 Hello and good afternoon. Welcome to this latest webinar series by Exchange for Media and Salesforce on a Tuesday afternoon on a day when India scripted a historic win in Australia. So congratulations to everyone who is excited about the win. I have a fantastic set of panelists with me today who represent a very wide sector of industries of Indian businesses. This webinar, as you know, has been curated along with Salesforce and we are today going to talk about redefining marketing moments and building personalized experiences. Brand building has been increasingly about personalized experiences over the last few years and the COVID, the pandemic has really put a new found spotlight on this. Let me introduce my panelists before we start the conversation. We have on the panel Ajay Dhyani, head marketing and e-commerce for the Timex Group. We have Christopher Jacob, senior director, product marketing Salesforce. Also joining us today is Deepi Sampath, vice president, marketing and ancillary for Vistara. We have Shor Mardikar, chief marketing officer, Tata Klee. We have Kumar, vice president, marketing for Mardukeshwati. We have Pawush Alavya, head digital marketing, Z5. And Vivek Sabarwal, head marketing and PR, AeroClub, Woodland. And I am the host, Navel Ahuja from Exchange for Media. Thank you, Deepi and gentlemen for joining us. I hope all have an insightful conversation. Let me get the ball rolling straight off the bat. Let me ask you now that 2020 is behind us for the wide width of brands you guys manage. Tell us two, three key learnings that you've come across due to COVID. And when I say learnings, tell us consumer habits, consumer insights that you've gathered, which you thought have the pandemic brought in and which are likely to stay beyond 2020. Why don't we start with Mahesh? Sure, so okay. So the pandemic brought one thing for sure that it's got slashed straight away. So that brought in a lot of innovation to be done the way we reach out to the customers. Apart from, of course, we all have seen that more and more customers, the physical world was off for a quite a long time. So how do we reach out to customers? One-on-one marketing, our digitization, our ability to have our customers, database, in fact, helped us a lot in those times. And so to say, of course, after we even sort of came back to action, this trend continued and there was a shift in the consumer buying profile, which also happened due to pandemic, the kind of people who went into purchase the products. So Mahesh, tell us what are the key things, what are the two, three things that you see the pandemic leaving behind for good? As a marketer, what are the things that you will, you think would stay with us, would have changed forever? And it came to say a sector like auto. Okay, if I have to talk from the marketing point of view, I think a few things to remain there is the innovations that were carried out in terms of optimizations. Optimizations in how do we market, how do we reach out to customers? The way we used analytics and our promising analytics to reach out to the right customers to write medium at the right time. These are the things which we sort of worked upon in this time and they are going to remain for the time to come. And of course, we do improve much further in the coming times there. Let me hop across to Ajay. Ajay Timex has been a brand that's been around for a while. And this category also was deeply impacted because a lot of the sales were also driven by physical retail stores. Right. Or you use this time to kind of, you have an input as to your digital strategy. But as a marketer, what are the things that you see that the pandemic has changed for good as far as your category is concerned? What are the things that now you require to do differently in the future forever? Right. So starting with the pandemic time when we had this lockdown starting across India. So Timex is mainly an offline driven brand. So we have presence across various markets through different formats of stores. So lockdown was a difficult period for the brand and it was not very, very clear to everyone how things are going to move up and how things will shape up in the coming times. But one thing out of this COVID situation which we have noticed in a very, very positive manner is the digital adaptation of amongst the consumers to buy watches online. So we saw the consumers coming online buying from e-commerce platforms as well as from the brand websites. So we saw that number of consumers who are willing to buy online, maybe not only from the tier one metro towns but from the smaller cities also. So the digital adoption rate amongst the consumers was greatly motivated. Second thing which we noticed out of this behavior is that the way we looked at the consumer aspiration. So we looked at consumers from different perspective like from the different angle, the way we were present in different formats of stores, the way we presented our catalogs to the consumers. And out of this COVID situation we also monitored that there is a large aspiration amongst the consumers to buy some of our global marquee products which are a little expensive than our normal price products in India. But out of this COVID, we saw a lot of consumers coming to our brand websites asking for those flagship products. And that is one very, very positive thing for us as a market here to understand our consumers in a very different way. Like we have been observing our consumers like we do in a traditional retail format but with the digital coming into the picture, the way we looked at the consumers completely changed our perception. So that was another positive point out of this COVID situation for us as a market here. Right, I think very relevant points and I'm going to come back to you on that. Let me just now go to DP. DP, obviously airlines were, airlines and the tourism sector has been one of the hardest hit. Things are now thankfully getting back to normalcy. And airline as a business has been of knowing the customer well for almost five months. If I'm not mistaken, there were hardly any aircraft in the air and then people have started flying again. There is one part which is safety and hygiene that people are bothered about. And hopefully those things will not remain a concern for a few months down the line. Beyond that, what are the other interesting things you've picked up change in consumer behavior when they approach a booking, when they kind of choose an airline? What have you guys picked up at Vistara which you believe are, though they are a result of the pandemic but which are likely to stay way beyond the COVID? Yeah, sure. So you're right. I think knowing the customer has been something that is key to an airline anyways because we collect the data at the point of booking. And we are also really, really directed by the government on many mandates that we have to follow. So safety, hygiene, et cetera, of course is something that came about. But along with that also came things like signing forms, web check-in, et cetera. So there is a behavior change. There is a consumer behavior change that has happened over time. We see a lot of web check-ins now compared to what we were seeing earlier. So from a marketing perspective, we had to put a lot of those in place in the sense that there is a government mandate mandate was there to sign a form that had to be integrated. So everything was done digitally. So that is a big, big shift. The other shift is in the consumer mindset is that if you look at when you wanna travel you wanna see the timings, the affairs, et cetera. That probably took a back seat because you're now concerned about safety, the hygiene, which airline is following all the protocol, which airline will be safer. So all of that came into play. So there is a shift in how you are, how the consumer is now thinking of air travel, what