 Hi, okay. So, I mean, it's both an easy topic and can be a tough topic, right, which panelists here would kind of agree. I mean, we are in a growth market, right? When you talk to international people, they're saying, okay, slow down in India means 6%, right, which at some level is incredible. But the mistake that we can do is to assume that in the growth market, whatever you put will actually succeed, which a lot of us have realized through good or bad experience that it's incredibly tough building profitable, good, strong brands and businesses in this market. And therefore, I think today's topic is fascinating, especially in the context and the environment that we're talking about, where almost every category that you think of, whether it's finance or retail, has its own kind of tremors in past few years. So the topic for today is what really is the formula, if at all, to make brand success in this market. We will talk about the formula. We'll also kind of touch upon what can make us failures, right? Because to my mind, the learnings are always greater from failures than from success. We'll try and discuss some of the more fashionable ways of building brands, like how do you build a brand around a purpose? I mean, does everybody need a purpose? And how exactly do you go about building a purpose, right? And a couple of more bonus questions if we have time. So we'll see how this goes. I'll kickstart the panel. And at Leo Burnett, we've been now managing brands such as Amazon, Spotify, Cardekho, Ola, a lot of Coca-Cola brands as well for many years now. And we kind of have discovered a few principles which help build brands into a success. And the first principle that we talk about is, in India, no matter where you are, whether you're number six, number five, whether you're entering the category really, really late, you have to play like a leader, right? The insight there is that Indians like standing in long queues. I'll give you an example. If you imagine the Delhi airport about 15 years back, there was one gate and there'll be a queue right up till the back. There was only one gate. And then the new guys came in, you had a Swanky airport, 24 gates. And you went back to the airport, there's still one long queue, right? Because our mindset is that if there's so many people standing, then something will be good. If all the other gates are vacant, there must be something wrong. Why take a risk and fail, right? You cut that to various categories in India. You realize that top two or top three brands explain 70% to 80% market share across categories in India, right? So we are quite ruthless when it comes to challenger brands as a market. We are a brand where we have to, if in the best case, pretend leadership. So whenever we launch a new brand like Spotify, we launch from a leadership stance. We always maintain that you keep that swag on. That's one learning. The second learning is very often as advertising people specially. We try to get ahead of the curve. We look at all the fascinating advertising that you saw in the previous segment and we try and map our work to that level. And realize that we've left the basic functionality of the category. And that again is a big failure. So if you're not owning the course of the category, right? If you're launching, say, Spotify and you're not talking about the largest playlist or you're not talking about the latest playlist, you will not succeed by just doing some wooly advertising. You will actually not succeed. I did that. So when we launched Sensodyne in India, we did some nice, very warm advertising that this mother has sensitivity and she can't eat that, let do with the child. And there's a moment which is missed and nothing moved, right? And then we came back and we got the doctor and we said Datome Janjanad and Sensodyne and we built a 500 crore brand just holding the functionality of the category. So that's the second big learning. And the third big learning is always to borrow from culture and give back to culture. So I mean, Aur Dikhao in Amazon, Apni Dukan, Sunteja, right? They've all been borrowed from culture and given back to culture. So no matter whether you're the sexiest millennial brand coming down to India, you still need to be very, very relevant to the mainstream middle India culture. So those are my learnings. I'll now get the steam panel here to discuss what learnings they've had in building success on their brands and businesses and they'll talk about their examples. So, Karthi, why don't we start with you? Okay, so clearly this is the brand plug session, so we'll plug the brand. But here I just told you a lot of Aathanda. He's given the principles away. I'll just give you the example. So I'll pick one example from my back story at Kotak. We were continue to be a challenger brand. We have roughly 2% market share. But for some strange reason, our market cap is along with the top three banks in India. So forget about with the consumers, but even in the office, I have to posture that I am as good as what they delivered for the brand. I also have to deliver. The way I try to do that roughly 10 years ago, when we turned 25, and I took a category truth, which Dheeraj alluded to, category truth is that you will only bank with the bank, which has been around for a while because it's about your money and you need trust and trust comes with age and heritage in banking. We were a very young bank. Lots of people didn't give us time of day because we were young and we were Johnny come lately. But the fact that the firm had turned 25, we took as a milestone to celebrate to announce our coming of age, so to