 Well, with that ladies and gentlemen, it is time for me to call forward our first speaker of the evening. Now our speaker joined Titan in 1990, over the last 15 years, he's held various positions of responsibility in marketing and sales in the watches division of Titan. And in 2005, he moved over to head the jewelry division. Ladies and gentlemen, this evening, he's here to deliver a special address on re-inventing retail. Please help me welcome Mr. C.K. Venkatraman, CEO Jewry Titan Company Limited. Good afternoon, it's good to be here. I have called my talk, Brick and Mottel, re-inventing retail, there's been a lot of conversation on this subject of Brick and Mottel versus online and how online is going to swap, swamp physical stores, and it's just a matter of time and all that. And coincidentally, there was a very large half page story in the economic times today on being Amazon, it's a new term that's been coined in the US, where being Amazon means destroyed by Amazon and sort of ground to dust, and there are many companies, some industries which are going that way. And there's a lot of fear and paranoia relating to being Amazon. And in the same paper, again maybe a coincidence, was the news about the shutting down of toys or us, all the stores in the US, and a business which is virtually gone out of fashion, not perhaps because of e-commerce, but certainly because of digital. So it's in this context that I've put together, these are thoughts, obviously it's an evolving subject, nobody's got the last word on it, and even as I was thinking about it, it's useful for me to reflect on what it means to our own company and what we could be doing better and stuff like that. So it's in that context. Now I just want you to imagine, I'm sure many of you here are familiar with the Pali cafe on Pali Hill Road, and I've been there once, but I'm talking about a restaurant of that type. Imagine ordering some very, very sumptuous Italian food from the Pali cafe on the phone or on the net, and somebody from Swiggy driving to your house on a bike and delivering very tasty, but reasonably cold Italian food in a box with the sauces in a polygene cover with a rubber band, and then you open it all that, get a little messy, and then you eat it. As opposed to actually going to Pali Hill cafe or any such restaurant and sitting at the typical wooden furniture with that blue and white striped napkins, a smallish round porcelain plate with the fork and spoon nicely wrapped in a tissue paper, the waiter in those slim types that they employ these days, in an apron waiting for you to take the order, and you can try and speak penne arabiata in the right kind of cadence, you know, trying to get the accent right and trying to impress that person thereafter, the steaming penne arabiata arrives at your table. Now, if the votaries of the online world were to be believed, then the second picture would vanish from our world, and everybody would probably be sitting at home opening that polygene bag and taking off the rubber band. But the joy of going out to consume things will always be there, and therefore, brick and mortar will always be there, and I am talking about how in various categories that you operate in, you could leverage the intrinsic strengths of your categories and actually even embrace online, certainly embrace a lot of digital and actually not be carried away by the paranoia that is perhaps in the interest of the, you know, online world, in the interest of the technology companies which actually sell online solutions and all that. So, the first thing and the very, very critical thing is, you know, category expertise and the brand strength. How much, how deep in whatever category you are, how deep is the category expertise that you have built, because that category expertise is not really available to online companies. Online companies are typically generalists, they are horizontals selling all kinds of products and it would be impossible for them to develop category expertise, every vertical that they operate, whereas you and most of us are in one, two, three, four categories like my company is into three or four categories. Therefore, the developing of that category expertise is a huge moat to contain, you know, anybody who comes in. The second thing is the strength of the brand. Now, the category expertise may be high, but the brand strength may start, you know, getting diluted because the categories themselves are evolving and maybe we will talk about it in the, in the Q&A session, I'm sure some examples on that will come up. But this whole thing of category expertise and brand strength and if I take a brand like Raga which is a brand of ours, it's a very unique brand in the sense that one is the mastery of making a very high quality watch is not easily, easily acquired. It takes years, it takes high technology, takes a lot of investment, therefore no new person can come into that category and try and disrupt like he could do in a category where the entry barriers are very, very low. The second thing, second thing is the, the advantage of the merchandise curating capability. If I take the online world versus the brick and mortar, you know, how do we, we have a 1500 square feet weapon with us in the store and we have to fight a 15 square inch, you know, iPhone 6 or 8 on which, you know, somebody is seeing the products. Now, you can see one product at a time. You can't get the whole, for example, if I'm in a shoe store, the smell of the shoes, you know, the ability to bend the shoes and get a feel of how flexible they are and the overall storytelling that is happening in the surround that I am part of, all that is, you know, just impossible in a, on the phone. Now, we