 All right, and like promised, we do have a very knowledgeable speaker here who's going to kick start the show before we actually unveil the 50 brands here tonight. We have, and with a loud round of applause, I'd like you to welcome Mr. Rahul Agarwal, managing director and CEO, Lenova for India. He's had over two decades of experience both globally and internationally leading businesses and marketing functions. And Mr. Agarwal, if you're happy with the applause that you got, we can move ahead. Otherwise, I would recommend no. Thank you. We're getting started. Thank you. Thank you, Pitch and Anurag for inviting me to do this keynote. I can tell you it's lovely to spend an evening where you're not working either to generate more revenues or to generate more profits. So I'm hoping that I'm really going to enjoy this evening with you guys. The subject of marketing and branding is a vast subject and my belief is that anybody can talk a lot about it. And there are no set of rules that you can talk about that you can follow diligently to make it a success. It's a bit of art. It's a bit of science. What I am going to try and attempt today is to give you a perspective that I've built over the years. And I've been fortunate enough to do a few roles which have given me a very unique angle to this whole field of marketing and branding. I've done role in my earlier part of the career as a marketing manager. I've also led the marketing for Lenovo when it just started in India. And when nobody knew about Lenovo and they thought, hey, it was some cheap Chinese brand. I've also led the worldwide marketing communication for Lenovo for three years. And last couple of years, of course, I've seen marketing from a very different angle. Sometimes something that is avoidable expense, too. Something that I am very passionate about. But as a primary provider of revenues and profitability, you sometimes have that view, too. So I was talking to Anurag in the morning, and what he said is that, look, we could make it interactive, and that's how I really like it. So I'll try and share my thoughts with you. And as I said, I do not claim to be a master. I do not think it's easy to be a master of this field. It's constantly evolving. There are multitude of views, multitude of perspectives, and what works for one company and one individual may not work for the others. So with that disclaimer, I'm going to just share with you what I think of this subject. Now, as I said, we can talk about this for hours, but what I thought is that maybe I could focus my speech or my address to you on one very specific element of building brand, which is how to build a brand through customer experience. But before I dive into it, can we move on to the next slide? Can you give me the clicker? Yeah. So let's just spend a minute on the subject, and I want to just capture a couple of words here. First is challenging. I, without a doubt, building a brand is a challenge. It's always been a challenge. I've myself seen it when I did marketing roles. And the fact is that customers don't really care for you as a brand. Customers really care about their needs and wants. They care about their gratification. They care about their experience. So when you want to build a brand, you're being inclusive to a large extent. And therefore, it is always challenging. And the other keyword is distracted. I think everyone knows how the world has changed about 10 years ago when smartphones came. They change everyone's world. And today, husband and wives have a tough time getting undivided attention in my office. And I'm sure you do it too. In meetings, however crucial they are, people are always fiddling with their phones. And that's just one aspect of being distracted. So clearly, this is very, very relevant how to deal with this. The world is going to stay like this. I get very upset when I see my son on the phone all the time. But the fact is that I have to accept it and I'm going to be a parent. I have to learn to be a good parent with him being a distracted son all the time. So I thought we could just start this with the context. It's always good to see a slightly long-term context of how is the humanity evolving if I'm a fae. And if you see this slide, it talks about some major trends which have happened over the last century. And these changes do not happen suddenly. They evolve as civilizations evolve, as human behavior evolves. And today, people are saying that it is the age of the consumer. And I'm sure this is not the first time you've heard about it. We've been hearing about it for maybe a decade. But there are some very good reasons why we should believe that. Firstly, the whole word of mouth has taken a very different meaning with social media. You have a good experience. You can share it with thousands, lakhs of people the same moment and vice-versa. Secondly, especially in the Indian context, the division makers are youngsters. I remember when I used to do marketing, I used to look at an average buyer of a PCS, a 40 to 55-year-old individual, and you would organize your life around that consumer in a certain way. Today, everyone is under 30, if I talk about my category. And these people are more demanding. These people are not easy to be convinced. They have an element of risk-taking. They want to do research. And therefore, to get them on your bandwagon