speak. And it has to be true as well, which is also right. So the thing about the truth is, this was a bit of a white lie. So the firm Kotak was 25 years old. The bank was born in 2003. So it was actually only seven years old technically. But the entity Kotak Mahendra Bank was 25 years old. So I took that chance to tell that white lie, which was a useful white lie, but I had my conscience was also clear that the consumer just needed to know that you had come of age. Whether you were seven years or 25 years old was somewhat academic. The positive, when we announced, we did a campaign called Great to be 25, we celebrated being 25. And to quote from Subya's previous session also, we didn't talk anything about the product, we didn't talk about our Hori history of launching multiple companies, whatnot. We only celebrated being 25 in the consumers voice, by the way. And we, in fact, preempted some amount of social community outreach, etc, by asking people what being 25 meant to them. What worked interestingly is that when we did the research, we are trust quotient jumped up some 500 basis points. And I speak bankies in your language, it's five points of share. Trust went up and consumers also gave back saying great company, great company, great company, you guys have done wonderful stuff. We didn't say a single thing, but they said you guys have done wonderful stuff. And we got a seat at the table. We continue to be challenger brands. We continue to be really, really small. But we grew dramatically on the back of that one pivot that we did. And then we've been working on a bunch of other things. But I'll save some of that hopefully for future questions and make some more time for everyone else. Fabulous example of how you can kind of, you know, short change the way to trust in a very, very quick way, right? Prachi, you handle a very different category, right? Fashion, latest and I don't know if people care for trust, they care for latest and was precious. What's been your learning in building success? So it has been not that we didn't falter on the way of the journey of becoming the market leader at this point of time in fast fashion. See, our journey has been as a brand from the umbrella brand of Big Bazaar. We started under the umbrella fashion at Big Bazaar and we are fairly young brand. If you see a BB is just a 10 year old brand. But if you look at us how we were perceived in the market was we came from a very traditional brand, which is again not a very old brand. Listening to Karthi, 25 year old, we are just a 20, 21 year old brand. But when we came from such a big umbrella or Big Bazaar, we definitely carried the pluses and the minuses. Pluses were huge. But what we definitely carried with us was we were perceived as a traditional brand. We were not perceived as a brand which is which can actually resonate with the younger crowd. We have been listening to a lot of stalwarts experts here since morning and I can relate to what they are saying and I can just so relate to the pain points that we have gone through to establish a BB as the brand that it is looked up as today. You know, we as a brand know that since the past four or five years since we started actually going back to our blueprint and thinking what is it that we represent ourselves and outside of the umbrella brand, how are we standing as a brand? So we realize that, you know, we are the first choice for any fashion consumer. Age doesn't matter here. Segmentation of consumer has been such a big problem for us as marketers we still struggle to get the segmentation right each time. And further as we are progressing and we can see the age is not the only criteria anymore. Demographic is not the only criteria anymore and it becomes even more sharper and more agile to find out the right customer, right customer. What we figured out that as much as we would like to be called as a young brand, it's not a age wise brand anymore. We knew that we were the first choice for any customer who wants the first brush with fashion. So if you're 18 doesn't matter, you're 16 doesn't matter, if you're 40 doesn't matter, if you're trying to find the first choice, first brush of fashion, we became the choice. Why? Of course we have a wide range, of course the price we operate at. And I think we were having this discussion earlier also. I might not be very different quality wise or price wise what my next competitor is providing. But what I promise my consumer is the soon as soon as you walk into that door, you will get anything that you would want to look what you are aspiring to look like. And at a price that does not pinch your pocket at all. And I know for sure in the next two, three years, you're going to migrate out of the door and find your fashion with a brand that you might want to migrate onto the next level. So as a BBS, we have been through that journey. And at this point of time, I think we are at a fairly good space where we are resonating with the right customer. I find that fascinating again, because a classical Western marketing thing would say that if you're building a fashion brand, you have to build it very tightly for a million years, right? You have to go counter train. But it's fascinating you're saying that you're a brand which goes from 18 to 45. And that to in a category as fashion, which is which is fabulous. Yeah, coming to you, I mean, you've your business and brands have been on the kind of roller coaster ride, right? From Indica to nano to Tiago, Harrier, right? You I mean, what are your learnings been on on what has made for the successes at Tata Motors? Yeah, man, I think you said it