 Either this session is after the break, so if it is a lunch break, normally people say that it's not a great idea for people to fall perhaps asleep. So I'm hoping that this break, you are a nice cup of tea and you are fresh. And I'm also hoping in the next 15-20 minutes that I'll be into you enough to stay awake. You know when I was invited for this talk, I was given the topic, marketing is a combination of art and science. And I said, I was thinking about it and I said, okay, what should I talk about marketing, you know, combination of art and science? To this audience, probably, you know, experts in this field and would probably know more than me in this subject, right? So I said, let's think about something else. Let's think about, let me see, you know, how my own experience at Big Point trip has evolved. And what are the kind of challenges, the opportunities, the evolution that we saw in the marketing space. And then I certainly came up with this theme, which I'm going to share with you in the next 15-20 minutes, was something called disruption. Disruption in the conventional marketing wisdom. So I'll explain you what I mean by that. And disruption is kind of a buzzword, right? When you look at disruption, I'm sure you would have attended many conferences and all of that. Everyone has been talking about disruption, you know, whether it's an e-commerce business, whether it's for the Internet, it's not for the massive disruption to, you know, a business model, and it has also evolved over the years, etc. as well. I can assure you, and I'm sure, you know, as we go through this session, you would probably relate to this, that marketing as a function, marketing as, you know, very important for the business has also evolved and actually many things got disrupted. So I thought it would be interesting, because it will probably be talking about, you know, our warning species and evolution, and it will be like a storytelling kind of a thing which will be perhaps more interesting rather than just trying to, you know, be very copybook about what do I mean by art and what do I mean by science and marketing. So that's how I thought, let's hope, you know, you find it interesting. So just to give, you know, give you a little bit of a background, then we started way back in 2000. In fact, I just met someone who reminded me of our first office in Okhla, phase one, very modest office, it was about 19 years, it's almost like two decades, and for the first five years, you know, we did not take off as a model. And you know, therefore, if I take my mind back and whatever will be marketing-related techniques that we used to use at that point in time and what we use it today, there is a massive, massive evolution and massive, massive difference that I see. And I, you know, with the topic I will walk you through, you know, some of those. But let me just start by saying what's happening today. You know, so the first disruption that I see today, you know, if you look around, you just, you know, get up in the morning, you know, you, everyone has got a smartphone here. Every five minutes you would get a push notification. I mean, what does that push notification say? What does that say? It only talks about cashback offer, it only talks about discounts, it only talks about needs, it only talks about promotions and a different kind of promotion than different kind of, you know, offers. If you try and link back to the business strategy and specifically on marketing side, you would realize, you know, this is the kind of stuff that you would see, that it's only, only discounts. You know, what does this mean? What are we, what are we trying to do out here when we're trying to, you know, look at business, look at marketing levers, you know, good old days, conventional marketing techniques, everyone knows. Everyone used to be focused on, you know, how do we build the brand per se? Do we realize that, you know, that kind of a conventional wisdom has kind of got lost somewhere? I certainly do. I think it has evolved into a massive, different modern techniques today, if I may call that. And I think in the first area that has over the last about, I would say five years and not ten years, this is the nominal of focusing on acquiring customer. At the end of the day, what do you do? When you build the brand, you're obviously trying to, at the end of the day, get customers to your platform, to your shop, to your business. That's what you do, right? At the end of the day. So it's obviously a customer acquisition, you know, kind of strategy on your mind when you're trying to, you know, go out and do an ATL, tomorrow go out and do any kind of an advertisement tomorrow historically. Today, most of the businesses just look around and I know some of those numbers very, you know, a little bit more in detail. Of course for our own business, but also, you know, I had the opportunity to be associated with Flipkart for many years. So I have a lot of insights on that as well. And if I look around, and what I see around and I'm sure you see that, a lot of the focus today for over the marketing experts is today going into just transaction acquisition, if I may call it. And the focus is not necessarily, and I don't blame them because that's the business goal that is kind of defined for people. You know, and what's the business goal? And we do it day in and day out and at our brands as well. And the business goal is that, you know, it starts with visitors and it ends with transactions. And somewhere, you know, you would probably realize the focus has gone away from customers per se. Very few people, when you get into the