have just entered a new category which is very amenable to online buying. You know, it is ethnic, you know, Indian ethnic wear for women. We have launched a brand called Tanera and it's a beautiful villa in Bangalore that we have set up this store in. And the, the curation that we have done and the whole concept is India under one roof. So we have curated saris from all over India from different kind of clusters. There is the whole aura of each cluster which comes alive in the 1500, in fact, 15,000 cubic feet that no amount of work on a phone can do that. And therefore, even though a six yard is the only size in a saree and therefore there is no size issue when you're buying a saree at all, we can create an environment which is something else, something so special that no amount of, you know, online convenience can actually compete with it. And we are seeing the kind of draw that a physical store of Tanera is actually, in a way, it is reigniting the interest in the category of saris itself. The third is distribution control. A lot of companies who are either over-distributed or whose control on their distribution partners is low suffer because those partners typically go online, become part of marketplaces, discount the products and create a lot of tension in the industry. And if your distribution control is very strong and if you're very, very, you know, brutal in dealing with people who are offenders, who rogue, you know, partners in terms of discounting and all that, then that's a very, very critical thing and companies like Samsung particularly on the mobile phone have discovered, rediscovered in a way the exercising of distribution control over their dealers and recovered a good part of what they initially lost to online threats. The other is technology in retail itself. Like I said, on the one hand there is e-commerce. On the other hand, as Mr. Bhattra spoke about, the influence of digital. Without doubt, the influence of digital is pervasive, even in a category like jewelry, you know, our sense now is that maybe certainly more than 50% maybe as close to two-thirds of the customers who come to a Tanishk store actually come after browsing. You know, they have done some research on the product. They would still like to buy the jewelry in the store only, but they have certainly done a certain amount of research online on the products. And therefore the role of the website and everything that you do in the website for whichever brands you are managing is very, very crucial and the role of technology in the website is very, very crucial. But other than that, multiple things, and we are as a company, even though we are a very strong brick and mortar company, and we're going to depend substantially on brick and mortar sales for the next 5, 10 years, we're investing hugely in digital, we're investing in CRM, we're investing in Omni, we're investing in experiences inside the store which enhance. For example, the typical bride who comes into the store to buy, you know, expensive, exquisite Padmavati jewelry is, you know, likely to be coming in jeans and the top, but she's going to buy a, you know, exquisite Kundan necklace, which she's going to wear with Belanga or Banarasi saree at the wedding. Now, how is she going to imagine that beautiful necklace on top of a top? And therefore, if there is a way that, you know, there is an application that I saw in study by Janak in Delhi, which, and they have a huge range of langas, so you stand in front of that magic mirror and keep trying, you know, Lange after Lange, and then you shortlist maybe three or four which you really like and then try them on or something like that. Now, so we're trying to combine, can we get that application so that the jeans and the top disappear that she's suddenly wearing a Lange, and on top of that, she's wearing the, you know, Padmavati jewelry so that it's visualizing for her what the real thing is going to be, and she's going to take her decision based on that rather than on a pink top, we totally sort of even color mismatched and so on and so forth. So the role of technology and digital technology in brick and mortar is going to be very, very high. For example, what Omni is going to help us do, help you do, is actually, I mean, if I take the world of Titan, which is our watch store, we have 1,000 worlds of Titan across the country. That means that practically all over India, we would be half hour from any customer. So in a full blown Omni situation, which I mean is under development and hopefully in 2019, we will be able to offer that, is that we can customize if you are in Ghatkopar, if you live in Ghatkopar, and if you are needing a half an hour delivery, and hopefully the Ghatkopar showroom of the world of Titan has got the piece that you're looking for. So if we can customize the inventory, customize meaning if we can show that inventory to you, if you want it in half an hour, and we can deliver in half an hour, no e-commerce company can come anywhere close. So therefore the advantage of the brick and mortar companies is that that the entire inventory of your network is very close to the customer. You don't have to depend on warehouses to service. You can just connect and if the customer is in even bigger hurry, she or he can walk to that store in Ghatkopar, pick up the piece and go wherever she has to gift or something like that. Or the endless aisle, some companies are already into endless aisle, but the applications are still developing. The quality of the images are still, for example, when you're in a W store or a Will's Lifestyle store and there's a magic mirror and you try on a shirt, it's still a little clunky, it's two-dimensional, the sizes are not