 Hello and welcome to E4M D2C Revolution. Today we have with us Shankar Prasad, the founder and Chief Executive Officer of PLUM. Hi Shankar, thank you for joining us today. Hi Srinay, it's my pleasure. Thanks for having me. Shankar, can you give me a look into PLUM's brand journey over these years and what all have you seen the ups and downs of the brand over the years? So our journey is about 10 years old as a company and about nine years old as a brand and 2013 is when I started working on the idea of PLUM and back then there was no concept of D2C. The terminology did not exist but what definitely did exist and continues to exist is the Indian consumer with her love for great product for benefit driven propositions and for brands that tell the truth and I think that's where we came in and that's how the journey really started. We started initially very small to bootstrap for the first five years, we got the product proposition right, we got the brand proposition right, we got the products right and throughout we have helped by our consumers more than anything else in terms of defining what the brand and its product should be and even today they are fairly vocal in telling us what we should and shouldn't do and I think the journey over the last nine or ten years has really been about listening to them and giving them stuff that they like and actually building this partnership with consumers more than anything else and that's what we love to continue to do. And what are some of the industry trends that you noticed today and how different are they today as compared to when you started off you mentioned 2013, that's a long time, how have you seen the industry change? Quite a few interesting ways, if I can call out the top three or four and the first thing is that the openness of consumers to new brands, very, very high compared to what it was, again if I reflect back to a decade ago, the people who used to try our brand back then were really sort of the leading edge of consumers who are really experimentated. Today experimentation has become mainstream, so people are willing to even in skincare, hair care really give a lot of width to new brands to come and try things out. The second thing that has changed over the last 10 years and especially so over the last I think three or four years ever since COVID time is people's openness to science as a concept as opposed to nature alone as the concept. So for example, herbal and Ayurvedic used to be very big themes about a decade, decade and a half back. In fact, it's been part of that theme for many decades now to where people are really saying, okay, it's fine if it's herbal Ayurvedic but tell me which are the ingredients which do what benefits you are claiming that the product offers. So people are keen to double click on what really makes the product work rather than believing what you say in terms of this is what the product does. The third bit is about the way information is being shared and absorbed very online heavy. In fact, it has now almost become entirely online driven and retail becomes sort of a supporting touchpoint physically to what people are consuming online. So I think all content consumption especially in the cities has largely moved towards online given the number of amount of time that people spend in front of their devices who as a result along with a lot of other content they consume, duty content also ends up getting consumed a lot and that really is influencing the way people think about the category in ways we did not think was possible even a few years ago. I think those are the top things that I would call out in terms of the brand of the market's evolution over the last few years. Today if you see the market has a lot of players be it from the D2C perspective or be it from the vegan perspective right. So what does Plums play to you know cut through a break through this D2C and vegan and product? The first and foremost is about being consistent even though we are rapid innovators as a brand we are very consistent with our approach to what Plum is and what Plum isn't. So for example the thing that I spoke about being good actually resonates across every single category or every single touchpoint that we inhabit. So the first thing is about being consistent in what we do not just in terms of brand which is what I just spoke about but also in terms of product. The product experience with respect to a Plum is defined in three words again from our end it's called goodness that delivers. It is good but it is not just good but it also delivers what it is supposed to or what it promises to. Now whether it is skincare whether it is hair care and within these sub segments of samples, masks, theorems etc. Every single product of ours is designed to deliver to a combination of plant-based as well as science-driven ingredients. Now these are some things which are you know I would say consistently unique to brand Plum and last but not the least the brand has a certain approach towards caring which is not just very clinical boring but it's also about very fun and lively sort of approach to caring for oneself while being driven by sort of science and the more measurable parts of care. It's not just about getting all to serious about care it's also about caring truly for oneself and for the world around us and having fun doing so and all the colors that you see around the brand are actually sort of very nicely playing together to deliver this goodness to the people that we speak about. Now I always say that in a market like beauty where entry barriers have always been low and it is if any getting even lower. Differentiation cannot be built on a single ingredient or