ecosystem so that is the purpose whenever we do anything we always benchmark against that purpose and say let's not get into any side tracks anything that people talk about outside of this is not worth it as of now the purpose which we created Vigil Aunty is to fight against frauds the purpose was met the purpose was getting met last year we created we were very successful in that and that's the reason why we again went in for the second campaign under the same Vigil Aunty team this year so even last year there was kind of murmurs about this we said okay but you did not change anything you did not change anything this time when the murmurs became a little bit wider what we looked at is the option was very simple for us what is it that we are trying to do our purpose was to fight frauds let's go ahead and do that and if it means doing any kind of a small change so be it again the whole purpose is not to look at it from that perspective also of for or against anything as of now because we are against frauds against scams preventing people from getting into these kind of experiences which nobody likes it so it's a simple shift for us to go ahead and do it so but as a CMO you think this is other CMOs should need to react to these kind of noises or see it's about again again I keep talking about like what is it that you are fighting for in my view there's need not be a fight against there has to be a fight for okay the fight for here in this case is freedom from frauds that's why if I remember last year we launched it under 75th anniversary of India's independence saying that freedom from frauds see that is the purpose let's be straight true to that purpose as of now and Vigilante is going to be there yeah yeah yeah there will be another season another campaign yeah yeah you will see that coming continuously looking forward to it so you know coming back to digital you have been collaborating with a lot of influencers actors now credibility is very important for a sector like yours and social media continues to be very unpredictable what kind of checks and balances do you put in place you know when you select a person to represent your bank see as you said exactly credibility so the first thing we all check is for the credibility it's a very simple like for example if I am going to use an influencer A what we just go is to go into their Instagram page go into their social media feed so far and we come to know what is it that they stand for what kind of followers they have and what kind of audience they are attracting and what kind of content they are putting out and once these filters are taken care of I don't think that's a problem you might have one or two wrong instances of after you have selected somebody and they are doing the work something else can happen and then you have that's a nature of the beast so you have to live with it as of now we have not had one single bad experience so far and most of these influencer activities are also very short term in view they are not brand ambassadors like somebody who is going to be associated with you for a long period of time they are therefore a very specific purpose of promoting a certain service or a product that we are talking about it at that point of time we believe the micro influencer will continue to be there it will only grow and grow and grow as the amount of see today is the time where compared to say 20 years back the choices of what you want to be and what content you want to consume both are available so you want to be a fashion designer you want to be a hair stylist there was a time when if you say I'm a hair stylist people will look up to you saying that is it kind of a job and see the word used that was not considered right today people are okay it's a career which is accepted widely it is a career which pays you well and the career has also got a lot of respect within the community compared to say 25 years back things are changing dramatically now if you're a hair stylist and if there is somebody who is very good at hair styling and they have their own influencer because of the fact that they are very good and hair stylist who have a lot of money I know how much you pay for a simple hair styling today so that's the kind of niche areas where we are seeing enough number of people who are creating very, very, very relevant content for their audience if you want to reach to that kind of an audience this gives us a much, much better ROI to reaching to those kind of people and that's why I love it would you have any number, how many influencers are you working with right now? see it depends on a campaign like for example during the expressway we work with 100 people okay, as of now for our regalia gold which we are running we are working with more than 20 people so you again we look at saying that this audience is different from this audience because the followers are very different we have a map which is available in terms of saying what kind of overlap exists between an influencer A and an influencer B and if the audience is something which we are interested in and if the overlap is minimal we'll try and use both because we are able to reach to a very, very specific segment of people who are very interested in following that particular content and foot blogging for example is really big in India you know coming to another news that was another thing for which HDFC was in news was a merger that happened early this year around mid-June your finance arm and your HDFC bank the finance arm was merged into HDFC bank tell us more about the merger and if it threw any challenges for the brand HDFC limited we call it now erstwhile HDFC limited HDFC limited was the pioneer of home loans in India it was the first company which brought the thinking that you can buy a home by taking a loan in India because India had no mortgage market and I still remember my father was a government employee so he could get a loan from the government and the rest of the people all have to do a lot more to just buy the same home or construct the same home in Chennai where we were living HDFC pioneered the concept of any Indian can dream of owning a home we will be able to provide you a home loan and 45 years they have been in existence and they have created this market and they are the leaders in this market they have been the leaders in this market for almost all the period and the rest of the Indian banking ecosystem started after that in terms of creating this home loan market home loan is something home is something which all of us dream to have at least one in our lifetime and that will continue and it's also a big, big, big one It's a very long term association also It's a long term association from an economy perspective it's a big multiplier on the economy from a consumer perspective it's a extremely long term relationship it's a very emotional product home buying is not a one-off affair it is a very emotional family is involved a lot of thinking goes behind by purchasing the home and if you are enabling somebody to own the dream of theirs then you are establishing also a relationship which is going to help the bank as at least for the next 10 years, 15 years because the tenors are pretty normally high so the merger happened and another good thing about this the HDFC staple of companies whether you look at HDFC limited bank, life, insurance or the mutual fund they all have a very similar image of safety, stability, trust and kudos to all the people who have created this organization kudos to all the people who manage and run these organizations they all have very similar brand metrics today so for us when we looked at the merger it was like very similar in characteristics so branding the merger, merging the brands when I looked at it, we said, wow this is not something which I have done earlier in my life where there were two different kinds of brands coming together and we have to do a lot more because the segment of customers were different one was considered Metro and Urban and Swaw and other was... What was the reasoning? Why were they merged? So merger for various other reasons happened and it's all good for us because we wanted something which is long tenor in our balance sheet for the bank bank did not do home loans and HDFC, our parent company was doing the home loans we wanted home loans in our portfolio so that we can establish the relationship longer with the customers and there were other multiple reasons but from a brand perspective it was