 second panel discussion and I can see our session chair is already ready with a smile, not yet, but the smile will come in. Yes, the smile is there. So let's get into it. In a diverse country like India, where the dialect changes every 100 kilometers, did you know that? Yes, it does. How do brands communicate with the consumers and keep the local ethos and tonality in mind? We have an interesting panel sharing the insights, the views on the topic importance of multilingual and diverse cultures in building brand love, powered by AVP NADU. And I'm very delighted to welcome our session chair, Nazia Albi Rahman, editor, exchange for media. And of course, our great panelists joining us is Kavita Ganeshan, head, brand marketing, TVS, Eurogrip, Rahul Gandhi, CMO, India, and UAE, ID Fresh Food, Naveen Drummond, Senior Vice President and South Head, 82.5 Communications. And of course, Director Naveen's Naveen Kumar. And over to you, Nazia. And let's hear it from all the panelists about multilingual and who better than me? But yes, I'm already this one. Over to you. Thank you. Thank you so much, Mithin. And welcome each one of you. I'm really sorry that we got laid by 10 minutes. I don't know if there was a technical delay or what, but you know, it looks like that we're running late. So we'll quickly start on with our interesting topic. You know, marketing has always been a tough game. But now with the kind of explode we have had in the mediums in the last one decade through which one can connect with the consumers. A general market message is not serving its purpose, particularly in a country as vast and vibrant as India, it fails to include the unique culture, language, communication styles, media consumption habits of millions of Indians. So all of this makes a multicultural marketing strategy a must for every marketer in today's scenario. But how do you do that is what I want to know from all of you today. And culture in itself is such a complex concept. So I would want to start with one of the marketers, Kavita or Rahul, you know, on how can brands embrace a multicultural, multilingual marketing strategy? What are what is its importance? And how does it help the bottom line? So Kavita or Rahul, I mean, either of you can start. Rahul, you're on mute. Yeah, sure. I'll go first, Nazia. Good afternoon to everyone. It's a pleasure to be here with everyone on this panel. So you know, I'm going to start off by saying the Indian consumer himself has evolved so much over the years. I mean, a lot of us would relate to the fact that while we were growing up, I think Indian audiences were a lot more accepting of insensitivities with respect to regional and cultural and linguistic understanding by brands as well as content providers. For instance, I remember I grew up in a household which very happily watched Junoon in a dubbed regional language. And we had no objection to the way our language was portrayed there. However, I think today's Indian consumer and viewer is a lot more discerning. And a lot of that, I think we should thank the digital penetration for because a lot of people have now started consuming content in their own regional languages. And that's made them more discerning. And I think brands and marketers have been very quick to understand this reality in the last decade or so. And they see a lot of difference in their approach towards cultural and linguistic sensitivities. So if you look at it, a brand I've always admired as I grew up was Asian Pains because way back in the day, they had campaigns which were made regionally relevant. So while they had a Sunil Babu playing for the HSM market, they had a Chandru playing for a Tamil Nadu market. They always had their priority markets in place and they took care of their regional and linguistic sensitivities. Today, I think both marketers and creative agencies have really become aware of the fact that they need to be relevant with respect to the linguistic sensitivities. And they have invested in terms of both talent and outfits that can help this requirement. Rahul, would you want to add to it? Yeah. Hi, thank you for inviting me on the panel. I think Avita made some very interesting points, especially the point on how that is possible. People are less accepting of somebody else's culture now. But I'll try to give a perspective that I have on this topic. I think as far as cultural segmentation is concerned, I think marketing at least has taught historically that there is various kinds of segmentation and we tend to do whenever we are making media plans, we tend to do various kinds of segmentations, deciding, okay, this is how we want to target Northways, this is how we want to talk about it. So it's been there and this whole digitization that was touched upon by Kavita as well. What that has allowed is that as digitization has grown, targeting microcultures has become more possible. And now targeting microculture is obviously, if you have to target India, you have to target lakes. I don't know how many different languages and how many different regions. And the opening statement that Mithin had made was actually that changes after every 100 kilometers or so. So then finally what it happens for a marketer is that it actually enables him to reach out to small multicultural groups who may be speaking