 on stage Mr. Sushant, Darsh, the President India and Middle East, Tata Global Beverages and let us know that how the Tata Tea is keeping human at the centre. Let's have the gentleman on stage. It's always a privilege to come and interact and give of a story. So when people ask me to speak on this topic in terms of keeping human at the centre, I thought, you know, I've been doing marketing now for the last 20 odd years, handling this business for the last five, six years. I thought that's what you do as a marketer. You keep, we all talk about consumer centricity. So what's what's new? Why are they asking me to speak about this? And what is this new thing that we are going to talk about? And how does brand engagement? Why is it the new centre? I thought human are always the centre of what brand did. I'm sure that as marketers, there's not a single one of you who doesn't believe that what you do is centred around the consumer, consumer centricity is our byword. But then I stepped back and I realised that while we talk about consumer centricity, many a times we are caught up with our own products, our own services, our own creativity. And many of us in this whole get up forget the fact that we are working for the consumer. The consumer needs to be at the centre of it. And even those of us who remember that the consumer is at the centre of it, many a time actually talk to the consumer through our product, through our services. And it is not necessarily that we celebrate the consumer. We actually celebrate our product. We say that our product solves a problem for the consumer or the human. We say that our service actually solves a need or it solves a problem for the consumer. But it never talks about the consumer per se. And then I realised that actually this is something that brands are starting to do anew. It's not something that it's necessarily been done or being done on a regular basis. And when I stepped back, I realised that maybe not through a well thought out strategy, but maybe by chance or maybe because of the situation at that point of time, Jagore is one of those campaigns where we actually do not sell the product and actually celebrate the human, the individual and talk to them and talk about them. So I thought it was a good idea to go through the Jagore story and figure out as to how we have actually kept human at the centre of brand engagement and how it has worked for us. So why human at the centre and how do you increase brand engagement? The reason at that point of time that we did not sell Tata Tea as a product and all tea companies including us at that time sold tea as a product which talked about aroma, strength, colour, garden freshness. If any of you remember the ads 10, 15 years back, in 9 out of 10 cases you would find someone dancing in the garden, coming home, cup of tea, drinking and suddenly becoming very active. Broadly that was the pattern, you could change the actor, the actress but broadly that was the action in terms of. But we realised that the consumer was changing and it becomes more important, the human, for a mass brand because in a mass brand there is not much of innovation, that is not much of technology. So in terms of differentiation there is only that much that you can you can only say I am stronger by 2x, I am more flavourful, my pack has now from red become dark red but beyond a point it becomes difficult to differentiate and ask the consumer to pay a premium or ask the consumer to shift from the brand that they currently use it. So the only way for a mass brand is to create empathy, brand love, affinity and not work just at a transactional equation point but work at an emotional equation if you want to get the consumer. And I think it helped that as I said there was a paradigm shift in culture and society in terms of the consumers and what do I mean by authenticity? What I mean by authenticity is that we realised as I said for the mass brands at least, people realised that between one brand whether between branded or non-branded between store brands between local brands the difference at a product level was not as much and hence if you expect the consumer to pay your premium it becomes more and more difficult or to differentiate becomes more and more difficult but what we also realised and I think a lot of brands post have realised is that if you are consumers do want to have brands with which they empathise which they believe is genuine which goes with their thought process of what they believe in irrespective of what the product per se stands for and that is what I meant by authenticity things that they can relate to at a more emotional level at a more impactful level and if you can do that you will realise that the engagement that the brand has with the consumer and hence the premium or the business that the consumer is willing to give you is much higher and that's at the end of the day what all of us are there for to grow our businesses So what did we do? I mentioned the conventional approach would have been to sell three brands and it's not that we didn't do that we did that for 20 odd years but what we said was for the Jagore campaign we changed our approach and we actually started putting human at the centre and I'll show you examples as to what we did and one of the things that worked and I think it's important that while you put human at the centre there needs to be a believability in terms of what the brand talks to when you put the human at the centre and I think that becomes a very critical and important point so you know I cannot promise as a brand or I cannot talk to the consumer as a brand if I do not have some authenticity or if I don't stay within the realms of what I as a brand can do so in this case one of the things that