discounts and then you go into, you know, aggressive offers, you know, and then all kinds of offers. You know, look at all these brands, including, by the way, our own brand, whether it is a form of, you know, a game or it's an auction or it's a billiard day or it is something else. Or we have a, you know, like an app fest which we keep doing on McQuadrim. Or if you really see, you know, big brands even globally. Alibaba and so you see most of the brands in China, by the way, have this strategy today. I don't think there is a lot of strategy that is behind who can build the brand at the end of the day. They try to build the brand, at least in the e-commerce space, more so acquiring customers. And, you know, there's only one company from the west that I've seen, not many companies, by the way, from the west. That has actually got into, I very famously call at least at our office, this drug addicted to this particular drug called discounts. It's only Amazon. No other company, if you would see, from the western world, they don't know how to play this game at all. It all started with China and it has come to India, whether it's a virus or a thing. And that's how it used to be, you know, looked at everything. Now, when it started picking it up, and when you started looking at this little bit more in detail, the models started evolving over. I give you not, you know, I give you two comparisons. When we built our A&M business back in the days 2006 to 2010, we built it on the back of the completely dimensional marketing. You know, conventional marketing as well as digital marketing, the digital marketing had just kind of started and we talked about that as we go along. But largely it was, of course you will get the price opposite, etc. But what you would not do, that you would go negative unit economics. You would not do that, you know, if I'm earning, let's say my margin is 10 rupees or 20 rupees. I would sell it for 25 rupees, which means I give all the margin away. I give 5 more rupees from the, from my pocket by the customer. Or I call rather the transaction per se. And then I will acquire it again and all. Because at the end of the day all I'm trying to look at it, I'm chasing the growth. And what I'm doing to just do is to keep pumping in money, whichever channel is giving me immediate liquidity, I will just invest in there, get some traffic, give some more discounts, convert and then do the transaction. You know, lot of that is happening today, it wasn't happening in the past. When we started building our hotel business, you know, fast forward, let's say 2012-13, it was very different. It actually changed from, you know, at that point in time 75% of our strength used to be marketing but real marketing. The conventional form of marketing. Think about, you know, offline media, think about TV, think about brand building, think about all of those. And now when I see lot of the marketing has changed to digital marketing, lot of it has actually changed to offers, discounts, various kind of promotions, etc. that we've been also doing. It has been a phenomenal change that has happened for over the years. And I actually think that this nuance where you actually end up going to unit economics negative is very, very, very, very harmful for the business. Because the result of that is that it doesn't give you stickiness of the customer. It actually doesn't. You know, you keep trying and you will get the transactions but you won't get the customers. Because customer is going to just keep looking for another shop where he is going to get better discount. So when you go back into your business and you look at, just make sure that you keep watching this very, very carefully. This trend is very, very dangerous in my mind. And you know, sometimes you don't have a choice because the market dynamics are such that you will have to play that. But be careful how do you want to do it? Don't lose sight of that whether that customer is going to retain, whether that customer is going to come back again. And is there going to be some kind of a lifetime value of that customer or not? If you are able to build that model, then I think it might still make sense. Or if you are able to balance your strategy between the, you know, aggressive offers and promotions and all of that. It's not that it never used to happen even in the past, but we have just completely gone overboard with this. Right? Because of the fact that, you know, everyone is kind of changing transactions and trading. And losing sight of the customer retention completely. And not worrying about long term, worrying about immediate, you know, next month or next quarter or next six months and so on. So I think that is one of the, you know, very big change that you see with the number that you are, you know, like I was telling you. If you start seeing it's a major portion of the total amount of activity is actually going into, you know, this discounting, deep discounting, which I call as drug, and you should be careful about that. The second disruption, and this is not a new phenomenon, but it is a very critical aspect of today's marketing, because if you really see this graph, it tells you, you know, how the digital marketing is growing and how the conventional AVL marketing is coming down. And there is one more aspect to this graph, if you think about it, the future in my mind about even the TV advertisement is going to be the Netflix and the hot stars of this world. I don't think it's going to be the conventional TV, they're losing content by the day. They're completely losing content by the day itself, credit. And credit also, you know, a