is far more difficult because they have their own mind, which is much stronger. Third, people say that the real age of discovery or the real age of innovation is behind us. Very rarely do you see innovations happening, maybe once in five years. And if innovations happen, they are very quick to be replicated by competition. So as a brand, you always are on the back foot. You're always on the back foot because there are two or three, or if I look at phones, 70 other brands who are pretty much trying to offer something very similar to what you offer. And therefore, customer has choice. And if customer has choice, customer has the division making in his hand. And therefore, he's the real division maker in the journey, unlike you. So if you look at these three or four points, it is fairly obvious that customers today are far more powerful in this whole process of purchase. Now this just further makes the point that customers are distracted because there are so many avenues with the advent of new mediums, social media, websites, phones. Customers are always shuffling from one end to another. And therefore, the traditional approach of how do I build my awareness, convert into consideration, into preference, into purchase and loyalty may not be the optimal one. It may work for a few organizations, but it may not work for many others. Therefore, the key really is to understand how the customer is doing this journey. What he or she is undergoing, what is the thought process they're undergoing when they go to a website, then they go to a retail, then they do search marketing, then they go to a referral website to get feedback on things and then again go back to the retail. We found out, for example, that 70% of the people who buy in retail, buy computers from our retail stores, do extensive research on the net before they come and decide. So the battle is not really being fought at the retail counter today, but the battle is being fought at multiple places, also at retail. You know, brilliant salespeople can still turn around, but the battle is now spread over multiple places and that's a big, big challenge to the marketeers. So if customer experience is what we want to really show and what we want to choose as a point of differentiation because, you know, the differentiation otherwise is difficult and if we say that the customer journey is complicated and the customer is distracted and the customer is powerful, then who owns this customer experience? And this is, of course, provided that, you know, as brand custodians, as marketing custodians of your organization, decide that you will take the path of customer experience. Now, somebody who sells a product which has a life of a few minutes, let's say a chewing gum, may look at it very differently, but somebody who sells, let's say, a refrigerator, the life of which is 15, 20 years, may look at it very differently. But the key question is who is the custodian? And let me tell you, my belief is always, whether I was a marketing manager or a CMO or now, I've always felt that building the brand is not the number one job for the CMO or for the marketing department or for the advertising friends. It is the number one job of the CEO and therefore customer experience, if it has to be the one that will create differentiation, has to be the number one job of the CEO. The CEO has to champion it. The CEO has to galvanize the organization to make sure that everyone is aligned to it. However, a CEO will agree to it but not spend a lot of time on it, because that's a practical reality. And in that context, when the CEO is willing to lead it, somebody has to truly embrace it and make sure that the entire organization sings a song and dances to that tune. And that, in my opinion, has to be the CMO and that has to be the marketing function. And it has to go much beyond what CMO today does, because customer experience is about what happens in retail, what is the website experience, what is the experience of people on the call center. Now call center is one of the most underestimated bridge or platform to talk to a customer. Now, in the context of customers being distracted, that is one time when you have the undivided attention of a customer, undivided. He's excited, he's emotional, or she's emotional because they have some issue or they have some query, you have their ears. But most organizations, including us till sometime back, used to have a target of closure time. We used to minimize the time that our call center agents are spending with the customer. We never took interest in the quality of people, the script of the people talking, but they were talking as Lenovo, right? And I'm sure you all have call centers, either pre-sales or post-sales, and just give it a thought as to who in the organization is really spending time on what the customer experience is. So it goes much beyond what marketing does. It goes much beyond what typically the organization looks at. And if the customer experience has to be the pivot to build the brand, then it has to be, of course, led by the CEO, but championed by CMO by getting every part of the organization together to be aligned on it. Now, I'll just spend a couple of minutes on sharing with what we did at Lenovo. We, of course, realized that we got a long way to go before we can be proud of the way we do things. Let me just say it