a single platform it has to be built through a combination of things that resonates somewhere in some corner of some consumer's mind and that resonance is created by being consistent about product and brand. So an answer to a question like this from my end can never be saying we are different because fill in the blank because that because it's going to get undecrinsated very quickly given the low barriers to entry. So it's really about continuing to do that which people expect us to do and people like us to do. Also Shankar you did mention about people preferring new brands today you know one of the industry among one of the industry trends where do you think do you think the increase has been an increase in disposable income among most people do you think that has also played a role in people preferring to explore more and you know get into the newer categories do you think that no doubt that is a factor but I think the bigger factor here is the influence of influence of online and therefore influencers who play a big part of influence that the online world views. So let me explain this to you right in my own worldview of what we see here. If you see the average consumer journey on a device typically it's mobile these days that the consumer is holding he or she flits between shopping platforms, content platforms, social media, other apps, games and a bunch of such things. Now the word funnel when it comes to marketing has sort of lost its let's say literal meaning of being a funnel it's more of a journey you know purchase journey of the consumer. So I think content and I'm saying entertainment content not just brand content being a part of shopping platforms which you can see on certain shopping platforms now I can see shops being part of what influencers do online so you can directly shop from an influencer's field today. I can see brands collaborating with influencers and the marketplaces to do lives which sort of convert into a sale on e-commerce marketplace. I can see brands sampling with e-commerce marketplaces and e-commerce marketplaces partnering with influencers to sample brands and so on and so forth. So basically this has become a multi-point I call it a ball or hollow sphere more than anything else where there's a bouncy journey towards some kind of purchase and consumption from the consumers mind and therefore what's actually driving this trial is really the multiple touch point that are happening online in terms of content consumption, content generation and content consumption which is not restricted to the content creators alone. So the entire ecosystem is now becoming driven by people wanting to know more and being told new ways to do things and new ways of learning about things and that is what is really leading to this experimentation. And what does Plums say a mantra to creating absolutely bang on content and that resonates like you mentioned it needs to resonate with your audience right? What is your mantra to creating that side? So it's a moving target to be very frank because consumers are evolving platforms are evolving devices are evolving content creators are evolving so it's a continuously evolving multi-dimensionally evolving space but to simplify things from a brand perspective for us I think it's very important that whatever content we put out sort of resonates with the brand's ethos of being authentic and being genuine and being good and without being too selfless and without being too let's say made up and without being too presumptive on things. So for us the quality of the content takes precedence over the medium where the content is being played. The medium almost becomes secondary the medium is basically a sort of equations all over where the consumers are inhabiting in the online world but it's really about the quality of the content resonating with what the brand has to say what the brand story is and what the brand as I said expectations from the consumers is of what the brand is about. I mean I am a guy who looks like this tomorrow I show up and extremely different looking clothes and you're going to have trouble relating to who you saw in the first meeting right? So you can't be randomly changing yourself just because the setting is different you've got to be true to who you are and that I think is what drives us. So even if you work with influencers where for example our content is very the control is not there on what the content actually goes out but we are very clear as to you know the do's and don'ts for what we request influencers to do so that you know the brand and you know there's an influencer talking she's talking about the brand it's better that we sort of stay as close as possible to the true ethos of the brand as opposed to be something different no doubt in online in the world of selling there's a lot of hyper bullies that is created there's a lot of you know wow this is the greatest thing I've come across kind of language being created but we have to be realistic and sort of apply the three top saying okay you know this is what it doesn't this is what it doesn't and we are fairly clear about that. Janker also I wanted to get a look at you know consumers are getting more and more aware at least in the urban and tier one cities about cosmetics and beauty care from the chemical formation perspective as well versus the tier two and tier three cities what sort of response are you seeing from those consumers basically a look into the localization and the strategy. See in terms of data today the top eight cities account for only about 35 38 percent of our DTC sales and I guess this is true even for our marketplace sales and consistently we have heard numbers north of 60 