are the priorities, dark priorities that have become when you book and also how we as an airline are able to instill the confidence as a brand, instill the confidence in consumers' mindset. So that is what changed. And I think that we tried to build that across all our platforms. Yeah, I think very important point, especially when it comes to the airline business, in fact, I'm gonna quote from the, as you know, Salesforce recently unveiled their state of marketing report where they covered a lot of brands and CMOs and a lot of them, 78% of the CMOs said that last year's crisis should be used as a catalyst for improvement. Correct. Airline is one good example and I'm sure, I mean, the Stara is, I'm sure you were following a lot of protocols and a lot of regulations even earlier, but it's also an opportunity for other airlines to come up and use this as an opportunity to make sure that they meet the, importantly, the required standards and are able to instill confidence of their consumers. Let me go across to Christopher. Christopher, as you know, is part of Salesforce and Christopher, you guys deal with the brands across multi-sectors. So it's not possible, of course, to go through insights into each sector, but tell us highlights from some of the key sectors, things that you've picked up working with these clients closely, what has changed for a CMO in terms of what consumers are doing and how that has changed the CMO's life going forward. Firstly, thank you, Noelle, for having me and thank you everyone for joining and hi to my esteemed panelists. It's a great question. I think, you know, you've heard some individual examples of what's changed with interactions between customers in travel and for things like buying consumer products like watches. We at Salesforce sort of sit in a unique position. Obviously, we are a company, so we have customers, many of which are hopefully on this call, but we also provide a platform that other customers use to interact with their customers. And because of that and because of my specific role at Salesforce, a lot of which you commented on, I see a lot of those macro trends in terms of what's going on with general digital transformation, as well as end transformation that's going on through research that we do between brands and customers. So just to give you one thing to start off with, like globally, 63% of end customers and buyers, so whether it's B2C or B2B businesses, say how they receive their goods and services has transformed just since the beginning of 2020. So within 12 months, 63%, that number jumps to 93% when you're talking about India alone, 93%. Now we heard some individual examples just say what the experience with travel, with check-in and buying products, but can you imagine a transformation in human history where 93% of people say how they did something just 12 months ago has changed? Just 12 months ago, and I'm talking about some rapid things. So if you think about that type of a rapid transformation in such a short space of time, and all of us brands and the industries that we represent and the markets that we sell into, that's a massive amount of change that we need to adopt, a massive amount of understanding of the customer that we need to achieve. And then when we go out and do something as tactical say as marketing, when you actually go market to that person, whether it's the channel you market in or the message that you're sending within that channel, that fundamentally has to be transformed, not just because they may want something different than else, but also because the context has changed. You have to be more empathetic. We're in an era where you have to be more empathetic. People may have lost their job. People may be going through health crises. You do not want to be hitting them with over powered products, services, or types of offers that may be insensitive to that information. And you want to hit them in a channel that they may be more likely to interact in. COVID, if anything else, has accelerated the transformation that's happening at brands. In fact, 71% of customers in India say that they expect brands to increase their digital transformation because of COVID. So they already wanted it, but now they're saying they want to increase. So there are a couple of the macro trends that we've seen that we individually are experiencing as a company, but I'm sure everyone is experiencing and feeling it. Yeah, I think the very relevant point, what COVID has done has accelerated trends that were already kind of happening. It has given a fresh impetus, things that might have taken another three, five years have happened in 12 months. But the important thing to learn here or understand here is that when something gets accelerated at such a fast rate, there is some significant fundamental change also that takes place. It's like how India went from a very low telephone density country to a mobile phone country without going through the curve of landline phones or a huge penetration of landline phones. And today you see mobile penetration in this country is huge and content consumption on mobiles, digital transaction has gone up and every brand is now scrambling around to figure out what to do. Yesterday I was chatting with Mark Reed, the global CEO of WPP. And one of the key things he said was that digital naturally is now a way of life for most of the consumers. But what is important for brands and marketers to understand is that not to look at digital as only a medium of reach out, digital has to be looked at in its entirety, how you are approaching the consumer and some of the old rules of marketing still remain relevant. Like you said, for brands to be empathetic, whether you're doing the transaction or you're seeking the customer to come to you offline or online, empathy is something that is a value that people will seek from brands anyway. Let me hop across to Kishore. Kishore, you are part of a company that has a lot of physical brands but Tata Clique specifically is a digital only brand and it's an online retailer, e-commerce company. COVID naturally would have really accelerated what Tata Clique's growth journey but tell us some of the key things you saw have transaction values gone up, are customers spending more time researching before they are buying? What are the key things you've picked up which are also going to be very relevant for you to build the next sort of growth foundation? In fact, I'm actually continuing the discussion about what Christopher actually left and what you spoke about. Very, very clearly for us, being a digital brand, we actually were witnessing a decent amount of exploration happening earlier on multiple categories. But the moment the COVID started, at the moment there was a long-term, the amount of exploration actually an exponential event. There were a large number of categories which to a large extent were not known for exploration. We actually suddenly saw people coming there, looking at multiple products, comparing products and actually that led to a need for us to generate content which can be consumed in what we call, I want to know moment. Because generally for an e-commerce platform, if you actually look into their two parts of the customer journey, I want to shop where the customer actually comes with an intent and shop. But there are large number of customers who come just to browse, just to understand more, just to take certain decisions. That part of the journey actually accelerated. We found large number of categories where customers actually started spending more time, started comparing more brands, comparing more products. And that is why actually we spent a decent amount of time doing better. To actually make sure that the content is generated where customers actually can start the journey. They can compare, they can understand. We actually brought a number of experts. Those