matching, so for example, your shoulders sticks out or sticks in depending on if you're slim or bigger built. But I'm sure companies are working on the applications to overcome these. So when you have endless aisle and you're a brick and mortar company, there are 10 stores of yours in Mumbai City and a customer who's in Phoenix is able to see all the inventory that you have in Mumbai City. And by evening, you have the piece that she wants. Maybe the color that she likes is not in the store in Phoenix, but she likes the fit, she likes everything else. The color she likes is in Thane, maybe three hours away, she has the particular piece that she wants. This is going to be impossible for pure online company to deliver because their warehouse for all you know is in Pune. So therefore, the advantages of Omni and technology in various areas, for example, analytics, we are again investing in a lot of analytics. And we have a very large, nearly millions and millions of customer database, which numbers millions. And our understanding of every customer, various things about every customer, that whole thing is developing. And therefore, based on a certain deep understanding of what we call predisposition, which is the manner in which a particular consumer has been buying products of Titan. So if I combine and therefore I can predict her next product that she's likely to buy. So predisposition is one aspect, context to the other aspect, which is the special occasion in our life. It could be the anniversary, it could be the birthday. It could be the kind of festival that she celebrates, that she has told us through the information that we have collected from her. So if you combine predisposition and context, we have a marketing, a direct one, n is equal to one kind of marketing program, much, much greater accuracy, much greater likely effectiveness. Now this advantage, again, knowing your customers, because typically, I'm also involved in e-commerce companies. E-commerce companies are so much focused on visitors, clicks, and the way the funnel comes into the final add to cart and thereafter order return. But their understanding of consumers in the flesh and blood aspect of consumers is very low and it's only starting to develop. Whereas naturally, brick-and-mortar companies have been very consumer oriented right from the beginning. They have profiles, they have faces, they have addresses, and they have connections the staff have with consumers. So every which way this power can be catalyzed, can be really cranked up to great advantage. The other is the power of personalization, the power of the warm body, the power of the relationship. Now these things obviously will differ from category to category. In the category that I am in, which is jewelry, it's very high. The relationship between the customer is not only with the store, not only with the brand, not only with the store, but with a particular member of that store, with a particular sales person. It's that close and that tight. And therefore, it can be really milked to advantage. Now if you're in the ready made garment space, it may not be that strong. If you are in a large format department store, it may be even less strong because you just go there and the sales person is perhaps not even in your site. You pick up the garment from the shelf, you go to the trial room yourself, you try it on, you walk out after billing. But imagine, even in a situation like that, if there is a fair amount of training that is given to that sales person in a shop or a shop or a lifestyle or a central about the new collection that that particular brand has launched. And that person is taught to be a little more on the front foot without being intrusive on the customer space. And there is a smile as opposed to just being a part of the wallpaper. And helping the customer and therefore creating a certain experience which is more than what it is today. There's something sitting there. Obviously, each category is being disrupted by online very differently today. So I'm not that familiar with so many categories to comment. But I'm only saying that the power of the human touch in small, medium, very large ways is there. And if you can identify the role of that in your business, then you can really crank it up and get something out of that. The last thing is about the installation and service advantage. So there are many categories where the product sales does not stop with the sale in the store. I know, for example, a company like Chroma, how Chroma actually wins over online companies on products like refrigerators, air conditioners, even televisions. Because the whole thing of not just delivery but experts accompanying the product, experts setting up that product to your satisfaction, you know you're in the right hands and not some random unknown guy bringing one box and leaving it in your home kind of thing. And surely and very clearly, they have benefited from that advantage. So if you're in a business of that type, then if you maximize that aspect which is a big move as far as the online companies are concerned. If you maximize that the power, the effective delivery of that particular area, then you're raising the barrier for them to enter into that. So therefore, the answers are not simple. But what we are certainly realizing is that there is simply no need to get worried and certainly not paranoid about the assault of online at all. And if you really look at your own behaviors, what you have graduated to buying more and more online, it certainly says something. Wherever ticket sizes are small, we are very clearly graduated to online. Wherever the products are almost like commodities, you're certainly going to online. Wherever