different languages, who may be having different lifestyles, having different income groups. And that makes the whole segmentation a bit more ROI effective. That's why marketer spend, when you ask them, are you going for broadcast media? Are you going for digital somewhere at the back of the mind? The undercurrent that you hear is it's more efficient. It gives you a better ROI. And I think as digitization is growing, multicultural targeting and channels which are catering to small psychographic user group or demographic or geographic user group will tend to see more investments. I mean, just to avoid confusion, I'll address you as Mr. Raman Naveen. I can call the other Naveen Naveen. So Naveen Kumar, I want to come to you. What is your perspective on this? Again, we are in the real estate business. So here, it doesn't change by the 100 kilometers. It changes by the projects. It changes by the postcode. One project could address a cosmopolitan audience, if you will. And then there could be another project that is, for example, there's a project where we have a vegetarian specific units. And then there are projects which are extremely cosmopolitan. So we need to end. There are projects which cater to an older demographic, so on. So what we find is it is like Rahul mentioned, it's efficient to target different communication to different audiences, depending on what they or what we want, wish they consume. So I mean, this is out there in a big way. And in real estate, it's a lot more detailed, per se. It doesn't change by 100 kilometers. It's just project to project, postcode to postcode. Mr. Raman, I want to understand from you, because you're from the agency, people who create, who have the responsibility to convert the ideas that marketers give to you and present it to the consumers. How much is the demand these days? And what are the challenges that you face? And if you can give us an example, from which we can understand that how you picked up a general message and converted it into a regional kind of a thing, and without the message losing its originality and the texture in other things. Sure, Nazia. First of all, thank you very much, for having me over and great being a part of this panel. Before I address this question, I'll add my two bits on the previous one, which you had asked the others. And it's a very funny anecdote. If you look beyond the four of now five southern states, for everybody down south, rest of the country is not India. Similarly, if you go up north, anybody in the southern part of the country is a mother I see. Fundamentally, that needs to change. And the irony is that eastern part of the country and the western part of the country asks, what about us? There's only north and south, and northeast is a different subject altogether. Thankfully, Goa is lucky because everybody loves Goa. Goa doesn't. Fundamentally, for me, that's the larger problem. And unfortunately, marketers cannot afford to do that. The most hated movie down south would be Chennai Express, because every Tamilian knows that no Tamilian speaks the way he's been depicted in that movie. Now, content provider, the film industry can get away with that, but can a marketer get away with that? The consumer is absolutely unforgiving. So it's a bigger challenge. And as Mithin rightly started this conversation, saying that 16% of the world population is with us. And we have about 28 states and union territories. We speak about 170 odd languages, 500 different dialects. And one recent Google data says that 90% of the people in India prefer to consume content in the local language. Now, this is the ground reality. How do you communicate to all of them in one language? We cannot treat India as one country. It's 28 different countries. And every country, every state behaves differently. And even within that, if you say, Eastern UP would behave totally different from Western UP, or Southern Tamil Nadu would behave totally different from another Tamil Nadu. And that is culturally so diverse. So strategically, what we do is at the same time, you cannot be positioning your brand 28 different types. And you cannot be communicating in 28 different ways. But broadly, one formula would be to correct and strategically, the difference that I see between the South and the North are that you know, there are certain certain category codes, certain codes of behavior that changes. You know, every time, and I don't know the reason behind this, but North and West are somewhere similar, South and East are somewhere similar, it comes to this particular behavior. And when you communicate and talk to people up North, what matters most is the looks, is the packaging, is the glamour question. Whereas when you come down South, it's more the claim or the reason to believe as we call that gets questioned. You know, it's more of an emotional communication that works better up North, as compared to the Southern part, it's more functional, it's more rational. And one very, very important point is that in terms of budget, whether it's the South, whether it's the East, people question it, who forms. You know, you need to give them that extra reason to convince them, why should I pay you that extra buck for your brand for these products? Whereas recency matters a lot up North. So these are certain codes that