experts actually held up creating the comments so that at least there's a point of view which the customer start getting. Because as a marketer, what our objective is to get that particular customer, make the purchase on our platform as well, which means the positive disposition to same happens. And that is where the content played a very, very important role. So the point answer is exploration. Exploration exponentially went up. And that is what as all the e-commerce brands did, we had to make sure that we get enough and more information to the customer. Because digital was the only way in which they can actually start the journey. Physical stores were no longer. I'm going to come back regarding this physical and the online store synchronization a bit later. Let me go to Vivek. Vivek, Woodland has been around for a while. And so you started your journey as a physical offline brand. I'm sure an online strategy has also worked for Woodland. Tell us, and again, outdoor was all shut and Woodland has been a brand synonymous with outdoor. So for many months, people were hardly outdoor. How did you survive that? And what are the learnings that came out of that sort of tough period? The period was certainly tough for everyone. So as everyone in the panel said, it has been almost four months that the entire business scheme came to a halt. Even online was on hold because of the logistics issue. But having said that, among the panelists, I do have Ajay and Mahesh who are in sync with my kind of working. So we are more of offline model-based brands. And our learnings would always be very similar. If I talk a little bit about history of Woodland, we started almost 25 years ago. And in the last 25 years, we have made an exclusive chain of over 600 stores. So that's the biggest investment of the brand and the entire scheme of things in the Indian business scenario. And yes, no doubt we were certainly hit like any other brand. But in the last four, five years, we have started our digital journey and that was somehow a blessing in disguise for us. So if you look at my business model, we started our own e-commerce almost eight to 10 years back. But in the last five years, we have seen that acceleration. So partnering with the brands like Amazon, Flipkast of the world, and also parallel to running our own e-commerce platform. This has given us some impetus. It's by chance that last year, we started working on our new website as well. So that came alive right at the time when COVID hit everyone. So we were able to give a fresh look and feel of the brand to the consumers and of course a better consumer journey on the online business. And parallel Omni channel was coming its way. So somehow a multiplicity of things happening at the same time was a blessing in disguise. And this has given us an opportunity to survive in this tough times. When the customer has come back to you again, have you seen any change? Digital is certainly a grown exponential. Having said that, India is and will remain a touch and feel kind of a country. So this will certainly come alive in the next three to six months, the moment things seem settled. The digital has grown, but touch and feel will remain relevant. Of course, of course, digital will grow. People have started having the experience of data and they will certainly take it on. The Gen Zs and all are by default there on digital. But even the middle aged and the senior people have also come a little bit on data. So there is certainly acceleration of the consumer on the data space. Parvush, let me hop across to you now. You're from a category, envious category where demand is higher-optated during lockdown. People are now moving among us on some content. I'm not going to ask you what has changed because more and more consumers are giving content is good for brands like V5. But tell me what are the challenges you've seen? One is, of course, the technology-related challenges. Perhaps a lot of companies are not even ready to sell so much content. So a lot of them have had to suddenly ramp up content. But OTT is a space which is hyper-competitive. Last count, there were some 29 or 30 or OTT players in India. What's been the biggest challenge for OTT brands during this lockdown? So yeah, I think the last count that I have is about 36 OTTs in India, actually. So yeah, there you have that. Yeah, I mean, you're right. The lockdown period has been great for all of us to grow, right? I mean, everyone has been growing and people have been sitting home and consuming a lot of content. The biggest challenges for us is how do we engage with our users? How do we keep them on board? And how do we make them keep coming back to us with what people have now is a lot of choice, right? This is something that people did not have a couple of years ago, but now with the choices increasing, everyone going into producing more and more content and having easy access to users as well because they are either freely accessing content or they are directly coming on the platform because of partnerships with your broadband connection or your mobile phone connection. I think the challenge is to keep the people who come on board either with free content, new offerings or with content which keeps on enthusing the users over and over again, right? So that is, I would say, the key challenge that everyone would face and competitiveness is increasing. So a lot of people and a lot of industries would want to be the number one in their space. Well, in our space, actually, that might not be possible for the 30 or people that are there, right? So how do you ensure you build your own niche? You keep your segment active alive and through good marketing efforts and good marketing campaigns, how do you ensure you keep the users who have already been acquired or have come to our platform for whatever reason? How do you keep them there? So that's where the digital strategy comes in. The strategy to not only acquire users but to keep them on board, keep bringing them back on board and what all do you do from there? So I think that is the main thing from our side. Good point. Let me now talk about physical retail stores are opening up, a lot of consumers are going back to shopping in the physical sense of the world. Discovery is still happening online but on-shop sales have started. And post-COVID, this entire customer journey has even become even more complex in some ways. Marrying offline and online data has become one of the very key challenges for any marketer, especially when you look at the data that is being generated to digital advertising, digital communication efforts, first-party data that you're generating on your own and then there is data that is coming to offline retail stores. How do you marry all of these? Let me ask Kishore, though yours is a brand which exists only on digital, but a lot of categories that you sell within your own group also have an offline kind of retail outlet. One, I'm sure you're synchronizing somewhere at the back end but at the same time for a marketer this entire matrix has become extremely complex to marry offline and online data and map the entire customer journey. So what is the lesser complex way to do it? See, from our perspective, though TataClick is a completely digital channel, yes, there are large number of Tata brands in addition to non-Tata brands which actually are showcased and let me take an example of a trend for that, like the West Side. So the West Side is exclusively on this. So couple of things which we actually do in order to make sure that there is a decent amount of synchronization is to make sure that certain offers and price points which are extended on offline stores are also available. Like, for example, their loyalty program. They have Club West as their loyalty program. How do we make sure that in case a customer comes in shops on TataClick, the