right. We are among the youngest automotive manufacturers in the world. But I think we've seen a lot of life in lots of ups, downs, huge expectation. And also, I think we've let down customer perception quite a bit. And when I took over this role, you know, in fact, contrary to what marketing, you know, marketing director's dream, I had to in fact pull back the messaging. There was just too much going on. We were doing too many things, not giving a consistent message to the customer. Communication was all over the place. Too many social media handles, too many websites, too many product communication, one product not related to the other. So basically, the learning I would say is to pull back, be very clear what you want to communicate, let your products be aligned with what you communicate as a brand. And, you know, in fact, it's much better to have a smaller but much sharper social media footprint. And I think that's what worked for us quite well. We've had close to three years of continuous growth, three years outperforming the market. We've managed to improve our pricing power, which is reflected on our profitability as well. So I think we're on the right way now. That's fantastic as well of saying a sharper social media footprint and a case for focus and a case for less is more, right? Where we're saying, okay, let's go and splatter everything. Let's have five messages. Let's get as many fans as we can. So great learnings here right from the first question where Karthi is saying that how do we jumpstart to trust and you don't have to be really 25 years old to look like 25 years old in the brand marketing and from Prachi talking about building fashion for a larger audience and being able to cater to 18 year old and 45 year old at the same time, which a lot of brands kind of struggle and a case for focus and less from Vivek. And I'll move on to a little more provocative question saying what happened to failures, right? Everybody talks about successes, right? We all have glossy resumes and good looking Facebook timelines. But what about failures? Let's learn from our failures what we've not done right, what we've failed. I have in fact learned a lot from failures. I mean, I launched a soap for Mariko called Manjil in South and it failed dramatically because I mean, we thought that turmeric and South we can't go wrong. But we failed because there was no way we could deliver the properties of turmeric in a soap format. I mean, we just got that wrong. And we got the fact wrong that we were competing with national players, right? Like Hamaam, like Luxe. I mean, whether you're living in Tamil Nadu or Coimbatore doesn't matter. Everybody wanted to be part of Luxe. Everybody wanted to be part of a national discourse. For the first time I learned that actually going regional or going focus is a bad idea in a market like India where everybody wants to be part of a larger big national kind of a discourse, right? I've also learned many other times where we've gone for differentiation ahead of relevance. So many categories, right? The category is not built. The reason for usage of that category is not being sold. And we begin to worry about how am I different from somebody else, right? And therefore, if you look at how we build the brand Amazon, it's in the construct not different from Flipkart at all. We've just gone on to build relevance, right? That it's about selection, it's about Apnidukan or say the way we're doing for Spotify. We're just building relevance. Not worrying too much about differentiation, which the marketing books kind of provoke us to do. So those have been my learnings on how not to fail in this market. Again, I mean, happy to hear from you guys and failures and challenges. So my lesson in failure is actually to say that you take two successes and put it together and think you'll get exponential success. You can go dead wrong. I'll tell you the story. When we merged with ING Vaishabank, we teased out the other insight about banking that apart from age, people also want to see distribution. They want to see you physically around. Even if they are all banking with your digitally, they want to see a physical presence. Thanks to the nature of the network we inherited from ING Vaishabank, we told this again semi-white lie called Kona Kona Kotak. Work gang busters. Even today, people have a hell of a lot of recall for that little phrase because of the alliterative nature of it as well. A few years before that, when RBI deregulated interest rates, we had taken a disruptive interest rate. Current India growth rate 6%. And we had done a number of years of successful product advertising on the back of telling the story of 6%. I won't get into the details of that right now. But after I finished doing Kona Kona Kotak, we said what next? And we said, hey, we have 6% which is working great. We have Kona Kona which did really well. Let's put the two together and let's say Kona Kona 6%. Kona Kona 6%. And guess what? That's my failure story. I'm still living it down. The boss still gets to kick my butt every now and then reminding me, see, you screwed up that time. Lesson for me is exactly this. And Sabya also alluded to that earlier. Product brand. If you want to be a brand that people are going to love, the product, actually the product is commodity. Frankly, even if I have a disruptive price point and honestly, I fought a lot with the boss about the price point before we launched it. Long story short, even if you do have a differentiation, you have to get beyond the product. And with Kona Kona, we actually had got way beyond the product. We had made done a category