as simple as possible. And here the context is what customers thought about us as a brand and what customers thought about us as an aspirational brand. And we did a very honest study through the whole journey. And you can see that right from the beginning of the journey till the end, we found that there were many areas where competition was actually better than us. So if you see, a full black circle is good. And where we are, the arrow is up, which means that we are better than competition. So it was a very honest audit that we did, which went on for months and it required even me to go and talk to customers and partners and get that. And we found out that there were many people who loved Lenovo, but there were as many people who did not like us. Who didn't like the way we dealt with them in the retail stores, who didn't like the way we spoke with them, who didn't like the way we solved their problems, and sometimes they didn't like the fact that there was a problem in the product. And we thought we should do something about it. So me and the entire senior management team, we spent almost 24 hours in the call center. So we took calls, I took dozens of calls, spoke to our customers. And that, I can tell you, was one of the best experiences that I had. Till then, I really didn't get a feeling that I was doing a real job. And after that, the way we run a call center totally changed. The customers, we reached out to almost 7 million customers through that campaign that we did because we went live on Facebook, we did a bit of social media to tell people that, hey, the entire senior management is listening. And we were able to convert a lot of negative emotion to positive emotion. Now of course that was a one-time event, but you got to do a lot more of these things to really be liked by your customers. This is the service campaign that we did, that I was talking about. So let me come to the end of my address and then hopefully we'll have some questions that I, Sanjeev and Ragh, maybe all of us can collectively discuss. So first, I'm assuming that this community by and large is marketing. Is that right? Are you all marketing? So I don't want to be standing here and just be thought provoking for the sake of it because it's very easy to do that, but it's very difficult to actually get really provoked. But I want to leave 304 messages here because that's all that human mind can retain. Probably after a week, we'll maybe retain one or two points. So my urge is that, you know, let's try and remember one or two things and see if they are relevant to our daily life. First is the role has to be redefined. The marketing function today, and I don't want to get dramatic because not everything is true for everyone. It's basically a spectrum. You go to see where are you in the spectrum. You got to be somewhere in the middle. The left and the right is, left is past and maybe the right is future. But you got to understand and you got to realize, and I say you I am saying I too, that we are no more the author of the brand. I think the days are over when you could broadcast, when you could really spin a story and customers would just listen to you. And the role of marketers and CMO has to be much more than just marketing communications. That's point number one. And this has to be not just, not just discovered by you, but it has to be agreed by the CEO of the organization and the entire CXO chain of the organization. Second point, got to be clear what is the differentiation. Now we, for example, realize that when it comes to computers, we like to believe I can actually talk about 15 things that are unique about Lenovo laptop or Thinkpads or our phone from Moto Mods or yoga books. But the fact is that customers, you know, at a high level, do not really care too much about this fine differences. But what they do care about is the experience. And when they hear about a good experience of a product that last four, five years, I think that is what truly, truly influences them. So the thought that I'm going to leave here is that, do you think your organization would want to go this way? Because this is far more sustainable. This is, I can tell you, having done a quarter of the journey that it is not the most difficult thing to do. But if you do it, it is very difficult to replicate. And this is the only way, in my opinion, real loyalty can happen. The third point, go back to the slide, please, where, you know, we were talking about the customer journey. What is extremely important for organization is, and marketers have to lead that, is to really, really understand the customer mindset, the customer journey. You know, what is the customer thinking? What are the customer needs? You know, go back, this is actually wonderfully, you know, going back to the basics of marketing. And the basics of marketing is to, you know, help people fulfill their needs and wants and demands. But how do you do it? So with the change context and the changing context, I think it's important to spend a lot of time, money, resources in really understanding, talking to the consumers, doing research, understanding what goes into their mind, understanding what really is the dynamics that goes on in a retail store or when people are, you know, browsing. You know, there are things like people deciding ten seconds whether they want to be on a webpage