the buying is a chore for the younger generation buying groceries is perhaps a chore. So why do I now want to waste my time going to the market in that dirty area or a crowded area certainly by groceries? So groceries, no, I'll buy online. Tickets online, holidays online, expensive but very specific iPhone online, MacBook Air online. Because I've already experienced that product somewhere else. Either in a MacBook store, iPhone in an Apple store, or I've seen it with a colleague. So it's easy for me to decide that this is the product I like, then I'll just buy it. But any product which is got a range, like jewelry, watches, shirts. But the disadvantage that shirts would have is that low ticket and I can take a chance. The role of brands is perhaps becoming less than this. So it depends on the kind of category you are the role of online will be large or small. So if you get your teeth, your hands dirty into the subject, like we are trying to do, you can certainly create a holistic approach which deals with it and also embraces online to its rightful place in your overall strategy and actually helps you maximize the business. So I would stop here and- Thank you very much, Mr. Menkant Raman for that fantastic way to kick start with CMO. Please take a seat sir. We'd like to extend this conversation ladies and gentlemen to a one-on-one chat for which I'd like to invite on stage CEO South Asia and Middle East Kinetic Advertising India, Mr. Suresh Balakrishna. Good afternoon everybody and Menkant as usual inspiring talk and a very different take in this era of e-commerce and digital and all four techno peasants like me, it's very reassuring to know that even five years down the line, I can go to a shop and buy. It's a scary feeling if you can't go into a shop. So thanks so much for that insight. Having said that, the more one is hearing from like rightly said, from readymade garments to iPhones to MacBooks, sure. So it covers the complete technology and price range and everything that is being bought online. About two weeks ago I was in a discussion with a very large car manufacturer in India and the topic of the discussion was will you buy your car online in India in the next two years? There was a lot of discussion, there were seven of us, we were discussing it. And a lot of examples were given. Tesla, for example, has launched a car which is only available online abroad, right, there's no showrooms. And this large car manufacturer in India was saying that five years down the line they expect that even in India almost 15 to 18% of their car sales, especially their popular models, will be online. So isn't there a dichotomy there between, so what's so different about jewelry then, if cars can be bought online? The difference would be that I'm reasonably certain that nobody's going to buy that car online without actually having driven it first. So how do you get to drive it? So you have to either pick it up from a neighbor of yours who has it. And you have driven it and then you found it to be good enough. And then you buy it online, cool. Or you go to a warehouse of that car manufacturer somewhere outside the city. Because the car manufacturer has chosen not to invest in expensive retail. And taken a test drive and then come back home and ordered it online. But without driving that car either of these ways, I suspect that purchase is not going to happen online. But the difference between a jewelry and it may be a 10 lakh necklace, which is like a 10 lakh car, is that you have to see some 20 necklaces before buying one. Now, if there is a way that you can see 20 necklaces somewhere else before buying that one, then the same thing can happen in jewelry. If the technology has developed that much by then of visualizing the necklace on yourself also, perhaps. But even in a country like the US where e-commerce has been huge for a while, a company like Tiffany still single digits e-commerce. So therefore, so like the car example is no different from the iPhone or the MacBook example I spoke of, which is you know what exactly you're buying. So you're buying it online, so you've discovered it some other way. But if you don't know what exactly you're buying and it's expensive, then you end up going to the store. Okay, another experience I'd like to share with you, kinetic in London handles Macy's. So when we were there, we were interacting with the Macy's marketing team. And one of the first things they shared with us when the digital e-commerce business hit the UK first, initially Macy's ignored it, saying it's just a flash in the pan. Then they realized it's a threat, it's going to impact their business. And they started doing various things to make the shopping experience better within their fabulous shops. But very soon they realized that you can be made an ally of the e-commerce. What they did was they actually, because it's convenient if a lady wants to buy something at 2 AM in the night, you can go to the Macy's site and buy it. So they actually embraced e-commerce. And today they're saying, we don't care, it's just another channel. At the end of the day, the consumer is buying into Macy's, right? They're not going, it's just another channel, they're actually buying into Macy's. Similarly, I think if you tell us what are the things that a marketer needs to do, therefore that at the end of the day, e-commerce is only a channel. Relegate it to the point of a channel rather than it deciding for you what brand you should be buying. So therefore, the consumers are buying, they are buying air conditioners, they're buying phones, they're buying shirts, they're buying cars, right? So if you're the best car in that particular segment, then they will come to