promise, but we also took that category promise to rise above. We also tied it to India's growth story at that point in time. 2014, Modi's first government was coming in. There was a lot of enthusiasm and energy and hope and optimism. And we rode that wave and mixed our story with it to say, Kona Kona Kotak, Desh Badal Raya, blah, blah, blah. But next time we dropped the ball. So you're saying link your product to the larger narrative and that always works for you. And don't be too greedy, right? Two campaigns pulled together is not a successful campaign. Great. Prachi, your failure stories. Yeah, so as I said, we have too many stories to reach where we have reached. In fact, all of us would have history of doing that. I have two examples wherein we succeeded and failed in the same campaign. And I have a beautiful story about an amazing successful story about something so humble. So I'll start with the success story, of course. Let's start with the success story. We actually took a product like most of the women out here. How many of us actually, there's a question only to the women, yeah? How many of us think that a kurti or a kurta is our go-to press or government whenever we feel uneasy, easy. How many of you do that, actually? Most of us, yeah? And I can see a lot of ladies over here wearing kurtis also in ethnic. So for us, it is such a humble garment. It's a humble piece of garment and it's such a beautiful piece of garment altogether. So at the same time, we had to figure out how to sell this barrel and make it a story because all of us in the fashion category sell kurti. So for us, we had to create a beautiful story, but hey, you know what? We had an amazing amount of stock lying with us which we had to sell and it was such a huge stock that at that point of time we had to rack our brains how to come about with a campaign which actually makes this humble garment glorified and also makes this a selling proposition. So we came up with this beautiful campaign called Forever Kurtis. It talked about a woman's journey with her kurti. You open your cupboard, you're feeling good, you go to a kurti, you're feeling dumb, down fat, which most of us women feel most of the days. You go to and take a kurti as that day's saving grace. So this was a piece of garment that we talked about and all we did was we said we have the largest number of choices in kurtis be it style, design, options, whatever you have to look at and we put an emotional tag to it. Forever Kurtis was one campaign in which we see our targets week on week. We had a 95% growth week on week and it sustained for six weeks and it had a plus plus cascading effect on something like a legging or a dupatta which was approximately in the rate of a range of 25-30%. So it was an amazing, amazing piece of campaign where we succeeded while we were talking about a lot of product as Karti has been mentioning. Same story while we were on this entire rampage of speaking about our product saying that okay you know FBB has everything and we have every product. There was a shorts campaign that we launched a Pan India campaign as you rightly mentioned something that we thought that every man out here wears a shirt, needs a shirt formal shirt, casual shirt and it's a daily wear. So we went on a national campaign and launched one of our very sharp technologically driven product and we feel like how? We just did not get the years because hey it's a tough market to be in there are established players out there we were still not considered as a brand we can actually sell a lot of formal shirts and actually promise you what you're wanting to because again one more thing about men men don't change their brands very soon we can influence a woman into changing a brand but men just just don't change their brands so it was such a tough market the same campaign when we actually took it down to something as specific as hyper localized as to Kerala where in 70% of the men actually wear shirts most of the days in over a tee so a casual shirt is actually very common thing over a tee we such a such a beautiful ROI on the on the campaign and it was as you mentioned it was regionalized it was hyper localized it had the voice that the market wanted to hear and again a 35% week on week sale growth so this is these are some some challenges failures that you would like to call them in in thinking that to actually a success can be replicated it cannot be it has to find its own voice and has to be personalized to an extent that the market really takes up notice so yeah a few good examples with us Superb I always thought Khichri was a comfort food I mean I've learned today that Kurtis are comfort wear as well Superb Vik, how about you what are your learnings from your organization Tough learnings I would say so as marketers we love communication and we do really well but the learning is when the customer comes physically especially in a very very high involvement category like ours we need to give that high quality customer experience at the showroom high quality experience when the car comes for service and any kind any level of marketing promises any level of gloss on the product it could be the best product that we make in the market it's not going to make up for that digital to physical shift and we've learned it repeatedly in the last couple of years great products that we've had are limited in their growth because of you know the the kind of customer experience we're able to provide but we are taking it on the chin and hopefully moving forward but that's been a message I think especially in the Indian context when communication can