we follow, basis which of how we communicate as opposed to you slice and dice and look at the specific market that you want to talk to the product that you're offering, and hence you position your brand and your product on it. Well, one example I'll give you here in Bangalore, one of the largest clients that we work with is Himalaya, Himalaya, which is into personal care. On the personal care business, the hair care category is that we work a lot with, which is primarily to do with shampoos and hair oils and cream. When we talk to the 22-23-year-old girl up North, you know, for her, when you talk about a particular way of hair, and then what we promise is that if we, for example, I'm saying that I want to promise what I would deliver as healthy hair to you, what healthy hair would mean to somebody up North would be voluminous, silky, good-looking hair, versus that healthy hair, down South would mean long, dark hair. So do you change your core proposition? No, you don't. Your purpose still remains the same. Your proposition remains the same. Your promise remains the same. But what does promise, that promise translated to in the markets, that changes. So we fine tune it executionally. You know, when you depict the kind of people you want to depict, the narrative changes, the script changes, the setting changes, and of course, talent, the face of the brand changes. So we need to have a dual strategy for brands when it comes to different markets. Rahul, if I can come back to you, you handle India and Dubai. I mean, for you, it is not just switching from one region to another, but two different countries. How do you do it? Localizing your content, keeping the cultural ethos and tonality in mind, by tapping the right cultural insights. What kind of briefs do you give to your agencies when you're launching the same product in India and Dubai? Luckily, UAE is mostly Kerala. So we can read it like a Kerala. But in fact, I think the way ID handled it, you asked me how I handled it. I don't know how I handled it. I'll try to answer that. But the way ID handled it is actually, I'm from Delhi. And I'm managing an idli, dosa, malabar around a marketing company. And I have had no experience of ever having cooked idli or dosa at home because we don't know how to make batter. The way ID has done it is actually the same approach. When we go into a particular culture, we tend to build teams which are made for that culture. That is one way that we do it. So if ID wants to become big in Mumbai or wants to launch in Delhi and already has an understanding of South, they will diversify that way by hiring local people. Similarly, if we were to be in UAE, even now UAE may be very similar to Kerala, but the fact that it is still a different culture, it is residing within a different culture. So one is that the organizational hiring strategy will be different. Now coming to how I would typically as a marketing resource in the organization would handle it. I guess there are two kinds of challenges involved in communication. One is production and then is dissemination. If you can produce it and you can disseminate it, you can most likely target. Now production would mean that you could produce it in many languages which are audio tubs, which is something that the TV industry has been doing over the past so many years. The other way is that you could actually customize the visual part of it as well because audio visual will be the entire completion of communication. When people tend to do customization of visual content, they tend to run into two kinds of challenges which are either a timeline-related challenge or a cost-related challenge. Luckily, these challenges are mostly only applicable to video content and video is the dominant one. These challenges are not applicable to static content. So creating a banner in languages and putting it up on a website is far more easy than creating videos with more than just audio tubs with video changes. Brands do it but it has a timeline and a cost challenge. So the way we handle it, luckily UAE is Kerala, so we go with the audio dub group and in digital for any static medium which is easily transferable and does not have timelines and cost attached to it. We tend to go multilingual and we tend to shaft out which is social and programmatic stuff and stuff that you do on Google. Well, Dubai is Kerala. ID is not just only South Indians eating. I mean we also eat it. I'm also from Delhi but I also eat it. So what about consumers like me? I mean how do you connect? How do you want to connect to consumers like me? We'll have a daily campaign or a Bombay campaign. Don't worry about that. Thank you. Because as you know Raman Navin was saying, they are very different and he made some very, very valid points that's differences between North and South. And yeah, we do understand that sometimes it has a single way of communicating to the entire TG because it's more media efficient, production efficient but it is not brand efficient sometimes. Finally, the point that Navin Kumar was making that each pin code has its own culture, actually each family has its own culture and that gets agglomerated to apartment societies, pin codes and then to town city states and then we say Asia has a culture. That's how it gets agglomerated but the deeper we go, the