 of our five-side chat between Matthew Chandi, Manishing Director and Euroflex, co-founder Exchange for Media where they will discuss how Euroflex has built its product line through the power of influence. But before we get on to introducing our speaker, I'd like to show some of the campaigns done by him and his team. So could we move on to displaying the campaigns first? Hey guys, welcome to my space. A space where I spend most of my quality time. Be it spending some time with myself, be it reading or just chilling with my pets. I like to live out of the box. It couldn't get cozier with a nice and comfortable mattress and that's why today I'm switching to Euroflex Living, a hassle-free easy way to live in. Let's unbox this baby together. Engineer, don't you recognize him? His fives on orthopedic layer adjusts my body's pressure points properly. And he's been sanitized directly from the factory. So extra sleep with extra safety. And the best part is, it is recommended by National Health Academy. Campaigns right there, I'd like to now introduce to you our speaker, Matthew. So Matthew is a law graduate from the prestigious National Law School. He comes with a professional experience across diverse industries, including law, banking and various international markets and an entrepreneurial stint in the restaurant business. He's also a member of the Young Presidents Organization. With this, I'd now like to humbly welcome Matthew as well as Novel on your stage and screen. Thank you so much, gentlemen, for giving us your valuable time. Let's have you over to you. Thank you. Thank you so much, Bhavna. Welcome. Matthew for the last session of our influencer marketing conference. It's been a very interesting day of learnings for us. This is not the last session in some ways of the evening. We have the awards that follow this session. But before that, let me dive straight in and ask you a few things that you've been doing. And Euroflex as a brand has done so many things. It's really progressed a lot. I remember meeting you in 2019 at our Bangalore edition of the Pitch C Oma Summit. In just two years, the Euroflex has come a very long way. We can have a two-hour chat about what you've done as a business in marketing. But because today's focus is influencer marketing, we'll stick to that topic. Before I go there, I just wanted to contextualize it and tell you we curated a report today with Group M and their influencer marketing agency, which is INCA, about what's happening in the influencer marketing domain. And some very interesting things came out, one of which, of course, is the size of the industry. Outside of media spend, the influencer marketing business itself is likely to touch 2,500 crores in the next three to four years. Now, that's a sizable number given that this was a domain three years, four years back, which was considered as a niche. So that's the direction it is headed. It is likely to touch media spends on outdoor very soon, so huge. 100% of the marketers who were studied for the survey ranked influencer campaigns as a top priority for this year and beyond. Every other leader indicated a budget growth of more than 25% this year. So that's the kind of interest level that this area commands. Naturally, there is a lot of numbers that follow all of this interest. 400 million users are on social media, 70% almost more than two thirds follow at least one influencer. So there you have it. The reason brands are chasing it and there are other reasons to the scale and size of what's happening in terms of influencer marketers following has gone up significantly. Couple of sessions back, we had some of the key influencers on the panel and you saw some of them have seven, eight million following billions of views. So those numbers are really growing at a very fast pace. And I've seen you've done a very interesting work in this domain as well, Matthew. Why don't you tell us what made you take to using influencer marketers and influencer marketing? Some of the things you've done I noticed you created something very interesting and mattress as a category can be very boring, but you made it very exciting because it is health, it is sleep and what better than this pandemic, unfortunately, to tell us the value of good sleep, good health and healthy life. So tell us what made you take to influencer marketing and how did you sort of dive into it? Yeah, thanks Navas firstly. Thanks for having me again. And I do recall that chat we had two years ago, very fondly. In fact, I think one of the things I shared with you is that it was almost embarrassing to be in our industry. Like you said, it was a boring, sleepy industry. And I think one of the benefits of being in a slightly sleepy industry is that you have a chance to have some fun. Pre pandemic, we were probably a little traditional with the way we did things. And I think the pandemic actually gave us a chance to really play and have some fun and take some risk because anyway, things were so scary. So as a marketer, we could actually take some risk. Our stores were closed. Traditionally, nobody was watching TV. Films were not coming out. So we had a real chance to do something different. So I think while it's a cliche that the pandemic actually brings out huge opportunities, really did bring out an opportunity for us to have some fun to play with our marketing. In fact, to not market too hard. Like you said, one of the first things we did was that we realized that people were so concerned about their health and about comorbidities. And having done many years of research into sleep, what we realized that was that sleep was one of the best immunity boosters you could ever give yourself. So rather than try to sell a mattress, we went to digital channels and we talked about sleep, the importance of sleep, how sleep is free. We found some great partners to carry the story for