customer actually gets the same number of points. So those kind of synchronization is what we are trying to do but yes, we do not have a central data repository where all these things actually happen on a complete real-time basis. So still because these are two separate entities, these are two separate companies, things to an extent actually happen in a slightly more of the backend file systems processing kind of a way. But ultimately what we try to do is from a customer's perspective, customer should be in a seamless experience. That's one part of it. Second part of it is within TataClick itself. But we want to make sure that we have a complete view of the customer across the panel when the customer is actually coming on board and we are doing the content exploration and going all the way and doing the purchase. So for that particular perspective, what we generally do is what we call full parallel knowledge. We make sure that we identify a particular customer from a perspective whether a customer is actually right now just exploring or a customer is wanting to or seriously shop for a particular product. Those kind of signals we try and actually get it. From trend, et cetera, what we get is some bit of information about what kind of tier these customers have. But generally that actually helps alone only in certain CRM campaigns, but not beyond that. All right. Ajay, let me pick you up on this since Timex has been an offline brand and now you also have online detailed channel. All in the journey to kind of go from a purely offline brand to now also doing online and then mapping both types of customers because the nature of these customers are different. These people are different preferences are naturally different. Right. So like you rightly mentioned, Timex traditionally been an offline brand and the brand presence across India is through different format of stores. So we are presenting moment pop stores which are like your traditional stores, small size stores. Then we also have our own flagship stores. So we have our brand presence to flagship stores across India. But having said that the customer journey and the customer experience and the customer behavior across each format is totally different. Customer buying products in traditional formats, customers buying products online on e-commerce platform, there would be two different set of consumers. And that's kind of always intrigued me that the consumer behavior is totally different on e-commerce portal. Consumer average price point in our showrooms is pretty high as compared to other channels. So there we feel that, consumers who are looking to buy latest trending products, flagship products and willing to pay extra for those premium products. But now coming to this, that the marrying the whole set of things that offline stores, online stores. So our stores are connected to our software and we also collect our consumer data. And what happens through that data, we also try to market our schemes and other promotional offers to these consumers. So that data is really helping us to build our digital journey. Like Vivek mentioned, like Woodland, we have also started our digital journey recently. We have also built our brand website. But having said that, in that journey, I mean, with the limited experience of our digital transformation, we have been trying to adopt various kind of technologies and various kinds of facilities to enhance our customer experience. So one way is that, we want to become a true Omni platform. So when you want to really, really achieve that high-class Omni experience for our consumers, it's very, very critical to integrate all your stores and your online data and bring that seamless experience for your consumers. So now in our digital journey, we are adopting these consumer data across funnels and using it to communicate well and create better experience for our consumers. And Vivek, if I were to ask you, is the other, the mapping happening other way around as well, where you captured some sort of data digitally? And then how do you map whether the customer was in the store and how do you ensure that or how do you kind of capture the customers when they are visiting the store? So now this would be pretty similar with me and Ajay's team. However, we will be a little different from Kishore's team because that is completed later. So we have a centralized ERP which captures the entire database of sales as well as the customer journey. So we have an online model and we have an offline model and there's a common database which captures both of them. Just give me a sec here. Let me bring in Christopher in the meanwhile. Christopher, since you are there and as I mentioned at the start, you work with multiple categories. Tell us Christopher, what are the pain points you've seen as Salesforce to implement a lot of CRM solutions, marketing solutions for brands? What are the pain points you've seen when it comes to integrating digital data, visibility of digital data or data that is generated through digital platform versus database or data that is generated through offline platforms? Yeah, it's a big challenge and I think a lot of people have alluded to it and how hard it is to connect the data and build a unified view. Just to give you a starting point for this discussion and then give you some specifics. For companies in India, they said in 2020, they're using on average about 20 different data sources to build that unified view of their customer or buyer. So a data source being transactional data, point of sale data, so things that may happen offline and you have things like email performance data, web analytics, those are the things that happen digitally. So each of those are data sources and on average, the number is 20 and it's projected to be 25 this year, 2021. That's a growth of 25%. That's a massive amount of growth in building a unified view in a very short space of time just like the customer and buyer trends we were talking about at the beginning. So what do I need to solve for? What do I need to solve for to manage all that data and harness it? There's five key areas. There's quality, making sure the data is accurate because what's the point of having all that data if it's inaccurate or misleading? Timeliness, am I getting the data fast enough so I'm able to react to it so it's still relevant because if the data's come in three month batches, that relevance if I'm producing an offer to someone may not be relevant to where they are now they may have already bought, et cetera. Integration, those 20 data sources or 25 projected to be this year they could be in 20 or 25 different systems. I have to integrate that all in such a way that makes sense. Consent, we are living in a world where the customer and buyer is king more than ever. They always have been in theory but more than ever in legislation is also mandating that all across the world. We need to capture the consent in terms of what we're able to use not just based on regulation but also based on empathy which we talked about earlier and identity. If you're having 20 different technology stacks housing all this data is personal while in the email system no while in the point of sale system so I can make sure I'm looking at the same person building that unified view when I'm personalizing a message to you subsequently in a customer journey. So these are the five areas that brands around the world are solving for and coming to technology to try and solve it for them but there's two challenges. There's a solving for it with technology and the solving for it internally because even if you have the best technology if you don't have the workflows, the bureaucracy the top-down mandate to solve for these things it's not gonna succeed. Yeah, I think very relevant and I think the most important part of this entire puzzle is how do you get these 25 data sources