a very perfect fit so we did a lot of research first with the consumers about both HDFC limited as well as HDFC bank and to our surprise which was not a very big surprise for us people assume they are already one one obviously the name is there and the second is also when the bank while it did not have the home loan in its books whatever loans we originated we actually got it fulfilled from HDFC limited only so there was a very clear fit and we also talked to a lot of stakeholders inside as well as outside to see what are the things that we need to be mindful about actually nothing came out as something which we are not aware of so it was a very easy decision obviously bank has been the brand which is much more visible to the end consumer purely because of the number of customers that we have compared to what they had both of us had stature both of us had very similar characteristic of safety trust reliability customer service was very good in both the arms so it was a very simple easy decision it's all done now all done now taken so Ravi coming to the next question what specific challenges do you face in marketing HDFC banks products and services in the digital era we've spoken about digital before but you know if you can explain it to us from the perspective of how do you stay ahead because other banks are also doing it so it's a very competitive space so what are the... I don't see competition as anything wrong because competition forces you to be a little bit better always it keeps yourself on the toes everybody does a lot of good things so you have to always see what is it that you can learn from them and how you can keep pushing the envelope they push us many times and we push them many times and that's a symbiotic relationship the market is very big I don't believe that we are competing with anybody we are competing with ourselves first actually so how can we grab more of the opportunity that is available in this country India has a 4 trillion dollar economy today if it has to become a 20 trillion dollar economy we have to be at least 10 times the size of what we are and compared to the time when I joined to what we are today we are three times we are a 30 lakh crore balance sheet company today and it will become 300 lakh crores definitely for sure when India becomes that kind of an economy which will happen and the whole world talks about it so for us the challenge is always about being relevant and I don't think that foundation principle ever changes and being present for our customers and I think these are the two pecs on which we always evaluate are you relevant for your consumers and the relevance question keeps changing over a period of time maybe the relevancy was availability of the bank branch next door maybe an availability of an ATM 10 years back today the availability of all the services in a mobile phone that's the relevance change for people presence also differs because at the end of the day earlier I was just withdrawing cash from the branch maybe I was withdrawing an ATM and making the payment now I don't want to do anything I want to do a digital payment so do you have the ability to allow your customers at the presence of whatever they want to do from a transaction perspective and also from an awareness and a perception building are you going to be there in the media in which they consume when they are thinking about it are you going to be available and that's the two questions which we keep asking ourselves and benchmarking against these two and keep moving the Ravi would you like to share insights on the future direction of marketing for banks especially in the light of emerging trends and technologies and how HDFC Bank plans to stay ahead in this dynamic landscape see the future trends is obviously everybody talks about artificial intelligence and large language models and what will happen because of that see we have always been a little bit ahead in terms of investing in certain areas where we may not know fully how it is going to pan out but we will invest ahead of the curve and that has been the principle that we have adopted and I keep almost boring everybody to say I have an 80 member data science team and the reason that we invested in analytics and data science and all is only to see that you have tremendous amount of first party data how do you leverage that to actually make yourself relevant again for your customers so AI has been used by us also for the last four or five years in multiple ways and I do believe there is a huge amount of potential when it comes to content creation when it comes to a lot of areas in which we were not using so we were doing a lot of data based modeling now the unstructured data and the ability of gen AI to leverage on the unstructured data that we have because all the interactions with the customers which are recordings available or the updates which are available you see I mean these are all words these are unstructured data I do believe that gen AI will allow us to be much more relevant to our customers going forward so that's what is the space I see where it will impact it will impact content creation it will be in a position to definitely improve our communication it will also definitely improve our ability to predict a lot more stuff so that's where I see this moving further and marketing as such consumer understanding again I see a lot of use case of gen AI to help us in terms of understanding what does that our consumers are doing so you will see its impact in multiple facets within the marketing functional ecosystem and that's going to happen for sure and it's going to only increase and increase and increase going forward the opportunity for me it's not a challenge it's an opportunity so how do you leverage how do we leverage what is happening and we are already in discussions with multiple partners with multiple people putting an ecosystem in place to use these capabilities and the capacity of some of these kind of new tools in terms of how do we actually enable our customers to do more and that's where the space I see huge amount of work happening traditional marketing in terms of understanding consumers will obviously be there maybe there is a new tool available for you to do it better but still time spent in the market with the consumers will still hold sway before I close it's not an overstatement that you know you have been acknowledged as one of the best CMO in the country and even in global rankings what advice would you offer to you know aspiring CMOs who have just who are looking at you and want to be like you someday thank god for all the things that has happened so far and even thanks for all the colleagues who have been working with me and where I've learned a lot from everybody the one thing which I always believe is you need to be challenged by good people around you and so one thing which I always look forward to is to work with much more challenging much more smarter people than what you are and think that pushes the curve so that's more from personal perspective the other thing is India has been lucky that many of us who went into this field are also engineers by profession so we did have an understanding of max to a large extent so that allows us to look at data and mix data and the consumer understanding together I think at least in most of the first party data companies the marketing role will be a mix of a person who understands data analytics and the consumer and the media and the communication and all those stuff I think that is going to be the future for many of the first party data companies where first party data may not be available as such maybe the other side of brand communication people will get a little bit of a preference and even those people are also looking for how do I leverage data which is available and they are wanting to create that data because they don't have the first party data on its own so the whole thing is be comfortable with as much of data as possible and be comfortable on the other side also I think it has to be a mix that will work going forward because there is a lot of technology that is seeped into every way in which we all work compared to say five years back and ten years back and things keep changing so fast so it's better to keep yourself updated and take the plunge on the data side and take the plunge on the communication side if you're not done and once you do that I think there is no stopping you that thank you Ravi, thank you for talking to us