us. The most, the most fun one I did was a chat with Lou Coutinho. We had a million someone carry the message. I think while we always believed so much that great sleep and a great mattress was crucial to great health, I think the pandemic gave us a chance to talk about it. And we found people were listening, listening much more than they ever did. And I think we also got a chance to celebrate the home. I think people were locked up at home, not able to go out and very soon realized that home was actually a very special place or should be, should be a very special place for everyone. So we did a lot of stuff about staying at home, having fun at home, all the fun things you can do on your mattress beyond just sleeping. So I think the pandemic brought everybody back to ground zero. We couldn't do any Big Bang brand ambassador campaigns. ATL was not looking as exciting as it did in previous years. So we were forced to really try and use influencers and I think there's no turning back. It was one of the best things that could have happened to us. And it's not just that the marketing became so much more meaningful and interactive, but I think very positive impact on business as well. So business while the brand has grown very strong, business couldn't be better as we speak. Fantastic. I think the pandemic was a vaccine for us and not a virus really. I was saying very interesting choice of the narrative you've created very important for a brand. Not talk about how comfortable your mattress is or highlight the aspects of the product, but tell people why sleep is important. And I saw somewhere you spoke about how the journey was very interesting. First you spoke about, like you said, sleeping for immunity. Then you started talking about how it was important during the pandemic for people to stay in. And since people were spending now significantly higher time at home, naturally having good quality comfort in the form of a mattress that you're sleeping in becomes doubly important. And then you got sessions you conducted with some influencers like Yasmin Karachiwala, Ayesha Billimoria, Vandana Gupta, that told people the value of staying fit. So it's not one or two things you've done. You've done things across the board. You've crafted a narrative. So you've not dipped your feet into it, but you've really gone into it with a lot of thought behind it. Yeah, like I said, I think once we tasted how meaningful influencer marketing was, I think it was no going back. We actually stumbled on the kind of fitness at home kind of campaigns. And then we actually found that we were doing all of this with our teams. So we said, why not do something on YouTube with it, on Instagram with it. And we just found there was so much great traction for staying fit, staying healthy, staying safe, having fun, boosting your immunity in the process. Yeah, so like you said, we did immerse ourselves. I don't think we're ever getting out of it. It was the best thing that's happened to us. Yes, and then to graduate the whole thing into talking about sleep therapy, connected with yoga, Nidra, and everything else, it's amazing how you take, as I said at the beginning, a boring product or a boring category. And when you look at the health and wellness space, it is so big and so fashionable and so contemporary today. Everybody you know wants to be in that space, wants to learn more about it. So the connect is so beautifully done. Let me come to another part. You've said in a few interviews about how you're looking to scale up your business from a 500-crore company, you want to go to 2000 in a few years time, and how naturally marketing and brand plays a very important part of that aspect. So what are your priorities going forward? So I was talking to you, Matthew, about how in the past you've spoken about expanding the Duroflex brand, taking it to more parts of the country and how marketing branding plays a very critical part in that journey. Going forward, how do you see that panning out? Obviously influencer marketing is only one leg on which it'll stand. What are the other areas where you are looking to expand your marketing efforts significantly? Yeah, sure. I mean, I'll also stay on influencer for the time being actually. One thing very powerful we found with influencer marketing is that you can do very micro-targeting with influencers. So one of my favorite campaigns, maybe because it was not a campaign, was Sounds of Sleep, where we handpicked six of the best and most sentimental alibis from different corners of India. And these were all regional alibis. So we had one in Marathi, one in Bengali, Hindi, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu. So what we found was if you wanted to get engagement, if you wanted to have people engage with your brand, understand, think a little bit about sleep and sleep hygiene, you could do that beautifully through influencer campaigns by choosing very strong regional influencers. And it's been an amazing experience working with Marathi influencers, like I said, influencers from Orissa, from Assam. So part of our strategy in going national also involved finding some of the most influential local influencers because they are every bit as powerful as the kind of national influencers. So that's been a wonderful journey. And of course, right now you probably know we're supplementing that with a really big brand ambassador like Alia Bhatt. She's popular everywhere. She's popular for so many things, but mostly because she's so fearless and she's young and dynamic and just represents New India, which is what we want to be. So I think we're using regional local influencers well as part of our national expansion. But of course, supplementing that with the national celebrity like Alia. But it's quite interesting that we don't just do a kind of TV campaign with someone like Alia, but we we splice and dice a lot