create an aura but I think the proof of the brand and also building the trust on the brand happens physically I think that's a message the Indian customer has given us very strongly so you're saying where the rubber meets the road is where the real brand test happens not on television and digital advertising excellent so I'll move a bit of a gear here and you know we want to discuss the idea of purpose right because suddenly it's become so fashionable in fact at camp this year almost 90 percent of the cases which won had some kind of a purpose right either for differently enabled or for different sexual choices or almost everything and if you look at that as a sample of your marketing is headed you feel a bit left out if you're not doing that kind of a work that if I don't have a purpose and if I don't have that kind of a storytelling am I really doing marketing am I really building brand at Leopon it our whole idea is that you know brands need to have purpose but they need to have acts so a brand which has purpose and has no acts writes a lazy brand but if a brand has purpose and acts both that's when we call it's a humankind brand because only then you're successful so you need to know why you exist and you should be able to do things not just advertising to be able to to be a real humankind brand so I'd like to understand again from us what is our experience being or what our point of view is I mean do does every brand or marketing needs purpose when do we go overboard and what's the right way of doing purpose right I mean just latching on to say favoritizing or making men cry is that going to help sell our products I'll first of all do the disclaimer and say that whatever purpose you pick if you're picking it because you want to get to come then I think you're wasting a hell of a lot of your company's money the purpose purpose has to come from something which is the triangulation of what you do for a living what a consumer cares about and what the category truths may be the opportunity of the moment may be it has to come from all of that so our story actually pulled back all the way to our 25th year celebration from that point on our story has been in one way or the other about inclusion in fact and now I want to tell that story when we did the Kona Kona Kota campaign part of it was about announcing a merger but the truth is consumers don't give a damn about my merger if I have more ATMs and more branches thank you very much that's great lovely let's move on you still don't have anywhere near as many as ICC, ICC Bank is actually the truth but around that time another important thing that was happening this nation was getting divisive in some unfortunate ways I remember Julia Ribeiro going on record saying I feel like a foreigner in my own country and we actually were in well advanced age of putting together the campaign that became Kona Kona Kota but because Mr. Ribeiro said this we pulled back we rewrote that script a little bit and we did two or three things in the film we made sure to put faces which showed a really inclusive tone of voice for the brand as well as for the country we had very we had instead of the stereotypical good-looking people you see in advertising we had specifically normal regular folks but clearly identifiable from different communities of the country their costumes clearly identifiable again from different communities the other thing we did was in outdoor we swapped things around so I would put for example a very visibly Punjabi boy in Tamil Nadu a very visibly South Indian person up not somewhere we swapped it around and we celebrated also we also said glad to be in Dulya Jaan in a Bombay hoarding glad to be in Amritsar in a Chennai hoarding and so on and so forth what we were trying to do with this was trying to counter the growing majoritarian voice that was taking over this country had begun to take over this country at that point in time what the hell is Kotak doing in this business the thing is Kotak has an opportunity to be heard as a citizen of the country but luckily for me it is also relevant to my category to say these things because when I am saying that I am in all parts of this country and I am welcoming all communities I think I am also being a responsible citizen while doing business when we when demonetization happened and RBI did a small piece of reform which allowed us to get our customers on boarded with their agar numbers remotely without having to literally meet the customer we use that opportunity again not to drive only a product but to tell an inclusion story for a very different kind because very soon after the launch we discovered that people from really remote corners of this country people from shall I say disenfranchised communities in this country were opening accounts with us in hordes in large numbers as just one illustration and I don't mean to make a point of it but it was eye-opening for us when I did a dump and I study of the names of my customers which were in the millions 15 percent of the names which were the first top ranking name was Mohammed and that gave me a lesson and I said here we have an opportunity to stand up and actually shout this story out and which is why when we brought Ranbir on board we didn't bring him on board to do his usual histrionics but we brought him on board to say literally that we do not differentiate nobody is excluded and you know the truth of the product is the product does it anywhere I didn't do it myself because you can sit in the middle of the night in any corner of this country and download my app and bang in your other details you'll get a bank account