we realised is in general tea is seen as something that provides energy in the morning you get up and you drink tea because it invigorates so it gives you mental and physical rejuvenation so what we started talking about is actually more the mental aspects of it saying that while other teas just rejuvenate you physically and mentally here is a tea brand that awakens you and awakens you to a social cause and that is where we bought human to the centre of it so while the rest of the tea category continue to talk product continue to talk about the benefits or in terms of wake up mental and physical rejuvenation we as a brand moved away and started talking about awakening the other important part of when you start looking at human at the centre and when you are not talking product or you are not talking service or you are not talking technology is very important to have the insight which is based on the human which is based on the consumer based on what is happening in the society at that point of time if you don't get that right then the brand engagement does not go up one of the things that we realised and as many of you realised as one of the longest running campaigns in the country we have been running this campaign now for 12 years we started in 2007 and I think I have the first ad which I will play in a while at that point of time we realised that and that was a time when social media digital was just coming into the picture it was just growing at the rate that we are seeing people were becoming more and more active and one of the things that we realised was the youth did want to make a change they were not saying they were no more saying that I seek change they were no more willing to just pass on the blame to others or externalise but they were willing to say that I am willing to make a change I am willing to do things and that was the insight on which the awakening story was based on the Jagore story was based on the other thing that you need to remember and this did in Jagore is if you want the human at the centre and you want to increase the brand engagement score it is not just enough to communicate change or as a brand say what consumers need to do or what the people need to do it is also important as a brand to walk the talk to be genuine to actually facilitate and inspire that change it is not about standing on a pedestal and looking down and saying you need to do that you actually need to create that awakening but you also need to walk along with the consumer the distance and facilitate that is the only way that you will engage the consumer that is the only way the consumer will believe in what you are saying and have empathy for you and be willing to pay the premium so how did this approach come alive it is very good to talk about all of this in theory but at the end of the day it is all about how you execute so what did we do and how did we go about it one of the things that we were clear about right at the beginning and that is one of the reasons as to why I think we did a good job of keeping the human at the centre was we did not look at it just at a macro level while the issues that we picked up were societal issues which were at a macro level we actually talked about it from an individual level as a one to one human in terms of asking for reflection at that level accountability at that level and the fact that you as an individual could drive change and we actually facilitated that change in terms of how you as an individual could do that and that to me was actually the success and continues to remain the success of how Jaguari has moved ahead play the first commercial please Greetings sir Greetings sir Greetings I am here to ask for your vote Greetings sir Sit down Ramu sir, do you have a cup of tea for sir? Okay sir, what do you mean by that? Bhaumar Lal Bhandari And qualification? Qualification? Forget it, tell us about your work experience I have been in Slam for 25 years Sir sir, work experience means construction Waterworks, engineering Are you taking our interview? Sir, you applied for such a big job Which job? The job to is to drive the country So this was the first commercial we actually ran in the Jaguari series which was back in 2007 as I said, been a long journey But when we played the ad when we do this commercial obviously at that time I used to head marketing and it was not a very easy task to my then CEO and president to go ahead and actually put money behind this ad because as you would have realized till the 30th second there is no, there is not a single mention of tea nor is there any product story nor does it show of a pack and before that it used to be you know if you were a marketer and you did not show your product shot in the first 10 to 15 seconds you did not get the money as a marketer, it was a waste of money as far as everyone else in the company was concerned. The second was obviously the fact as to whether as a Tata group company where we pushing the envelope too much was this the right thing to do so obviously there were questions on on that front but what we also realized is that we could not actually leave the campaign at this stage while this was great it created that initial euphoria but does it create engagement if you leave it at that level the answer is no and that's what we realized as we move forward that you need to then walk the talk you as a brand it's great to say that okay wake up, awaken, got question the politician how do I do that what do I do next how do I take accountability can I play a second hey boss, why are you sleeping? hello ma'am hello why are you not sleeping? now have some tea why do you want to drink tea? what's your problem? what's the problem? hey, we are sleeping we are sleeping, sir we are sleeping please