to integrate with each other? Otherwise the effort is all kind of waste. Exactly. Deepi, I'm gonna pick you up on that. Thankfully nobody buys airline tickets offline anymore unless you are last minute at the airport. So for you life is slightly simpler if I may use that term but at the same time you're still generating humongous amounts of data and you have first party data. You're doing digital marketing activities which is generating data for you you have your own data sources to which you are doing marketing then you have third party tie-ups with for example Vistara as a tie with access credit cards they are generating data. How do you ensure that you have these humongous different data sources talking to each other and then you have a unified customer reach out strategy in an age when everybody's talking personalization? Yeah, so this is definitely challenging and as Christopher said earlier that it's very, very important to kind of put it all together to be able to give that experience and it has to kind of it's not just technology you also have to believe and you also have to have that philosophy. So you're right we don't have an offline kind of a system per se but we have data flowing in from many channels. So we work with OTAs which are indirect channels. We have our own many other channels which are our website, our mobile, our call center, et cetera. And then of course there is Club Vistara as you said there are co-branded cards, et cetera. So we probably have it a little better than maybe when you're combining offline and online but I think we are still some time away. We are also in the process of in the path of building that one view of the customer so that the same customer when it comes on the website I can give a personalized experience and when calls the call center can they can look at the history, et cetera. So I think we are successful up to an extent but it is still some time away. At the same time we do have a lot of things that are going on social media. So there are social listening tools in place as well but it is still a task to put it all together and give a personalized or a very, very customized experience at all touch points. But I think that that journey has started and I think COVID has also fast-tracked. It was always there in our head. There was some work already done but I think because of COVID it has kind of fast-tracked a lot of it. Yes, personalization is the holy will. Absolutely. Mahesh, let me come to your category which is slightly different from some others in the sense that very few car orders are yet placed entirely online. People do discovery, people do research but eventually you go to a store and buy it. So a company like Maruti would have a very strong digital strategy when it came to communication. How are you building the next leg of digital journey for the customer? When do we start seeing people, for example, if not really booking a car online but pretty much doing almost everything online and the car being delivered to them? Okay, I think first of all, let me relate it back to one of our co-panelists. In our strategy, the feel and touch is going to remain an important aspect. More so to say that a car is not a product which we buy and sort of, the life cycle is pretty long and it needs to be served over a period of time. So the physical world remains a reality with us. Now, having said that the physical world, we implement our customer engagement and customer serving through our dealer partners. And Maruti is known for the network as a dealer partners but all this delivery when it happens through the dealer partners, it becomes important to have a synergy or a common system and platform for all the dealer partners, that is one. Two, I think a co-panelist touched upon it that we've got many LOBs and these LOBs, lines of businesses, they came up over a period of time. So for example, of course, the sales, we do service, we do driving training, we have a true value wherein we facilitate the old car business. We provide finance, we provide loyalty programs. So the point here is when we've got so many LOBs and they're for a company like us which has come, they have come up over a period of time, it is, it was a challenge which we've been able to overcome to a reasonable extent to stitch all these, the customer interaction points into one for today and also for the past. And when we say a customer, customer can have a different, for example, mobile number when he comes to one particular touch point, he may have one other mobile number. So I mean, it is an analytical challenge to stitch it together and we've been able to do it reasonably well and we've actually put into action. The second thing which becomes important is once we have it in place, some reasonable amount of confidence into the single view of customer, of course, within the realm of the privacy and the basic rights of the consumer about their data sharing and all that. Now it comes how to use it for the best interest of the consumer as well as the company. And there it becomes important to standardize on the interaction platforms with the consumers that all the touch points that we have. And their sales force came in as a partner and we've utilized it to the best extent possible everywhere. So when somebody calls up for a customer concern at a call center or someone is reaching out to dealership or buying a new car or so we see. So, so commonizing that in a interaction platform where a consumer can be identified with the relevant amount of data for him to be served, better for that personalized experience. That also goes on to when we want to reach out to somebody, some consumers or a marketing initiatives to make it relevant for that consumer at the right time, at the right place, the right content, the right positioning, the right product or service offering. So all that becomes important with, of course, the data analytics promise that we are building. So this is the overall strategy which sort of comes into play for organization of our size and complexity, so to say. Yeah, I can imagine because, you know, Maruti is like the FMCG equivalent of an auto company. You are pretty much in every price category that a car company can be, your geographical spread is unmatched. So to kind of service this huge gamut of customers in an era where a brand, a marketer wants to do personalization is a very complex task. So let us tell us a little bit about how do you sort of try to achieve that balance because at some point, personalization also becomes a very costly exercise, right? How do you get all these data sources that you're generating on a daily basis to talk to each other, then create strategies to kind of individually slice customers say across 25 TGs or 40 TGs and then go to them? Yeah, very, very relevant question for the discussion. Yes, actually, first thing is start from defining very crisp KPIs for the resultant KPIs and analytics and our internal analytics promise comes very handy. And then we have an analytics group being groomed over the past three years. And now in every stream of business, whether we are trying to pitch in a new product to our existing customers or we are trying to reach out with respect to, let's say we want to call out to some people coming for servicing their cars, we are able to reasonably bring out the cohorts which, so it starts from cohort-based treatment of the customers and slowly we refine it and we intend to make those cohorts smaller and up to bring incremental value. But yes, of course, within the realm of the law of diminishing returns as you were saying that, where is the fine balance, where the costs actually start becoming higher than the results. It's a fine balance and it's the statistics and mathematics which we have to plan then. The possibilities are enormous. And once we have it in-house, that incremental knowledge