or not. In four seconds people, you know, decide whether the brand appeals to them or not when they go to a website. So these things are really changing the dynamic and it's important for successful marketers to be able to write a book on their customers. When I was younger, we used to say, can you draw a pen picture of your customer? And if, you know, people would be able to draw or create one page about the customer, we would say, hey, you know, you're the dude and you'll do well. I would say today a good marketer should be able to write a book on the customer. And lastly, and this sounds a little motherly and I apologize for that because that's not my approach. But I've been a part of many marketing discussions in different roles where people would forget what they are but they would spend hours and hours on what would make sense to be positioned as, right? And they would look at vacant positioning points in the customer's mind, looking at market and competition and would want to occupy that. And then they would rush into finding brilliant ways to communicate and add agencies, you know, would of course do what the marketers would tell them. But because of all that we just saw, social media, the empowerment of the customer, the customer being young, the cluttered customer, the fact that differentiation is low, I think it's time to be really authentic and do some soul searching as to what do we stand for. I can tell you that that question is very difficult. I can stand here and tell you that for many of our product categories, we struggle to find what do we really stand for? What are we that customer would come to us not go to our good competition? And I think it's something that is required. It's something that is very, very difficult. It's something that people will fail to do when they start to do. But if brands have to stay relevant in the changing times, this is one approach that would do well. So I guess that's what I had. Do we want to take any questions now? Thank you, Mr. Agarwal. Yes, requested to please raise your hands in case you'd like to. You can offer an applause later. We're not yet done with Mr. Agarwal yet. We need you to answer some questions. So if there are any questions, please raise your hand. Introduce yourself or the company that you represent. Yes, Ram, we will come to you. But I do have a question, Mr. Agarwal. So like we all know that, and you mentioned as well, when somebody comes to buy a product at one of your retail stores has already done their due diligence online. And a lot of times we figure that the price at which it's available on e-commerce platforms may be much lower as compared to your retail stores. So how, or maybe if it doesn't affect Lenovo but at least if you can talk about it holistically, how does a marketer handle something like this? No, it affects Lenovo very much. 20% of the computers today are sold online and one third of the phones today are sold online. So it affects us a lot. It's something that as a brand you've got to be agnostic to. It's different channels fighting for market share. It's like when the LFRs came, when the Kromas and the Reliance Digital came, the traditional retailer cried because they had the muscle that they didn't have. So it's a new channel and people are getting worried about it. As a brand you've got to play fair. You've got to make sure as much as you can that there is price parity and there are no disadvantages being given to the larger players. But I think it is the battle that people have to fight. Smaller retailers are getting affected. Online sales are going up, that's a reality and there's nothing that you can do because that is how the world is evolving. So you're endorsing unlike a few other brands that have actually gone on record and say that these may not be authentic products online which are being sold and you have to buy it from our authorized retail outlet. Yes, so we did all that at the beginning. I think nobody knew how this whole, how this online world is evolving. Now, you buy something on Flipkart or Amazon, it's authentic and I tell my friends and family that look, you do the comparison and buy what makes sense to you. All channels are legal. Sure, yes, Rahul, do we have the... I'll hand over my mic to you here. So it was indeed very inspiring. What you have done, what Lenovo has achieved in particular in the Indian market. Coming from what you said, cheap Chinese product to a very reputed brand. It is indeed a very good achievement. So my question is, based on your white good experience and laptop and mobile phone experience, what is your suggestion for other products which are more of experiential in kind? Say for example, it may be healthcare, it may be in any other segment, so which primarily provides experience. So what would be your advice for those brands? You know, it's dangerous to give advice on something you don't have a direct experience on. So I'm not going to really, you know, bite that one, but I would say that it fits, you know, even more into what I said, that brands which are service brands which are experiential brands, then customer experience can be the differentiator that we spoke about. Even more for a product organization or a product brand. We have one there. Hi, Rahul. My name is Raj Kavan from Silver Push Technologies. Rahul, one sees a lot of disruptive innovations