have some tea what kind of tea do you have? tea, tea hey, we are sleeping today is holiday day we are here to watch a movie we are here to watch a movie bring everyone tea wake up time wake up time I am not sleeping okay? so this is when we started moving ahead and we said that we need to actually do two things one we need to have a call to action so whenever and I will show you a couple more in terms of whenever we pick up a topic well the topic is relevant and we create awareness about the topic but we don't stop there if you want to have brand engagement if you want to relate to the consumer on a one-on-one basis if you want to treat them as human then you need to have a facilitation exercise and you as a brand need to show your intention that you are genuine about it so what did we do about it? what did we do about voting? we realized that while there is empathy there is inertia in terms of voting there is also an issue and the issue is mainly with a lot of youngsters because people move cities in search of jobs people move cities in terms of education and when they want to register and when they want to vote the registration process is actually a very cumbersome process you know you need iCard you need proof of residence many a times you don't know how to go about what forms, where to get the forms so one of the things that we did as a brand is actually help in the voting registration process so there was a clear call to action in terms of how we as a brand could facilitate in the voting process we actually tied up with the election commission we tied up with a NGO called as Janagraha which is into urban development and works on public policies we actually spent a lot of time effort and money as a brand to actually help the youth register and we also did the same on the digital medium in terms of tying up with MAPMA India to actually help people to go to the nearest office for example the route to the nearest office details of the nearest office for the first time actually put the registration form online simplify the process that actually gave us a lot of engagement so we did a full campaign as I said we went to campuses we went to the large IT campuses and we followed up it was not just we went once and did a camp and in none of them we were selling tea in that sense we actually were genuine in terms of what we were trying to do and believed in the cause I think that is the other critical element these were some of the examples in terms of the posters that we set out to do we actually got 6 lakh people register and vote in terms of first time voters and that in terms of the word of mouth in terms of engagement in terms of the database that you create is huge and subsequently for each and every one of the campaigns that we have done that is the general format followed we create awareness about the cause we then take up the issue and ensure that the brand facilitates the consumer actually taking accountability and doing something about it and actually being genuine about it I think those are the three critical elements in terms of going forward the next campaign that we did and I want to quickly touch upon and show you how we did that was the power of 49 which was the next election in fact the youth voting was 2009 elections and 2013 was the power 2012 was the power of 49 campaign which was the next general elections the insight again was very simple we realized that women are 49% of the electorate but in this country in many parts of the country and in many segments women don't independently vote they vote as per the family so the family votes for x candidate the women also votes for the same candidate the women actually does not have a voice of her own so the point that we made was that if women want to talk about issues that are important for them women want to have a voice of their own then they need to stand up and speak so I've covered all of this so we ran a full campaign in terms of collecting crowdsourcing and allowed women to actually call and speak and create awareness about the fact that they don't need to vote as per the family and they have their own issues which they need to talk about and vote for candidates who would actually help solve those issues I will again because there is less time not go through the full process in terms of what we did in terms of empowering and in terms of how we went about doing it but what we did in terms of the result was we actually got women from nearly 504 out of the 543 constancy either through digital media or through free call that we actually had call and talk about issues that actually affected them we got 8 lakh unique calls the total calls that we got was around 28 lakhs in total and there were 8 lakh unique calls in terms of issues which made it one of the largest repository in terms of women's issues which covered the length and breadth of the country and in a sense it was the first ever crowdsourced manifesto which we then as a brand facilitated and presented to various large parties and got them to incorporate gender and manifesto as we moved as I said I am not taking you to the full journey but these were two of the campaigns that I just wanted to highlight we actually have done by this time by 2015 we had done 6 or 7 different issues in terms of what we were talking about starting from voting to women empowerment to corruption but we also realized that how things were in 2007 and how things were in 2018 had changed quite drastically one obviously was the advent of social media and digital and people were much more active so while that was as I say a culture of empathy and people turning a blind eye to many of the social causes in 2007 in 2017-2018 people were actually activists at least on social media people talked