and incremental experimentation comes in very handy. Yeah, absolutely. Christopher, let me hop across to you because you have a very good sort of ringside view of having worked with multiple brands and industries. What are the flip side of this race towards personalization? What are the challenges you've seen that companies have not been able to overcome and where do they falter? Yeah, it's a very good question and it was sort of alluded to and lots of different individual examples of the challenge of interaction, one, because of the change, but two, because of the nature of the product or services being provided. There is a trust crisis. Generally speaking, customers and business buyers across the world are distrustful of brands and there's fundamental reasons why they're distrustful because of macro examples that we all hear about in the news and especially coming in through my industry and technology and then we're all aware of those examples. That's something we all have to overcome. We have to overcome that trust crisis if we want to then go and have the opportunity to then go offer our product or service or just have a general conversation with those we view in our addressable market. So that's the unique thing people are doing. They have access to all this data in such a way that they've never had before. They have the ability through technology to personalize in ways they've never had before across an array of channels reaching people at their most intimate moments. But the end customer is more distrustful than they ever have been of those same brands. So this is the way that we've generally seen people be successful at this is basically doing things in such a way that have a humanistic approach. Yes, first know your customer but when you then go to the next stage it's humanizing the approach of the marketing that you don't do or the communication you do or the customer service interaction that you do. And I'll give you two simple examples that sort of make sense given an end customer and I'm sure we all feel this is end customers. When you have a customer service interaction with somebody and somebody is raising an issue with your company maybe there's been an issue, there's been a cancellation the product hasn't arrived the service wasn't up to standard. What is the last thing you want to do with that customer at this point in time? The last thing you should be doing is marketing to them. They have an open customer service issue you need to rectify that issue. They should be blocked from all forms of marketing until that issue is resolved and then you can start marketing it to them. Right now only about half of companies have the ability to do that around the world. I don't know the exact number for India off the top of my head, but around the world it's about half of companies. They don't do it all the time. They just have the ability to do it and doing it sometimes. That should be 100% all the time in every industry. And in reverse, if you want to be truly be effective when that customer service interaction is happening when you have that chance to connect with a customer directly shouldn't that customer service agent whether it's live chat group messaging over the phone or in person shouldn't that customer service agent be empowered with the ability to market to somebody? You have the opportunity to talk to somebody, shouldn't I know what that person's interacted with in my console? Have they've seen and interacted with this email offer what was the last product that they bought? Because in that moment you have a unique opportunity to market to that somebody that a marketer would ultimately kill for to use an expression. They would love to have that level of personalization in that moment to have that conversation. So these are types of simple things that people can do to establish trust one by not annoying somebody when they're most annoyed with you and two by connecting with them in that moment where they're willing to connect with you because they've reached out because of an issue. Yeah, I think very, very relevant points. You know, some of these are very fundamental to marketing approach but in our race for, you know personalization and gathering all these data sources we end up kind of missing some of these issues. The important point for a lot of marketers to also remember is that customers in a sense find brands boring, right? They want products, they don't, they want products or services, right? Brands or creations of the companies and how do you humanize boring brands? That's the challenge for marketers. How do brands talk to customers and create aspirational value? I think that's the most important thing for marketers to do. We have limited time now. Let me quickly take up the issue of creating contextualized reach to customers and I talk about contextualized advertising, marketing campaigns. We've seen what the pandemic has done last year to economies across the world, large parts of populations in almost every country is very deeply impacted. Having said that the realities of business have not changed. Shareholders still seek quarterly returns. Almost every industry continues to remain highly competitive in an era like that. How do brands take a human approach towards marketing at the same time, maintain their competitive edge? Otherwise you are at the peril of all sounding the same. If everybody started doing COVID-focused campaign, all 10 brands in a category would sound very similar, right? So how do you sort of walk that thin line? Vivek, if you have any thoughts on that? I'm sorry, I was not able to hear you well. We'll have to repeat the last one. So I said, COVID has done very huge damage to economies. Customers have lesser money. At the same time, woodland shareholders would next year want things getting back to normal, more returns. So how do you balance that trade-off between aggressively reaching out to customers when you're also competing with 10 other brands in your category? At the same time, also having a very human approach because the last thing you want is all 10 brands in your category sounding very similar to the customer and the value disappearing overnight. So if you look at the woodland loyalists, they remain there and they intend to grow further. In terms of our marketing budgets, if I say broadly, they remain almost in the same space. So it's a matter of optimization of a marketing campaigns which were a little skewed towards a traditional earlier and which are skewed towards the day till now. So there's a shift in the marketing optimization strategies that we have been doing. And that is certainly which has given us an opportunity to come back on track to a certain extent. If I look at my current scenario, I'm probably back on at least 60 to 70% revival that has happened in the last three months. And typical to my brand, this being a winter season, which is certainly in a very good shape. So while as a human, we all love winter only to a certain extent or my product line winter is something which I sell the most in terms of my barrel and all. So a multiple mix and match of my product line, economic scenario and all those things have got us a little bit back on the track. We intend to take this forward. So they tell us certainly that has made shape already proved itself. So that will be on a longer journey for sure. And let's see how things shape up in the next financial year. If you again, very relevant for your industry, airlines, you know, at the heart of it, it is about going from point A to point B, you want larger share of the market in an era when, you know, people have lesser money. How do you find that balance? So I would say that it's very, very important at this time to create the brand connect. It's extremely important to, you know, create that emotional connect with the customer and not to be in the face. So as I said