better we'll be able to connect emotionally. Kavita, your brand again is more about two billers and three billers and if I I mean correct me if I'm wrong, I mean maybe you are trying to cater more to two tier, three tier you know consumers. So how do you know what kind of messaging are you looking at when you shift from let's say Bhopal to Kochi, you know you're shifting between different kind of entirely two different cities. So what is your brief to the agency? So it's at multiple levels, at one level you know for digital campaigns like Rahul said it's fairly easier because you're just dealing with banners which need to be translated, creatives that need to change and stuff like that. But when you're doing your national media campaign like one of our recent campaigns, the learnings were immense because this panel discussion is exactly what I experienced in my professional life a couple of months ago because we were here building a you know a national level brand film which was supposed to make sense to the entire country because you know often I know that there are you know films that are getting shot with multiple cast and crew simultaneously today like a Babu Bali but unfortunately not all brands and organizations can afford that kind of a production cost number one and number two they don't have the kind of timelines and the third most important challenge is that usually a brilliant creative idea stems in one language and then to translate it in the true essence of that idea to other languages becomes a challenge. So you know our recent most campaign was exactly this you know it was around India being a country full of turns and we spoke about mode as a word in Hindi is so beautiful so simple so colloquial convert I mean translating that into multiple languages itself became a challenge and you know this is something which we dealt with you know we did a couple of things which I can share with the group one thing we did was we went to regional experts we went to language experts and cultural experts and we did not go for a translation or a transliteration rather we said take the essence of the script of the ad film and then rewrite it in your own language you know for instance there was I had a lot of personal learnings too over here for instance there's a small sequence in our film where it's based on the insight that Indians actually take a turn bases some superstitions like a cat crossing a road which most of us can relate to you know I mean we might not believe in it but that's something Indians commonly do when we went into the language translations of our script one thing we discovered was that this does not make sense to Amaliyali in Kerala it is you know people don't believe that a cat crossing a road is superstitious or you know brings in luck so we took care that we respect the cultural sensitivities of the region and when we translated this and got our Malayalam edits out we ensured that sequence is edited out of it so these are small nuances but the reason why I'm mentioning it is because there are many practical difficulties you know and not every brand is at that stage of the life cycle where they can rope in an Amitabh for HSM and you know Mohanlal for Kerala and somebody else for Tamil Nadu so Naveen coming to you you know I mean here all I can a lot of people can buy just because it is you know I don't attach so much of culture or ethos or other things to it but housing is something that you know it is it is it is all about you know living in the similar cultural kind of an area and particularly in a country like India where you know South Indians have their own societies and you know everyone would have want to have their own kind of you know traditions and cultures so how do you how do you handle it you know with every project that you launch? Thank you fortunately here real estate is a very targeted marketing segment so you know what you're targeting it's it's not going to be generic you're not going to reach out to everyone who makes let us say 10,000 rupees a month to whatever 10 lakh rupees a month it's it's the each project is different so the content that you create for a project would largely help because of the targeting of the project itself so the challenges arise when we go into a large cosmopolitan townships let us say a thousand unit or a 500 unit or a project like that that's where we start facing these cultural imbalances that we need to or cultural targeting that we need to address so what we start to sorry how do you address that? Correct so what we what we do is first we start off with a linguistic play so we for us it's a straight translation and depending on the project let's say a cosmopolitan project also allows us to do transliteration both from English to that language or the reverse itself so depending on the project and the medium we choose again real estate also has very little challenge from a video content perspective what Rahul mentioned because here or what Kavita talked about we are not going to create a lot of video content it's it's going to be limited video content mostly digital content so it's so much easier trying to you know get the banners up on your web pages get the the images out there or a print media or a print media advertisement be it on an English newspaper or a vernacular