lot of the time is more popular in the hot star, because you're on the move, you have that small gadget, everybody has got a smartphone and, you know, you're kind of on the move watching it. I think the trend is changing. For us, the experiments that we've done on, you know, channels like hot star have been both very successful and, you know, very different from an IPL, let's say, as a mega event is a completely different thing. We have always been kind of advertising on IPL as a mega event and you get those ERPs, you get that graphic bumper, but I think it's just fading away. I think it's just going towards the digital channels more and more. You know, look at the huge of digital channels, there are tons of them today. And this is what we call it as performance marketing. And what does this performance marketing do? The performance marketing actually gives you immediate results. Performance marketing targets, uses data, you know, uses models. You reach out, you do the bidding, you basically do targeted marketing and you get that traffic again. And then get that traffic to convert, you end up getting some kind of an opera proposal. You convert that traffic and, you know, you get those transactions or orders, right? So a large portion of the advertisement is going there and I do definitely see if I kind of see for the last over 12, 15 years this trend has only gone in one direction. I do not see this changing in the future as well. One of the forms of digital marketing, within digital marketing, actually the disruption happened and one of the biggest players by the way, you know, who got like 90% plus market share. Which is that clear by the way, who's got 90% plus market share? It serves. Google of course, right? You know, so they got disrupted, actually a lot of people think that they got disrupted. I don't think they got disrupted. Actually they saw it coming earlier. They saw it coming early that there's going to be smart phone and they are not going to be able to control it. The internet access device is going to be small screen. It was not going to be desktop because desktop was not necessarily going to go. Smart phones were going to go through the roof across the globe, especially China and India, which is like, you know, 1.2 billion population each. They saw it coming early and what did they do? Can anyone guess? Android. They came up with Android, right? And they came up with Android and that Android became a platform for mobile phones. And today, Android share, that's how Google operates. Today Android share is predominant, right? You know, most of the business, if you really see by the way, which is happening and I can give you our stats, the 80% of our hotel bookings today are happening on mobile and mobile app, not mobile web, 90% or not 90%, about 75-80% of that is Android. You know, over the last 4-5 years, right? And that was Google, right? So they started building this platform. And I don't know if, you know, the thought crosses your mind. It does cross my mind all the time. How dangerous is that? What has happened with this? You were dependent on Google on one platform. Now you are super dependent on Google on another platform. Tomorrow they decide to do something to Android, what will happen? Nothing. Your business gets disrupted. Get used to it because that's technology for you. You can't do anything more. I guess what's happening, I'm sure some of you would be knowing right now, that, you know, now from mobile app, slowly and gradually, the narrative is building towards mobile web. Right? That is what is happening right now. If you go on Google today, I don't think there's any rocket science by the way. People have the device, device, smartphone, mobile phone. They have to either open the app or they have to open the browser. Because of the apps, the size of the apps, and when you expand to mobile population to half a billion, not necessarily everyone has the high end phone, then you don't have necessarily high quality bandwidth. What do you do? You open mobile app, browser on mobile. Because you're not going to go back on desktop or laptop, they don't even have it. Right? Nobody's going to do that unless you're going to office and, you know, doing something there. Nobody's going to do it. It's a very simple, straightforward consumer behavior. Imagine the transfer that happened from desktop which they saw it early, brought it with the Android platform, now back to mobile web. When we discuss this marketing strategy in our office, every time I have a question, that are we going to be dependent on one single player in India for all the performance marketing? The answer is no, because, I mean, largely of course because of their share, but look at the channels that we have today, right? Multiple channels that we have, and those channels are also starting doing really, really well. Whether it is in store, there's a different kind of marketing techniques that we have. I'm sure you guys know it and you may be able to teach me a few. I don't need to teach you, you know, anything on that. But the point I'm trying to make is that mobile did not necessarily only disrupt the business models. It also disrupted the mobile techniques, right? The marketing techniques, because this thing was very small. How are you going to do marketing? What is going to be your download campaigns? How are you going to look at web ads? And so on and so forth. So this was also, in my mind, mobile was a disruption phenomena in many ways. And now we should wait for the next one, because I do think this is going to get disrupted in the future as well. The third one was a crisis