earlier, the priority in terms of travel change from not just pricing and timing, but also to safety. How an airline will kind of take care of me, what will happen inside the aircraft, et cetera. So it was important to create, to communicate and create that brand connect that we are going to take care of you. You are safe. So there was a campaign that we launched and it was across three, you know, all other, all our platforms. And it was all about flying feel safe again. When we started, when we were not flying for about two and a half months, when we started flying, it was in a very limited way. We knew that pricing is going to, there is a capping on the pricing by the government. So what's going to play on customer's mind? It is not really the price. It's the confidence that we have to build. So you have to have that connect and that is how you're going to get the customer back. So today as a brand, I mean, there are many airlines, right? As a brand, if I'm able to build that trust and get the customer back to fly with Vistara, then that's how you build over it and that's how you see the growth because at the end of the day, as you said, it is the revenue that matters. So how do you go about it? How do you communicate? And we used various, I mean, we used the social media, we used other properties at the airport to ensure that these are some of the things that we will be doing. Apart from that, it was important for the customer to know what are the quarantine rules? What are the policies? Because it was very dynamic, right? Everything was changing. And it was important for us to kind of communicate that. So we kept doing that, along with talking about how safe we are. And also if you see many, many interactions on Twitter and on social media, about how people are either appreciating, how the ground services or the crew has helped people, because in an airline, it's an experience of the product and the service. And we reciprocated it via creating a property called Vistara Love. So saying that, thank you for appreciating us. So those kind of connects you build, to kind of ensure that you are humanizing the experience and creating an emotional connect. So that you ensure repeat, or you ensure more and more customer choosing Vistara as a brand. Ajay, what would be the challenge for a category like you? I mean, you want higher market share, higher share of wallet, but it's almost kind of inhuman to aggressively pursue it in these times. So how would you approach that? Right, so in our scenario, again, the personalization is very, very important. Like I mentioned initially, that the way we looked at the consumers has completely changed after this COVID situation. How consumers behave on different platform, the interaction with the product is totally different. And as a result of that, during COVID situation, we also build cohorts of our consumers across different products. So we have a product lineup of, let's say about more than 1000 SKUs. And within those 1000 SKUs, it's very difficult to build cohorts. But when we look at the data, we realize that there are different set of consumers who are looking at functional watches and there are some set of consumers who are looking at very, very trendy, flagship expensive watches, some watch collectors items. And there are consumers who are looking to gain offers on these kind of products. So we have seen interesting transition of our consumers happening on digital platform. One interesting example, like during the COVID time, when we had our stores closed and there was nothing moving in our traditional stores or also completely locked down. So in order to just gauge the consumer sentiments, we launched a campaign, digital campaign on digital platform, saying that you place your order in advance and that was something unique which we did for the first time. Just to check how the consumers are ready. We had the data of consumers who are looking to buy expensive limited edition timepieces. And we targeted those consumers just to check whether they are willing to pay in advance and whether to wait for the lockdown restriction or not. And as a result of that, what we saw deluge of orders coming to our website. And as a matter of fact, it also sensitized our trade partners and they also kind of felt absolutely motivated that the things will be positive soon and consumers are ready to buy watches and they are ready to buy products. They will be back to normal things. So again, using the data and creating that personalized experience during that COVID time, targeting special set of consumers who have aspiration to buy your expensive watches, limited edition timepieces, kind of gave us again this great understanding of creating personalized experience and looking at how the consumers interact with your communication and with your product categories. Yeah, Mahesh, what could you do? How would you get 20 lakh rupees out of a guy whose income has been badly hit without kind of aggressively selling it? So I think in our case, it's not the scenario that we can get somebody to. But yes, there are offerings. For example, there are things like subscription models and those kind of things which are kind of, yeah. Sure, it was before COVID, but you kind of. Yeah, yeah. So those are the kind of things. And plus, I think it is also that consultative approach at the point of sales and throughout which, because it's ultimately for us, it's not only one time product sale, it is also the lifetime revenues that the customer brings to us across the overall lifespan of the product and of course, the repeat purchases. So that is our take on that. And it's not a short-term strategy for us. I mean, it never works for our kind of industry. One can assume no over-the-top usage of stars for some time. But I think the subscription-driven strategy is a fantastic example of good quality consumer insight coupled with insight into what's happening with incomes during COVID. And only time will tell how successful it is commercially, but on the pace of it, it looks like a kind of very interesting thing to do at this point of time. We are almost out of time. So let me come to each one of you for your closing comments. One of the key components that CXO is kind of aimed to achieve today is real-time engagement with customers. Real-time engagement is also a huge challenge because as we have discussed multiple things during this last one hour, Christopher said, Indian companies are dealing with 20 different data sources going on to 25. Personalization as a piece is not yet in place. It's really complex. The offline and online data sources again are not yet fully integrated. How do you approach real-time engagement in a complex metrics like this, Mahesh? Since we are with you, perhaps you can talk about it. Yeah, I think it's very important. One of my panelists already spoke about that human face of a brand, a company, company that comes very important. So when we talk about this aspect, it becomes important to have a common platform of interaction with people and keeping a view of the customer overall, what he has done with us, what he's going through. What are his preferences overall? And statistically, one can build upon what are the medium somebody prefers to talk with. What are the times? Probably he will be most, you know. Another thing is that in today's world, when it becomes very easy to get bulged into anybody's privacy, it's very important to be relevant and to live up to the expectations from the brand. It's very important for big brands like us. We are not like someone who can annoy the customer. And if someone, for example, gets too much, feels too much his privacy is getting impacted by the emails I am sending to him, he'll just check me off and then that opportunity is gone. So we need to be very careful in the strategies that we follow in the coming times, respect