print paper or a magazine so it's that much easier but what we do is depending on the project we give we translate the advertisement or we also go ahead making new content because these content is not as expensive as let us say producing an outright video video content so that that makes life a little easier for us now Mr. Raman so you know I I kind of you you told us in your first answer you know what are the challenges that you face when you make these ads but now I want to understand what are the challenges that that you face when you get the brief from the marketers you know handling marketers you know when they want you know they want too much from you you know from that one ad you know when they expect you to replicate it from one language to another and retain everything that they want you to retain how do you handle that you know we resolve that in the right in the beginning itself at the starting point you know I'll have to go back and tell you it's without naming a brand if you can tell me you know how you what what kind of practical or impractical things that are expected out of you I'll I'll come to that in a bit and I'll give you the give me the largest solution you know as I was saying you know the very the very existence of 82.5 it will be it was created and the name 82.5 comes from the longitude of India that defines the Indian standard and and the purpose of our being was very similar to the parallel discussion that we're having here you know we said India is such a diverse country and we cannot treat India as one so the capability that we bring on and that's exactly what we go to every client of ours is that we bring in the capability of thinking in a particular language it's not about translating or transliterating or translating culturally and language-wise you should have the capability to think in that language I can't agree more with what Kavita said for example that she gave up a cat crossing a road if it doesn't work in again that doesn't work in again but there has to be a cultural ones that one should be able to relate to what a one of the bigger example I'll give you an adp news so that's an important client of ours that we work with strategically it's very very clear that the business model itself is a localized business model there isn't an English channel that ABP has ABP has a Hindi channel has a Bengali channel has a Tamil channel has a Marathi channel has a Gujarati channel now right at the top if you see the core of the brand and the core philosophy it's it's about being limitless you know it's it's about talking to people you know in a you know in a particular manner and that DNA trickles down into every market that you go but if you look at every market how we position ourselves is very different for example there's an ABP Anando in Bengali where we say which is which in English would means that it keeps you ahead the Hindi ABP news channel we talk about which is very similar but the moment you go to a Maharashtra where the culture is very very different where we say that open your eyes to see the world and the latest example is just about a month back we launched ABP in Tamil Nadu and the and the story was very very different we call it ABP Naadu so if you see the brand name changes every in every state whether it's a Naadu whether it's a Maja whether it's a Ganga so culturally you have to be very very different so when we came down to Tamil Nadu the biggest problem was that you know it's there's an outsider syndrome why would a Tamilian accept somebody coming from the north typically as I said and you're an outsider that's when you need to crack the code understand the problem what you're solving understand the relevance understand the nuances culturally on ground it's a very designing audience in Indian it's a knowledgeable audience people are educated they want to have a certain point of view there are certain traditions which they follow certain traditions they don't want they want to get rid of but yet they are rooted so these are the smaller pieces that we keep in mind and we came out with a campaign which basically said it was for the new Tamilian the new age Tamilian who wants to know who is basically a content consumer and just not a gross country so that's how you look at each and every pulse local nuances smaller pieces and you cater to that the problem is of it with with clients yes there are there are mostly at the mid-level we do face problems where people typically want to translate and you know everybody is at the expert in their own language and they want to translate it but as long as you're able to set this larger philosophy that translation is not the future ahead it's about who creating and it's about thinking in that language things within i see you log in but you know we started late so we'll take five more minutes I just quickly wrap up one last question and then we'll close the debate so you know one big fear with the you know when you adapt something from one culture to another is the fear of stereotyping you know like like somebody said right in the big name you know everyone who's in south is a madrasi and everyone who's in north you know is looked in a particular way so you know when you are doing this multicultural and multi-lingual marketing how can brands use cultural sensitivity