with Kotak I can't even say no I took the virtue of my being unable to say no and the fact of being unable to say no and turned it into the virtue of saying that everyone's invited and now we are driving that inclusion message year on year and we've put asset attack victims in our advertising transgenders in advertising and we are embracing and we are doing work with those communities as well and we hope and again less than half a percent of that journey is done but I think we are also this country is in an interesting place right now the way the newspapers read every single day and we all have an opportunity to use the brand's voice to make a difference while doing business and that's what we are trying to do it's a fabulous example because it doesn't overtly pretend to do purpose but it's so closely connected to the product right and and that was so fabulous about it Prachi what's your view on this so when we so as a brand we say that we are here to democratize fashion and we have been doing it very successfully since the past four five years the numbers are there the visibility of the brand speaks for itself you know what we what we consciously realized is that we missed out on a large part of what we do for the differently abled and these are baby steps I we are no hero in what we have been doing but these are baby steps that when we took and we realized that you know for the first time the first thing is to the customers a differently abled customer walks into a store it's the first brush with the brand we're consciously trying to make our make our outlets make our stores much more much more conducive to how they look at our products and how they would find ease to shop around the changing room the trial rooms are being made which is conducive to how they would like to work around in a changing room their experience of walking around ramps are being built inside the formats also it it it takes a lot for a brand like us also to go out and realize that this is something that needs to be taken care of we're working at this point of time we're definitely working with designers who tell us that how we can actually reach out to the custom these customers and what is it that they would like to look in fashion and fashion is not only about apparel it's about your entire look we just heard the entire conversation of how a stylist make a difference to the entire conversation of how you look at the end of the day so we are definitely making baby steps towards this as again I said this is a purpose that we have picked up and we might falter on some steps but we definitely are on the way of reaching out to this this customers fashion for everybody absolutely fantastic purpose Vivek, your thoughts on do we need a purpose at all everywhere? I think there's no and in my mind there's no question that every brand it's it's good to have a purpose but I think the way we arrive at purpose needs to have a lot of you know self think I mean looking inside yourself and also futureing you know is it going to be relevant for me five years ten years from now because I don't think purpose can change overnight or even with every campaign or every two years as a result I think I would recommend brands not to jump into the first thing that comes into their mind or the first obvious fit in their market segment where they play with that context I think coming to Tata Motors I don't I don't think we have a clearly defined purpose yet you know we've been while we're part of the Tata Group which I think is very extremely strong in it in its purpose Tata Motors we've still not pinpointed exactly what we want to stand for but we're attempting to find out we're looking inside ourselves seeing what have we been doing right what are capabilities for the future what do the Indian customers want in the future what and probably I think that's one of the tricks really customer might not know what he'll want maybe five years down the line now but we and if we have to really invest in purpose and be truly purposeful in it we need to think about the future but I think sublimally Tata Motors is you know we've always over-engineered cars you know I'm not plugging the cars but that's a fact it I would call it trying harder to win the market and as a result they've been very safe and in the last couple of years we've committed to safety it also you know the fact that India's is clearly the leader in accident fatalities in the world points us in that direction so we said we let's put the money behind this one of our products is the first five-star safety-rated car in the country it was a year back and it continues to be the only five-star safety-rated car in the country and I don't want to speak about competitors but many of them have the technology and they sell five-star rated cars across the world but they don't seem to be committed to that in India they rather give talking cars and maybe a bigger screen than safety but we said it's going to be a hard sell it's like selling insurance but let's commit that you know I think it'll kind of allowing us to discover ourselves and hopefully we'll make a difference and also discover where we stand in this purpose going forward it's a tough one in your category I mean you have to deliver it through technology it's not just delivered through advertising and money and we are coming to the close of time I think we have some time for questions from the audience no time for questions so we spent all the time talking on ourselves sorry for that but in some of us I remember around outside hope to catch up but it was a fantastic conversation for me thank you so much