about candle marches people talked about raising issues people talked about people rave and rant all the time about every possible issue but what we also realized is while we have a lot of angst and we take up a lot of issues we usually do that after something bad has happened so we talk about India not winning medals after the Olympics is done and we don't win any medals or we talk about women's safety after a rape has happened okay we don't pre act so while activism is not bad and activism is actually good but if we actually want to make an impact and we want to have accountability then we need to raise our voice and do things pre so we actually changed in terms of the engagement with the consumer activism to what we call pre activism in terms of the next phase and I will quickly play the ad I know I am running out of time but last couple of minutes not this one the next one the next one concept and that's the other thing if you want to keep human at the centre one of the things you need to do is you need to keep evolving because humans evolve it's the same as your product brands when you are talking of a product when you are talking again and again because people will get bored the differentiator will go away so even when it's talking about the human and the brand is talking about the consumer and not your product or service you need to keep in mind what is happening and the inside and the trends and be sure that you are taking into account the changes that are happening in society and move along in terms of how you evolve your communication and the brand story I will not take you through those videos but if you are creating awareness and leaving it at that the brand needs to then walk the talk and facilitate what the end consumer does so in this case what we did was we actually created a whole repository of information in terms of how person can pre-act what does pre-activism mean and what are the small things an individual on a daily basis can do to actually move the needle in terms of pre-activism in terms of society that was phase 2 and we used influencers and we used social media to do that we then actually went and checked with the consumer as to what are the couple of big issues that the brand could pre-act on and help move the needle on and the two things that came across very clearly was one in terms of gender sensitization because one of the things that all consumers spoke about is that women's safety that 11 experts believed in when we talked to a lot of experts around that women's safety is not something that you can teach or do overnight it needs to be a generational shift and a lot of it needs to happen at a young age and if we do that in our schools if we do that with parents when the kids are young in terms of gender sensitization that's one of the ways that we can actually empower women and ensure women's safety going forward so that was one of the topics that we took forward as a brand and the other was in terms of making sports more a cultural thing rather than something that we talk about just from a you know when India doesn't win or India doesn't do very well again sports is something that needs to be part of a culture all of us in this room are well aware that when we grew up or even now when kids go to school and come back all of us ask them as to how much did they score in maths or English or science but I am sure that very few of us actually ask as to what is their high jump what distance what height or what is the time that they take for their 100 meters or what would they do in terms of the long jump I am sure none of us discuss that so in terms of a culture that is not something that is imbibed and something that the school also does not take into consideration very seriously most schools are of the 40 periods that they have have two games in the whole week so that is actually where we stand in terms of the sports culture so these were two of the things that we as a brand picked up in terms of pre-activism saying that we need to make a difference at the school level we actually carried out a petition and on both of them which we got parents to sign I will not go through the details in terms of what we did but these were the numbers we got more than people to sign gender sensitization being made a compulsory subject in the school curriculum and we got a petition where 735,000 people signed saying that we should make sports a compulsory subject in school the good thing is we presented this to the HRD ministry and many of you would have seen that at least in CBSE schools they have actually agreed to make sports a compulsory subject going forward gender sensitization is already incorporated into the school curriculum again in many of the CBSE boards so I think we are moving the needle in both the cases long way to go but I think that is how in terms of engagement in terms of getting the consumer on your side and talking about empathy and love and affinity for the brand and something that they are proud of you can build without necessarily talking or keeping the product or your service or technology at the center of what you do last slide in terms of some of the do's and don'ts I think I have talked through that it is not about the brand talking down I think that is important it is not about the brand taking a holier than thou stands it is about the brand creating awareness it is about the brand facilitating it is about the brand itself walking the distance so that the consumer the human realizes that it is not you versus me but it is us together I think that is the secret in terms of creating good brand engagement by keeping humans at the center of it thank you thank you thank you so much for sharing the various awakening and impactful campaigns and could