in their messaging and eliminate stereotyping of a particular culture that's that's one thing that I would want each one of you to tell me as briefly as you can because we have already exceeded the time given to us Rahul we can start with you and we can finish with either honestly research if you really want a short answer yeah yeah because you know I face this problem every day what you just said you know I don't know how it will be perceived in Bangalore versus North Karnataka versus Kerala versus South Chennai I don't know yeah and if I would be launching in US tomorrow I won't know how it will be even the west coast and east coast so the best way to do it is test it out ideally before you get into production yeah because then the you know the the so test it out I mean that that's really how the challenge needs to be dealt with you know day-to-day organization marketing environment I think listen listen and listen more and more to your consumers that is a mantra which is surely not going to fail I mean I'm sure there are gaps but do you agree that there is always a sphere of steedwood I think which exists and you know when you have to show a South Indian you just dress that person in a certain way and you you feel that you are done absolutely and in fact I would go one step further to say even what Navin Raman spoke about I don't know how far that holds good anymore you know because today the South Indian woman doesn't necessarily want long black hair preferences are really changing and you know there are cohorts that are emerging across the country for different kinds of preferences it's making the marketing task much tougher on one side but on the other side I think what marketers should do and this is something which I personally practice and we do as a company as well use your brand level national level campaigns to communicate the overall messaging and when it comes to the regional sensitivities cultural sensitivities etc address them more through your btl and your digital activations so you know for instance we ran a consumer activation campaign Q3 last year so what we did was while the overall messaging was that of a consumer campaign which was called Taya Mela we used regional video content on YouTube to target different states and I'm not saying that's foolproof I'm not saying a person in Tamil Nadu only wants to see an idly becoming a tire not at all so what we also did was we mixed it up a little bit because you know it's no longer that a person in Delhi does not want to eat idlies or a person in fact there was this very interesting communication Zomato took out around Republic Day which was all around this about how so many madrasis so-called ordered Lucknow-e Biryani and so many people in Punjab ordered filter coffee and so on and so forth I think that's the beauty of India right so the challenges are only going to get worse also because you know people are transferable there are so many North Indians settled in Bangalore so on and so forth they're all becoming a little more cost more so there is convergence in a lot of things and there is going to there are going to be challenges as we go forward as well so my thing would be about using digital and VTL strongly to reinforce the regional messaging. Naveen. Sure what I would suggest I mean what we did was the use of local partners for local communication I mean we we empowered the local partners more in terms of creating content so we just gave them the guidelines you know basically what you can and you cannot do and everything else we gave a lot more freedom for the local content creator when for example we did a project in Vizag I can't speak a sentence in Telugu or none of my marketing team so all except one but the way we worked around was we use local partners and we allowed them give them a lot more freedom to operate so they are a lot more sensitive about what is happening there what is okay to say and what is not okay to say I mean that was one way we worked around. Naveen would you want to add something more? Just to to simply put you know the only solution to this is localization localization and go on a hyper local model as Rahul right in the beginning said research but when you do how do you how do you research and with whom do you research choose the right kind of higher the mine right kind of people who understand that culture who understand that language choose your partners accordingly you know even at 82.5 if there is a you know we have offices across the country in four different parts of the country whenever there is a requirement we reach out to each of the officers and take the help for that local particular because they understand the language and the culture and once better than anybody else so to me going hyper local is the way for. Thank you so much all of us for joining us meeting us back again and we have exceeded the time that was given to us it was indeed a very interesting discussion and we have been I mean every report that has come out in the last few years has been hinting towards localization and vernacular and regional be the future of media so thank you again for joining us and I would like to say goodbye now stay safe thank you thank you Nazia thank you to all our panelists thank you for joining us here and a very good evening thank you again