again. Over the years, a lot of the businesses, you know, the conventional businesses, which was brick and mortar businesses, also used to collect a lot of data. It's not that they did not have the customers, right? They had the customers, but what they did not have was technology. They did not have the technology. They did not leverage the technology. They did not pay life. They used to do conventional CRF activities with conventional databases and the rest of it. Technology and big data technology, you know, leveraging data science and engineering and data science models have completely, phenomenally changed the game for marketing. I'll tell you, and you know, towards the end, when I finish, I'll tell you another story. But before that, I'll tell you one instance just to make my point here. When we interview marketing people today, not necessarily we go for the marketing concepts, competence as given. What we focus a lot more is the understanding of data, how are the analytical abilities. You know, do you understand digital marketing channels? Do you understand big data models? That's what we do because the jobs today, if you think about it, if you have outsourced your performance marketing, that's a completely different story. But if you haven't, and if you're 50-60% of the marketing spend is going to be in performance marketing, which is not necessarily going to use the marketing concepts of all the conventional wisdom which used to be in the past, which is all about art, right? And creativity, but then what's the point? Then you have to look for alternative skill. If you don't have no skill, then I think from a skill standpoint, it has actually disrupted a lot of people's mobile, you know, technology people got disrupted because suddenly they had to learn Android programming or iOS programming and I think marketing functions people got disrupted because they had to learn performance marketing. They had to learn various channels, building models, figuring out what is going to be the KPI measurement of that and how's the auto-i getting measured and auto-i gets measured more with the data than even national, you know, career marketing if you will, right? So a lot of the new skills that you had to learn before you became an expert and you get used to all you could adapt to the new way of doing marketing because the focus is fundamentally going to be customer recognition. There is so much of noise on the digital channel, if you don't participate then you're going to lose it, right? And of course it's very expensive and I'm not going into economics, you know, maybe deep into the question. Some interesting question might happen because it's easier said than done but right now I'm just being focused on what I believe that how marketing has evolved over the years more in a disruptive fashion. You know, this is a little bit of a complicated picture but essentially what it is trying to do is essentially levitating data to acquire, to retain and to grow. You do all kinds of models by then. And I'm telling you marketing folks today in our office use data science team to build their models and then automatically that gets connected to, you know, on the funnel doing pricing and stuff like that. So everything is integrated but the underneath of that are only two things, technology and technology. And you certainly think that, you know, maybe we studied something different, right? In fact, you know, I was, you know, on the first topic that I was making on the deep discounting I have been saying this and I will not be surprised that it will go into the management books the new way of building lifetime value, case study in terms of building lifetime value by focusing more on promotion than offers and not doing anything else. There are already people who are trying to make business case that listen, you give me 100,000 rupees and if I spend more on customer directly my immediate ROI is much more than that I do it through any other way of marketing. They're already doing it. They're already building it. We are trying to see also expanding and see lifetime value. We are doing it between our two brands. At one time it's very old established consumer brand. That's how we built the brand. Absolutely the conventional way. And then of course, you know, when you're in a technology business you can't do digital marketing. So we evolved along with the, you know, the way marketing techniques evolved. But when we got merged with Goa Erivo about two years ago, it's over two years ago, we inherited two more brands. One Goa Erivo and one Redbus. The Redbus was established as a consumer brand like McMutcher. You know, the top of the mind repo of the direct traffic was phenomenal, repeat rates were phenomenal and so on and so forth. When it came to Goa Erivo, it was a completely different brand insights that we got. From a consumer insights standpoint. And what we tried doing, we say, you know, this is not the right way of doing it. Let us experiment and see whatever we know, how we have built brands in the past. Why don't we just go and do the same thing? We built this revenue. We built absolutely this revenue because that is now not that platform was built. You know, and we tried again, same with Hollywood Celebrity, you know, the best of the Hollywood Celebrity, etc. They both, and then we were very quickly forced back to see, okay, what is that we need to do differently? And it turned out that all of those consumers on that platform were coming through various different features, whether they were, you know, the referral programs, whether there was two-sided network that was built by having a