of the collateral and the media the way you would with social media marketing. So we have different formats for YouTube, Instagram for different occasions. So I think a lot of our best learnings from influencer marketing, we're also using with our national brand campaign. And it's I mean, it couldn't have asked for a better result, it's going really well. Fantastic. Yes, I was going to talk about the sounds of sleep initiative a little later. But since we're already talking, tell us how did it deliver for you? Because the idea is fantastic. I have some numbers. The digital series you did in March 2021 garnered 23 million YouTube views in just less than three months. And there's not an idea that you do one off. Because you can continue this in so many formats. And it kind of starts building. We know that a lot of social media audio also audio based media has been used, you know, for, you know, lots of things when it comes to sleep meditation, yoga for children, lullabies and you know, things like those. So how is this idea worked for you? And how do you look to build upon it? Yeah, now I'll maybe rewind as to why we why we first thought of it. Actually, we a lot of us in the office just love music. So the big fans of Coke Studio, we were very inspired by what they did. And I think a lot of us are also sleep evangelists and we use sleep music to fall asleep. Literally, I use I use sleep music almost every day. I find I get much better deep sleep when I use good soothing music as opposed to somebody loud thriller to fall asleep. So that's that's actually where it started out. And then we realized that some of the most sleep deprived people in the world are young parents, both young dads and young moms, because I mean, I'm sure we all know why they're so sleep deprived. And we're like, look, why don't we just put together a bunch of old sentimental favorite lullabies, which remind us of our times with our parents and our grandparents and try to build in some education around sleep routines around lullabies around deep connection with our children. And that's where the idea was born. Of course, we had some amazing strong partnerships, for example, with with Sony Music and with YouTube, who helped us to promote to promote this property. And like you said, you know, sounds asleep. We can do a million things with sounds asleep. For example, you know, we talk about 23 million YouTube views, but we don't even know how many more times it's been streamed on Spotify and on YouTube music. So it's reaches is almost unmeasurable, but it's huge. It's also it's also got no time limitation, right? It's gonna be these are beautiful songs which will be heard time and again and again. And we actually wanted to create something which is really lasting and enduring and for sure sounds asleep will come back in many different avatars hopefully for many, many years because there's no limit. There's no limit to what you can do with with something like this. And one of the interesting, I think aspects of, you know, an initiative like sounds of sleep. And when you talk about engaging with regional influencers is also what's happened in the last two years, especially during the pandemic. Couple of key trends again, you know, the report talks about it, which is, which is, you know, region based influencers, they've really taken off, you know, as opposed to say three years back when or two years back when you YouTube had 200, only 200 influencers with at least a million plus subscriber base, that number runs into thousands and the growth has come from, you know, languages growth has come from smaller cities and towns. So that area has really expanded. So the pyramid has actually become a plateau at the top, which is a fantastic thing for the industry and for brands as well in terms of the engagement that you're looking to do. And the other part is how you are able to curate content and engage in the local language, because that is very important. Eventually, India is languages, India is not English, India is not only Hindi, India is these, you know, beautiful 50, 60 main languages and for brands to be able to connect with audience or consumers in their own native languages is a very, very important step in the journey of influencer marketing. Absolutely. So I think video vernacular and voice are things which are here to stay and it's worked really well for us. I think it's working really well for a lot of brands who embrace it genuinely. So while we talk about the campaign, you know, what we can also say is that actually our sales from the smaller towns has grown considerably because of the power of these influencers and the use of vernacular. So we are selling in, you know, very, very small towns, towns that I actually didn't even know existed. But it's, you know, that's the power of this digital media. Now it's, it's reached everywhere. I think the pandemic has also meant that a lot of people who work in big cities have now gone back to their small towns and are helping to spread the word. So yeah, you know, embracing vernacular and video in the vernacular has been, has been a big learning for us through these influencer campaigns. It's very interesting that as a business, business leader, you talk about how, you know, your sales needle has moved as a result of, you know, using digital media, especially influencer marketing, this is music to years and to the music to the years of the people in the industry, they would love this, they'd like to record this, you know, the para and, you know, play it all over again and again because I have the benefit of not being a professional marketer and therefore for us, finally, everything has to result in, in, you know, a healthier business for us. And we've always seen marketing as a way to connect with customers and of course, finally get sales and transactions and relationships and it's