you. So which means that if this company, whichever company said 20% of its sale is likely to be online. Now, if it's not as if that some disrupting car company will now come online and take that sale away. If this car continues to be a preferred car in that segment, online is just a manner or a method of buying, like the Macy's example. So if Macy's is the best store of a premium category and continues to be, but people are starting to change, they're buying habits. For example, there was a time when EBOs ruled before shoppers stop, central and all those came in, exclusive brand outlets ruled. Then the department stores came and people in a way wanted to go to a store which had multiple choices, but in a similar retailing ambience. So that choice drove traffic towards the MBOs, but the brands inside the MBOs were still chosen best on their pull. Therefore, keeping the pull, the desire in whatever dimensions for your brand is even more key, even more key because in the e-commerce era, many, many small brands which were earlier unknown, which were not able to get physical presence nationally can actually disrupt because their access to consumers is much easier today online. In categories where online is becoming more the known, like garments, online is certainly becoming more the norm and small brands from maybe Ludhiana or Tirupur potentially, because entry barriers are low, can disrupt bigger brands. One last question before we throw it open to the house. That is your own purchase of Carrot Lane. Isn't that, I mean, Carrot Lane is largely an e-commerce online jewelry shopping vertical. Isn't that a futuristic move by you because you also see some amount of jewelry buying, going online? Wasn't that one of the reasons? Certainly. So if I look at holistically, the Tanishk brand is actually moving more and more up in terms of the ticket sizes, into the wedding space, into the high value diamond jewelry space, which is more and more frankly, more and more brick-and-mortar because those women are relatively, certainly older, relatively more traditional in their thinking. The shopping is group shopping. I mean, can you imagine 10 people buying for a wedding, sort of huddling around an iPhone 6? It's too small to accommodate 10 people around it. So they have to come to a store. So the manner in which or the direction in which Tanishk is going is very clearly brick-and-mortar, but with more and more digital technology enablement. Whereas there is a growing young women audience to whom jewelry is accessory, it's fashion, it's daily wear, and she is spending a lot of money on grooming. And therefore for us to get a bigger and bigger share of that pipe, we need a different strategy and that strategy is Carrot Lane, that strategy is Mia, a brand which we already had. So we're betting big in all parts of the overall time. Thanks, thank you very much. Audience, any questions? I see one hand has gone up straight away there on the right. Yeah, hi, I'm Jayesh from Market Power. I would like to understand the pattern in which the million, million kids would be taking up this kind of buying patterns in the future because we are from a psychology, hello, am I audible? Yeah. It will be pertinent to understand the way the million's would be taking up this kind of approach because brick-and-mortar, we as age group are used to that going to stores and buy, but then in the train in the future, probably five years down the line, the million's would be the guys who would be having a purchasing power. So in that context, if you could throw some light. I think, I'm not very sure how much it is to do only with the age. I think it's an, for example, I have started buying shirts online, okay? Now I have all the time in the world to go to a store. I'm not so pressed, given my age, I'm not so pressed for time, for example. But I'm also starting to move because the simplicity of buying a shirt online is, in a way, driving me towards that. It's a small share today, but I can imagine, I'm like, I wear Levi's most of the time. So I know it's 501, 511, so I know my fits. So I can so easily go and order a 511 black color and get it off. Now, the millennial is doing 100% of some of these categories online. And therefore, she's moving in that very, clearly that direction, correct? It's more becoming an habit. But in categories where that decision is not going to be that easy, and the categories where the frequency of purchase is low, the decision making is more complex, the cost of the decision is high. There, the store, and there is a certain celebratory aspect to shopping, because it's a reward in itself kind of thing. So therefore, the critical thing is for each category to immerse itself in its customers, have a very deep conversation on what is happening. Otherwise, if you're not doing that, then we can be either over-imagining the problem in our category, or to be very complacent about, no, it won't happen in our category. Both can happen. I think what I'm saying is that, of course it is happening, but the paranoia is uncalled for. And you understand it, then you can actually embrace it to your advantage, rather than get spooked by it. Thank you. Well, Mr. Venkat Raman and Mr. Balakrishnan, in the interest of time, we will not be able to take any more questions. So we're just keeping up with our schedule. But thank you so much for starting PitchCMO with such a fantastic address. And before I let you go, I'd like to request Mr. Vivek Sharma, CMO of Pidilite Industries, to kindly join me on stage to present a token of our appreciation to Mr. Venkat Raman and Mr. Balakrishnan. And another round of applause for our special address, Vika. Mr. Venkat Raman, thank you very much once again.