lot of the promotions that he offers. And when you do the math, the amount of money that were being spent on that, on the base of it, you could look at the decision, you just paid the cash. But, you know, just taking the negative unit economics aside, which we fixed it, it started making sense because, you know, you tried changing the key, it didn't work. And it was working, it was working for the consumer because, you know, you have all kinds of personas and the consumers in the marketplace who are used to, I showed you all the brands that they are doing it, not that, and they're all very, very successful brands. And they started building it. So, my prediction is that whatever is happening in India and China, in terms of customer acquisition, different techniques being used by, you know, investing directly more into customers going to go into management books very soon, watch it. Okay, coming back, this is again, you know, another example. Again, using leveraging data, here, basically, this one, this diagram is trying to do a matching principle, you know, which we do it. You can, on one side, you would take a lot of the variables, you take the search engine, you will take the, you know, the visits happen, you click through on a particular property, you click through on a particular flight, and all of that. You take the demand side variables, and you take the supply side variables, you take the traffic side variables, bring them all in, and then try to match and give a personalized experience on the other side. You will be surprised, it looks like more like a product slide, that, you know, maybe the product experts would be doing it, a lot of the marketing folks do this today. It's not necessarily non-marketing folks are doing it. The CRM today, and we lack of technology and lack of ability to just combine the data very differently. It used to be a very conventional way of doing that, and this is an age-old thing, and I think it continues, and it is very, very effective, but what has changed, and again, because of technology and data, what has changed is the way you do it. It's far more personalized, it is far more, you know, you can do cross-cell in a very effective sort of way. You can, you have the gadgets, you can do it, and you can push it, you can do it differently from a dynamic standpoint, because you know, for example, you know, if you do a return booking on a quantum platform, although I don't have a platform, and we have that data, and you know, we need to figure out whether, you know, if it is a return flight, and you probably need a car, and can I push you a car from an airport transfer standpoint, pick up a drop, or if it is just going to be an overnight stay, can I push, push for the help, but you know, do it in a way which is, you know, very personalized sort of way, and also leveraging the data. But what am I trying to do here? I'm trying to basically acquire customers here, or acquire transactions here, or trying to off-sell here, or trying to do the cross-cell here. That's what I'm trying to do, right? So the lines are getting blurred between, you know, I'm sitting in a marketing function, and therefore I'm only going to just go out and do the offline media ad, and that will work in an overall e-commerce or a technology company at all. You know, I think it is far more now transitioning into working very closely with the product force, and you know, work to get whatever is the less thing to give it to the customer. In fact, from a budget ownership standpoint, I must tell you, we have realized that you can't have only marketing budget and you can't have sales promotion budget and you can't have loyalty budget. All of the budget has to be looked at together because if you do it inside of, you don't go anywhere because everyone kind of thrives it, when you look at the overall K and L, it goes for a toss. You look at all of it together with 1% ownership and say, this is a good budget, decide what you want to do, objective are only two. One customer reposition, two customer retention. And then tell me, on that particular customer, which is the bucket that we use, from a spend standpoint, it doesn't matter, right? And show me the overall lifetime value of that, right? This is an example of, you know, because of all of these and these are the techniques that people have started learning in our office, most of the ideas that happen, cross-functional moments that happen, happen from marketing to product. You people, you know, good old days would not even dream about it. They've done their marketing techniques because they've understood the data, they've understood the panel, they are experts on actually marketing techniques, acquisition and retention, and they start to, when they want to make a transition, they say, we will do an online product role. There are many, there are many. In fact, not only that, our head of marketing, the CMO historically has also moved from marketing to business role and product role. As we speak, that also is happening. Okay, so if all of this was the evolution, you know, we spoke about discounting, we spoke about discounting in the context of acquiring customers or acquiring transactions, not customers actually, unless you do the NTB. We spoke about digital, we spoke about mobile, and we spoke about data and we spoke about CRF. All of these have evolved over the years. So where is the conventional creative marketing now? I think they're very small now, even there, by the way, there is, it has moved and transitioned, sadly, though. From what it used to be, and this is our example, you know, we thought that the Binto-Romi era was