happening. Yes. And, you know, there are, there is no dearth of brands who look at the top of the funnel, but then eventually struggle to figure out what to do about the bottom of the funnel. So top of the funnel being creating awareness and consideration, but when it comes to driving advocacy and conversion, a lot of brands eventually end up struggling and, you know, they, they only bother about the top of the funnel. So I think, I think now, well, I think that's, that's maybe the other thing we did. We focused a lot on recently was that we used to be very retail focused, maybe very one, three years, four years back, majority of our business was from traditional offline retail and in excess of 35% now is coming from digital channels. In fact, we think about 80% of all our business originates somewhere online and then it may transact offline, but, but even, even completion and conversion, 35% is happening online. So while it was important to do all of these campaigns and create awareness and consideration, I think it was equally important to create all of the, the mechanics to actually complete the transaction. So we, we really revamped our website. We became very strong on the marketplaces with Flipkart and Amazon and Pepperfry. Our distribution networks became much stronger. And of course, we also launched products which were very easy to distribute in a lockdown sort of scenario. So I think Bhavna played some of our bed in a box videos. You know, that's a, that's a simple, very good, but a very simple product which can be delivered to your doorstep and you can install it yourself. In fact, unboxing and installing it is great fun. And our customers did some of our marketing by putting up videos of their unboxing. So I think it was a mix of marketing, but also a lot of product development to suit this very, very strange lockdown sort of scenario which we had, as well as creating very strong channels to complete transactions on digital and digital distribution as well. So I think mix of everything has, has led to good results. Interesting. And, you know, if I may expand this conversations to now what you're doing with Alia Bhatt and how that works out for you. And there's a very thin line between, you know, or a very gray area between what you call an influencer and a celebrity endorsement. I think, I think one of the differences is the amount of money you have to pay to the celebrity endorsement. I can't think of any other, you know, differentiation. But it's very interesting how you moved from utilizing influencers in the last two years for specific campaigns. Now you have a, you know, sort of big brand celebrity who's perhaps taking, helping you take the brand to even larger number of masses and you ride on her image to do massive campaigns. So tell us what is your thinking behind getting somebody like Alia Bhatt on board? How does she kind of fit into the brand philosophy? And how does that dovetail into what you're doing in the influencer marketing space already? Sure. So I think that the thinking is was reasonably clear that, like we said, mattress is a bit of a sleepy category. And in India, in fact, worldwide, but in India, particularly sleep was not taken so seriously, even though it is, it is the third below the foundation of great health, right? So when you have that kind of issue where you have a high touch product, but maybe low engagement, we actually needed the, we needed the power of national celebrity, somebody who has a lot of credibility to help us carry the message. And I think Alia Bhatt was, you know, she was a perfect candidate for that. She's young, she's dynamic. She's so intelligent. And she's so disciplined about her health and her sleep. So while she's a lot of fun, she's, she can also carry an important health message around sleep exceptionally well. So what we were looking to do was to really raise the tempo of all the conversations that people are having around sleep, around health, around the importance of buying a good mattress, which gives you good back support, which keeps you cool, and which helps you get that, you know, sleep and the REM sleep that you need. So while influencers were very important and, and helped us on our journey, there was also a stage where we felt we would love to reach even more people. So influencers reach is very good and all added up was giving us tremendous reach. But I think at some stage, we also felt we needed a national, national face, a national message. We've opened up great experience centers in Delhi, in Jaipur, in Chandigarh, in Calcutta, Bombay, all over. And we did feel that we wanted a strong, young, dynamic, fearless person like Alia to help carry this message of great sleep to the mass as well. So I think it was very important to do. I wouldn't say it ever replaced our influencer campaigns. I think it supplemented what we're doing with influencers. Influencers certainly still have their space and always will have their space because of the ability to do something quickly, to do something micro, to do, you know, I think influencers have a much stronger connect with their audience. And so we talked about a fitness, fitness influencer or a lifestyle influencer or a sleep influencer. They have a much stronger connect with their immediate audience. But I think the brand ambassador gives you a much wider reach with much larger. So I think both have their place as I think marketers will need to be able to use both at the right time and for different reasons. Yes, that's true. Let me ask you a little bit about this new native digital startup you've done, which is called Sleepyhead. What's the kind of philosophy behind it? And what are you looking to do with that? Sleepyhead is another big success that we're really proud of. Sleepyhead started just three years ago. It has grown tremendously. It's almost more than doubled its sales every year. It's