percent for non metro cities so what I mean by that is cities which are non metro are probably accounting for 60 percent upwards of sales of our brand and I think it is again a trend that we are seeing across brand now reason for that is very simple it is a mix that purchasing power is concentrated in the larger city purchasing power is actually fairly widely dispersed across let's say the top 30 40 50 cities in this country and even beyond and now the only barrier was availability which has been nicely solved over the last few years through e-commerce and through all the delivery partners that who have who have been doing a great job actually of reaching product to people in double quick time the then the other problem to be solved was of awareness generation and you know getting the content out and I think the role played by vernacular media and influencers in creating stuff that is not just English English but I'm not even just Hindi but even across languages like Punjabi, Asami, Malayalam you know the list goes on in terms of content being very relatable and easily understood by people for whom yeah sure they can read and write English and talk English and whatnot but it's not the language they think in right for each of us we have a language image we think in and for most people in this country English is not that language contrary to popular belief so Vernac actually ends up playing a very big role in telling people stuff that they need to know in language that they understand so I think that thankfully that trend started about I would say about five or five odd years ago and it just accelerated so now we are sort of getting into this almost language agnostic territory and especially where video is concerned video is very sure and tell and if it's up there's a subtitle running which today is even automated then you are mostly sorted in terms of overcoming language barriers so you solve the language barrier you solve the availability barrier you solve the distance barrier you solve the affordability barrier to great extent therefore there is no reason to really look at you know smaller towns than cities any different from your micro cities if any you know available physical availability is restricted there therefore their propensity to consume online actually goes up as opposed to going down super and you know moving from here to the digital aspects now you mentioned about the share you get from e-commerce versus the share you get from d2c right how do you reach out to your audience and how do you leverage the different digital channels to reach out to different consumers the ones say were coming on e-commerce versus co-directed for you know purchasing from your uh so social media is of course big paid social media and social media whatever social media big part of what we do influences uh decent part of what we do we also respect and you know leverage the reach provided by the larger e-commerce platforms we don't see them as people who are adversaries where I have a d2c and I have xyz.com or app that is also selling to consumers in the same geography I see it as playing different roles as I said in that bouncy ball that I called what is the current version of the funnel we we occupy different parts of that ball so there is nothing to say that if the person goes and touches that touch point he's never going to come back to this touch point which is my d2c so each node in that in that hollow sphere has a different role to play and our job consistently is to evaluate what role that that that touch point plays in the in the journey and continue to optimize every single time and as I said before it is a moving target you can't say okay this is the optimum I have found and this is going to stay for the next three or four quarters it doesn't remain that way it keeps changing because new data gets thrown at you all that time and consumers are evolving and platforms evolving so for us we are able to take a quarterly view at least of saying okay here's where I think we are under index under leveraged and it's really about filling up those gaps wherever there are gaps rather than trying to do something too big because it's you know it's too big for a brand of our size to go on and take on head on so for us the the strategy is always to understand where there are gaps use a quarter time frame to fix those gaps and then move to the next gap to fill because by that time the horizon has moved forward and and thankfully given the country that we are in and the kind of consumption tailwinds that we see you know for most brands if you just get this right you've done most of it right you don't have to go and create a market necessarily out there because there are enough consumers for you which is not the case in a lot of other countries so therefore you know as I always say to be building a brand in this country at this time is a very exciting time for anybody and what about your overall media mix how are you know what sort of marketing spends and you know allocation of budgets are we looking at from here especially when the festive season is going to start is there going to be a rise we'll be seeing yeah so the overall if you see our spend is very online focused it's almost entirely online river except for visibility that we do in our points of sale and now that we have our ebos that visibility is also increasing having said that the festive season is a slightly funny time because along with demand on products the demand on media properties also goes up many fold and I feel that the inflation on pricing on media properties whether it is social media real estate or influencer all or marketplace let's say rate card everything spikes