a very brand-building campaign, and the other one with Alia and Rajiv was very tactical customer recognition campaign. Of course, those celebrities, they do a good job of the sense of humor and so on. But which one do you think worked the most? The right side, right? So, I mean, that's what is happening today. And actually the first one, to be honest, in form, we didn't know it at all. We thought it was beautiful, there was also the scenery in Shaoan, this, you know, beautiful lake and trying to build a brand and all that, it just didn't work. Things are changing because suddenly, what happened? Then, because business also has to see the result, and I don't think I'm not saying it is the right thing to do. I think sometimes we are guilty of losing, we are all business people's heroes, whatever designation that you want to call it, we are guilty of taking a very short-term view. Very, very short-term view. We tried to do it because you have immediate numbers of pressure and you say, listen, this campaign did not work, it was supposed to give me X number of shoppers, et cetera, et cetera, it did not happen. So, let's move to another technique. I don't think you should make that mistake, I think you should make sure that you're trying your balance. Similarly, you see some of the other ads, you know, ETEL versus GEO, you know, close friends, her friends and who we have was a beautiful campaign. Look what happened with GEO. You were completely disrupted, completely disrupted, right? And you know, that was like, and one can turn around and say that it was aggressive pricing, part of it is true, right? But part of it is very aggressive land grab kind of gorilla marketing in mind. That's very important and I met Rubal at some level with a friend the other day, and he was talking about it, and he was giving the whole background and story, and not how many people know, in fact they have been able to, in this whole noise, been able to actually hold on to their high quality, higher value customers. What has got disrupted is the people who are deal conscious. They move, and that's what is happening, but that's like a big chunk, so there's a talent with you, the growth comes from that, it comes from the daily group. How do you balance the group? Okay? But that's what is happening, so you've got to strike a balance. Similarly, we spoke about it, brand love or customer acquisition. So my point is, just the last one, and I'll tell you a little story, and then we'll open up for questions if we have time. My question to you all is, I'm in food for thought, not question. How prepared are we? I'll tell you the reason why I'm saying that, and people might think that they don't know we are well prepared. I'm sure most of you would be, if not all of you. But we were looking for a senior person in marketing, and it's not a big scar, okay? I have met many people personally. I, to be very, very honest, senior seasoned people, I have seen them struggling for all the 5'6 light that I showed it to you. All the 5'6 is nothing. Because they did not jump into it to learn, to adapt, to absolutely be dived into it, to understand that game completely. You see, massive gaps, massive gaps. And we're struggling and we're saying, what are we supposed to do? We're not equal to that. So we've been changing our perception and saying, okay, maybe we don't need this kind of person. Because this is like, this is a ten-year-old phenomena, maybe not even that. And there are not too many people who are experts in it. So let's then move back and say, okay, maybe we'll pick up changing criteria, pick up sharp people, pick up sexually strong people, people who have the understanding of some data at some reasonable level, basic smarts, intelligent people, leadership skills, etc. And then let's run with that. You're supposed to do that, do that. Because you don't get that, unfortunately. The reason why I'm saying that is, that when you think about, and it could be just maybe industry-specific, so pardon me for that, but e-commerce industry is definitely more digital. Any digital technology-powered industry is a very big industry. And this argument kind of holds true for that. The superficial knowledge that I have done it and I've kind of looked at it and kind of, I understand it doesn't work. It just doesn't work. Because you could only realize that, you know, the 500 crore budget that you suddenly have that you need to spend, it was very easy for you to call agencies and then do these scripts, and then you only call them and do massive ads or radio campaigns or often media advertisements because you've done that and you know it all. But here it is going to be, you know, money goes like this because it goes down the drain if it doesn't work. And you do it right. And guess what? The competition is absolutely, absolutely fierce. So you have to perfect that art and that will only happen if you practice it. Otherwise it'll happen. You would even... it'll happen. It remains superficial and then you would struggle. You would struggle. The history of McMutton over 19 years, I have seen people struggling. Beautiful, absolutely expert marketeers struggling the moment the transition happened to perform. They were not able to adapt. They were not able to, you know, get deeper into it. And they got the stuff. Because then they will have to figure out because, you know, market demand is very unfortunate, you know, for them. So I think I would just shut up here. I would just conclude it by saying I hope you found some reservation with what I said in terms of how we saw, how I saw the evolution happening and in the form of disruption.