to this. You know, Paurush, there's an audience question for you. I'm going to take that up. How is Z5 creating personalization across global markets? Oh, yeah. So your personalization is something that we are very focused on. And what are the, what are the pointers, I think Deepti and Mahesh have also kind of picked up. It's something that is very relevant from an online world, right? So right from bucketing and quoting users from the time they come on our platform to how much time they're engaging with us, to what geography they are coming from, what language they are watching the content on, all the way back to when was the last time they kind of engaged with us and what was it that they engaged with us with and then hitting them back with communication of what new content we have, what new offers we have on our platform. So personalization is the only way of distinguishing ourselves and the customers that we have on our platform on everyday basis is what we do actually, right? So it becomes very important and like Christopher actually already mentioned, right? So because our data and it's true for us as well and I think it'd be true for almost everyone, Pete, an Indian company, a non-Indian company, our data lies in multiple different channels, different pieces and we have to segment that, get to the bottom of that and then hit back the users on a completely different channel. So those are the challenges that we face, prioritizing all those things and then reaching out to users. I think that's the game for us actually. Christopher, if I can get your closing thoughts, what are the things you think CMOs would be kept busy with this year? I think- Oh, sorry. No, I'm sorry, you wanna finish your thought? No, it's okay, you can cut me some. Okay, no problem at all, the era of Zoom. This is exactly what we need to be wary of. The thing is to keep track of what's going on, right? And I'll give you a sort of a simple example of how quickly things can change based on on the ground conditions. In month three of the pandemic, the number one thing customers that they wanted to see from brands was how they were taking care of their own employees and what operational updates were going, i.e. change of service, hours may have reduced the way I'm delivering a product or service, only two months later, then the brands wanted them to focus back on their products and services again and promotional offers. Now, think about what's gonna happen in this year, right? We've got global vaccinations being rolled out, new regulations, things like cross-border travel may start opening up in new ways. You may have things like vaccine passports. So it'll be the whole host of other things that occur this year that change the way that customers look and feel and then the way they wanna interact with any given brand. These are the things all of us have to be on top of, right? We don't exactly know what they are. We know it at a macro level, but we don't exactly know what they are. We just have to be a depth of keeping on track of what those trends are, what changing sentiments may be going on. Of course, regulatory things going on in our industry and at the government level and then act accordingly in terms of how we then go and communicate. Now, so there's no specific one thing to do, but you need to have the mechanisms to capture those insights either directly or from people you trust and then be able to deliver that out in terms of output back to the customers and buyers that you service. So being agile and being adept is critical during this time and then having the technology and workflows to deliver what it is you want to do in terms of your strategy. Because I think as we've all learned through the past 12 months, we don't exactly know what's gonna happen and not only do we not know what's gonna happen, we don't know how people are gonna react to what's gonna happen even if we know what's gonna happen. So being adept and agile to adapt accordingly and then move through the year as things happen through the technology and the workflows that we have. Well, I think COVID has made one thing clear which is the fragility of all the plans we made. And I think that's a good point to give to your bosses. Deepi, I'm gonna come to you. There's a question from Nikhil Deshmukh for you. By when do you think passenger football will reach pre-COVID level? Yeah, hi, Nikhil. Well, I think a lot depends on how and how the international borders open up, how the government mandate comes across. But I think we get a good sense that it'll take about six more months for it to kind of completely come back to pre-COVID level. With the vaccine coming in and hopefully more and more people will get the vaccine short and travel will open up. But yeah, it is again, international may take some more time. Domestic is already kind of getting there. So maybe in other six months. Ajay, what are the things that will keep you busy? So now we realize that digital is very, very important for us. And now working on our yearly calendar, a lot of new activities being planned to fast-track this digital transformation within the company, new softwares, new investments and new strategies and new ways are being looked at. So presently, very, very occupied with taking this challenge of, you know, managing the digital transformation within the company. So that's one thing which is keeping me busy these days. Will that also mean significantly reduced emphasis on offline store or will that expansion continue at pre-COVID level? So our offline focus will remain same and we know that the touch and feel is very, very important. And it's a beautiful way to showcase your products to the consumers the way, you know, consumers would like to interact with your sales people in the store and the way they like to feel the product. But yes, digital transformation is to reach out to the new and new set of consumers in smaller cities where we don't have that much of penetration through our flagship stores and where we are not able to showcase our entire width of catalogs. So maybe, you know, a two-way, two-pronged approach. One is to, you know, catch new and new consumers. And second is to when you catch your new consumers, your own set of data, the way you interact with the consumers to create a very unique consumer experience, that's very important for us going forward. Understood. Vivek, I see you nodding. Completely, I completely agree to Ajay. Are there any different ways in which you are going to now engage to the next guy who walks into your store, the next outdoor enthusiast? No, our work would be very similar to what Ajay recommended. We, being an exclusive detail chain of 600 stores, we intend to make it grow further. And that is our strongest asset. Fantastic to show your parting thoughts. In fact, for us, because being a digital platform, we actually generate tons and tons of data. So one of the most important thing is knowing very clearly that every customer who comes on the platform does not want to shop. The intent for shopping may not be that high. How do we actually build relevant experiences, for customers who are not actually just browsing? And how do we build relevant experiences for customers who actually have a very, very serious intent to shop a particular category? So making sure that, making sense of that particular data and build ecosystem that actually automate these kinds of customer experiences is one of the most important focus areas. Fantastic. Fair point and a lot of wealth of information that you all shared. We are out of time. So thank you so much for joining us. Thank you Deepthi. Thank you gentlemen for a very insightful, engaging session. Thank you. Session, if there are any more audience questions that come by, we'll be happy to pass them on to you. Till the time we meet again. Thank you. Goodbye and stay safe. Thank you so much.