up in this time now purely from a promo perspective we are sure we should be sort of there in festive season on only platform but if I take a you have a commercial hat it becomes difficult to be very frank to go out there and you know get into a bidding war and every single property that exists so I feel you know very few brands should good or should go especially tight capital scenarios very few brands would or should go overboard in terms of over indexing on festive season I think what's more important is to maintain a consistency throughout the year with very tactical spikes being taken on specific properties during this time as opposed to just going all out you got all out approaches likely to burn a big hole in people's pockets I don't think that that's that's what at least we are going to be doing we are going to be very measured in what we do no doubt the demand upswing is there and that personality is the given hopefully the monsoon even though August has not been so great but hopefully the monsoon will hold out and therefore sentiment will remain strong into the festive season the next one month is critical from that point of view but one that is there then is really a question of being thoughtful about where you deploy your your ammunition great and lastly expansion plans for plum and anything particular that we need to be looking out for in the next couple of months especially so nothing very different from our current playbook so I think the expectation can be just more of the same and probably hopefully better of the same not just more of the same so wherever we have the launched initiative whether it is online in terms of content or or D2C platform or offline whether it is our own stores or partnerships that we have a leading detailers in the country so each of these isn't a certain version which is by no means final version so some of them are in V1 some of them are in V6 but still improving so I think the improvement journey will persist continue through the next few years in fact forever improvement is forever but definitely a lot of these are very very young initiatives so therefore you will see a lot more improvements happening rather than many new things coming from our anyone in terms of number of categories I think you have launched a few categories in the last two quarters that are seeing great traction and we also know which are the areas where we need to focus and get things better and that's where we are focused on over the next few quarters. Shankar I have one last question to ask you what is your sort of a take on the or your spends are located on Instagram reels say for example because they are on the growth and you know you can just share whatever your takers on those on that front. Sure so I think reels after Tiktok rather suddenly and unthermoniously exited the country people but they were hooked on to the format right there's the reason why it sort of stored in popularity and still is popular around the world and I think reels really born from that era and I think the era of short video content more generally speaking and short and snappy and user creator rather than very scripted and over curated that you know format is here to stay at least in the foreseeable future I don't know what will take its place but as of now short video snappy video is here to stay and therefore you just need to take a look at our own social media in terms of the percentage of content that is now put out on reels versus statics or carousels or any other form of content and you will see that there is probably 70 percent of what we do on our own social media and when it comes to influencers I rarely see any more static posts unless and until it's some some photography or something specifically so and also device capacity bandwidth network bandwidth has really improved and deep bottlenecked almost silently over the last four years nobody's made a big noise about it saying hey you know what I got fast internet you're all now getting used to fast internet which is a great thing that just makes video that much more easy and you know the communication task is that much more easier when you're showing something to somebody as opposed to either showing a picture of it or writing about it which is even difficult to consume for people so a lot more information is entering our minds through videos than we even give credit to it for and and what sort of ROI are you seeing there are you getting like because in short format video is any less sought after are you getting good ROI out of this see if I talk performance marketing ROI there it's still a mixed bag I would say there the I'm talking more awareness generation when we talk about ROI driven advertising Reels is not a guarantee for higher ROI it is about the same ROAs that we get on we actually I think it depends more on the content that you put out rather than the format of the content alone that you put out so if it's interesting content you can by all means get even static posts too well extremely well and we've seen that happen even as recently as last month whereas if it's boring content your video is not going to save you already so it's really about getting the right content hooks for people and you know I think what people don't like is being interrupted in whatever they're doing so if as an ad I just try and as an influencer I just try and sort of post something onto somebody it just gets repulsed with the same or more posts so I think that is the biggest takeaway that I would have on the space thank you so much Shankar this was a great chat great conversation thank you for joining us today I need to see revolution thank you very much it's my pleasure to be here