across the multiple discipline of business, whether it is manufacturing and everything else, related to design and R&D and everything else. Of course, the innovations that one observes there also puts pressures on marketing. No doubt about that. And even the time when you were into the marketing role and things like that, the distribution channels which used to be there earlier, which was a brick and mortar and the investment that really went into it, had a particular strategy in place. Now you have the entire digital innovative spaces like the e-commerce perspective where the complete change is possibly required in the way one looks at marketing the way Philip Kotler had defined at one point in time. Do you think with the innovations that one sees elsewhere, marketing also needs to rethink and possibly strategize in a manner which takes cognizance of the multi-screens. Of course, Lenovo also is quite responsible for the multi-screens that have been created and the disruptive audiences that you said. Yeah, look, without a doubt, I think that's the key point that I wanted to make today that marketers need to change starting from the way they look at their roles and the way we connect to the customer. Broadcasting is going to become less and less relevant and reaching out to customers at a platform where they're really listening to you, where you have credibility with real-life experiences is going to go up. So if you are able to, you know, cultivate, curate your customer experience and capture it and find a way to disseminate it. Let me give you a very simple example. Today, you know, if you spend some time on TV because TV is still, I'm told, 62% of the advertising in this country and it's not really going down, you have creative stories. The key platform that people use is at, you know, entertainment because the client says, hey, I want ad which has memorability. I want to entertain my customers, which in my personal opinion is too ambitious because your job as a marketer is not to entertain because you end up entertaining people who are not relevant. People who are relevant to your category at that point of time are not looking for entertainment. They're looking for real, good, important message. So for Lenovo, it could mean, for example, instead of, you know, having an ad with a celebrity which I'm guilty of introducing to the PC industry, we actually get real-life people to talk about their experiences. The ads would be boring, but I think they will resonate more and they may not win awards, but I can tell you they'll win more sales. So likewise, technology, the way technology is really everywhere. Marketers need to know how it's evolving. SEO is a big science. Today, I'll give you an example that knocked me out when I got to know about it. It's scary, actually. At least to me, it was scary. So there's a technology available. So if you are sitting in your living room with your family and you see a Lenovo ad, right, and your smartphone, of course, is always next to you, we can make sure that seven out of ten times or seven out of ten people who have seen our ad, in the next half an hour, when they pick up the phone, they will see a Lenovo online ad on the smartphone. Now that is scary because it's kind of almost invading your privacy, but these are the kind of technologies that marketers need to be aware of and, you know, be there. So the whole TV alone or print alone or outdoor, the whole idea of 360 is evolving and is changing pretty rapidly. I think we'll take just one more question. Yes, the lady here will give the lady a chance to ask a question and then wrap up. From Godwaj, I had sustainability there. So my question to you is, these days in India? Sustainability? Yeah. Like for Lenovo, if conflict minerals, would that be a reason for you to have a plank on marketing and conflict minerals in your product? Yeah, see, we can take the route. It is not a route taken by a lot of marketers. And it takes a bit of courage and conviction and somebody higher up to take the route. But there are companies who've done it. P&G has done it. I remember we ran a campaign in 2006 where we tied up with Cry and we said, that look every PC that you buy, we donate a certain amount of money to Cry. And when we do sales slash marketing to our B2B customers, we talk a lot about what we are doing to create a sustainable environment. How do we really take care of the old products, the e-waste, what kind of packaging we do which is environmental friendly? The reality is, and it's a crude reality that it's still not the top one, two, three reasons why customers make a choice. And unfortunately, when we work for a commercial setup, we go by what motivates people and we get motivated by that rather than maybe what is the larger good for the society. Thank you. Does that answer your question? All right. Thank you, Mr. Agarwal. Thank you for taking the time for being here. Requested to please stay back. We'd like to acknowledge you. Requested to please stay back. We can do better with the applause. Now is the time to acknowledge the gentleman here who started with his information and his experience with you. Request Mr. Rajiv Biotra from In The Sun Times to please come up on stage and offer a token of appreciation on behalf of the Exchange for Media Group to Mr. Agarwal for having taken the time for being here.