now actually 20% of our total business. So it's grown very fast. It's a very different brand. Ureflex is a niche brand. It's a brand based on, you know, rooted in science and medicine and talks to an evolved audience, maybe 30 to 50 years old. Sleepyhead is a younger more quirky brand. I think a brand which has has no rules. It calls itself the easy peasy mattress. It comes, you know, it comes cutely packed in a box. It comes home. The campaigns are, you know, really reverent. I think my favorite campaign was Eat Sleep been repeat by the Jordanians. Sleepyhead has been working quite closely with and repeatedly with the Danish set because his, his vibe is the Sleepyhead vibe. I think all the Sleepyheads really vibe with someone like Danish set and the Jordanians and things like that. So it was, it was for a young audience, a younger customer between actually 18 to 35 just coming into the workforce, starting to do up their homes. So Sleepyhead filled a, filled a different target group. The branding, the marketing, the product is, is all completely different from what Ureflex did. So I think we have two brands. They play in, in quite different spaces. And frankly, both learn from each other. Sleepyhead has its own energy and momentum. Ureflex has its own energy and momentum and we learn from each other. Sleepyhead was a digital native brand. So it learned how to do e-commerce and lead to see much before Ureflex did. And Ureflex learned a lot from that. So it's a, it's a startup in a legacy business. And I think Ureflex learns a lot from Sleepyhead and vice versa. Fantastic. Very important, especially for a legacy business to learn from digital. And if you're going to integrate both of these, nothing like it. Last two questions before we go, Matthew, you have done a lot of work in the influencer space last two years. For those of us who are listening, what are your sort of key learning, especially areas to avoid mistakes you've made? Because when you've done work, you make a lot of mistakes and you learn from them and improve on what you do. What are the mistakes you think brands sometimes make pitfalls they should avoid when they are doing influencer marketing? Because one of the very natural temptation is, let's chase numbers. Get me an influencer who has 10 million following without bothering about brand fit, whether the positioning is right, whether it lets you conversion. What are the other similar kind of learnings you had having done influencer marketing now? I think the first mistake which you could make is to try to avoid making mistakes. I think the best thing is to start doing influencer marketing and learn a little through your mistakes because the beauty of influencer marketing is that it's not that expensive and your mistakes are not that costly. So you can quickly learn. I think it's much easier to learn from some mistakes in your campaign than to hear something from me and change your plan accordingly. So I think the first thing I would say is just start doing some influencer campaigns. The second thing would be, like you said, find an influencer who actually resonates with your product and brand and has a natural fit. When we talked about the fitness influencers, we were really trying to carry a message of health, fitness and immunity and therefore we chose fitness influencers who could carry that message. So I think if the influencer has a good fit with your community and the kind of message you're trying to carry and has some genuine love for your brand, I think then the influencer campaigns work out much better. I was listening to some of your panelists just before that and they all said, my favorite campaigns were the campaigns that I did for products that I loved. So if you can find an influencer who genuinely loves your product or your message, I think that's the best thing you could do. So engaging with Luke about the importance of sleep was just completely natural for him because he talks about it every day and he lives and breathes it every day and therefore evangelizing sleep through Luke was the most natural thing that we could have done. So yeah and I think with influencer campaigns you can't go too wrong. If you go wrong, you can change it very quickly. So I think the mistake would be to not stop and think about what went wrong or right to their campaign because the beauty of these campaigns is that you can do them so fast, so quickly and so often. You can't go too wrong but it's worth always stopping to see whether you met your objectives. Are you trying to get reach? Were you trying to get cost per views down? Were you trying to get conversion and doing a debrief and a deep analysis of the data surrounding your campaign? I think that is important. Can you go very wrong? I don't know, don't think so. I think you can but the mistakes worth making. Absolutely. I mean unless you try you won't make mistakes. Last question, where do you see this? That said, sorry I should have mentioned. If you try to sell too hard I think you can go wrong. I think especially if you're doing an integration into a program and we did some good integrations with TV serials but the selling was very subtle and under the sheets if effective use of fun. But I think if the selling is too hard I think it sometimes doesn't work. That's right. Defeats the idea of doing influencer marketing then you might as well make a PVC and run it to the big star. With that, thank you so much Matthew. Thanks for your time. I'm told the award ceremony is about to start anytime. Pleasure talking to you. Thanks for taking time out and on my next visit to Bangalore I look forward to meeting you again and thanks for sharing your insights on what Duroflex is doing in influencer marketing. Thank you and back to you Bhavna. Thanks so much Neval, catch up soon. Thank you so much Matthew. Thank you so much Neval. Thank you for joining.