 And our speaker is a marketer with experience across three diverse industries, FMCG, Telecom and Automobile. Over his 23 years in sales and marketing, he has worked in leading marketing organizations like Gillette, Procter and Gamble and Samsung. Building brands, innovating on them, creating new ways of going to market and identifying growth drivers has always been part of his marketing passion. Ladies and gentlemen, put your hands together and help me invite on stage Mr. Sumit Narang, Vice President Marketing Bajaj Otto. Good evening everyone. I'll just wait for my presentation to be loaded and I think somebody has to reset the timer. I can just see time is up already. Okay, can you have the presentation up please? Oh, it's coming on the sides. All right. Okay. All right. Once again, guys, thanks a lot for this opportunity. It's a pleasure talking to all of you out here on a subject which is as vast as perhaps marketing itself. I really don't know how do you summarize brand experience or contain it into a certain part that can be talked about. But I must admit that when I talk about brand experience or when that word comes to my mind as a consumer or as a marketer, somewhere this example always comes up as one of the best practices for me. Kind of you enter that store and you feel young all over again. You somehow feel that those calories are not going to even affect you and you become kind of almost as ravenous as a kid. Several more examples, places which might be some of your favorite joints to hang out, whether you look at places like the PVR, Starbucks, a hard rock cafe, or if you go into some other categories, something from one of our own industry, one of the competitors, Hal Davidson. If you go to the brand store, great brand experience over there. I think it's more than just motorcycles they've done over there. My compliments to them. If you look at the Apple store, again fantastic experience and a big part of what the brand Apple is all about. So some great industry examples, but one thing we do see in common is that many of these examples that do come to your mind are very often either from the retail industry or from the services industry. So the question is that is brand experience only limited to that? What about mass market products? What about regular consumer products where you might not have either the luxury or it might not be that critical where brand experience has to really be contained only at the point of sale or the point of consumption. That brings me to the category where I'm working currently and that's automobiles. Don't get me wrong. By no means am I saying that experience at the showrooms, at the dealerships, the service experience is not important. It's extremely important, it's critical. But what a great brand experience at the point of sale for an industry like this be enough for a customer to switch his choice? When was the last you walked into a showroom when you had a certain brand in your mind and a car salesman was able to convert you very conclusively? Chances are if you were thinking of buying a car and you went to four showrooms, you have probably already decided that these are the two brands I'm going to be considering and these are two backups that I want to look at. So which means that this whole journey of brand experience starts well before you get to that point of sale. So that's a big challenge for certain industries, automobiles being one of them. The other big challenge of course is that in a category like motorcycles where you spread all the way from metros to small towns to almost rural, you're talking about a fairly large retail footprint. You're talking about close to about a thousand places that you might be selling out of and trying to control and maintain a wow brand experience at all of them can be a big challenge. So if you're going to talk about brand experience in this context and saying that how does it go beyond point of sale? How does it go beyond the point of consumption? I think it's fair to first put in place a framework. For me, brand experience is what you feel about a brand. It's more than your brand knowledge, it's more than your brand image. I think it goes even beyond your brand positioning. It's a sum total of everything that you have experienced, heard, seen, read about the brand and by and large, how do you feel about it? So therefore, that to me sums up brand experience. And what you see listed over there are just some of the touch points that many of you would be working with in regular marketing and brand building programs. Very clearly, when you talk about how you feel about a brand, your influence, which is largely on the first two, which is in black, which is advertising and retail, have only a limited role to play in terms of impacting this brand experience. And then there are a whole lot of things. And as Vivek also talked about in his final slide, many of these things are beyond your control, influences, the chatter, etc. So if I start with a thought that influencing conversations, influences brand experiences, and let's keep that as a holding thought as we move ahead in this little piece where I would like to share with you through a few examples on how I believe one can start influencing a brand experience before a guy has really made his choice on what he wants to buy. Because after that, it might give you a very warm feeling, but it's not going to change his brand choice at all. So the example I'm going to take today is going to be one of our brands, Pulsar. It's a brand that's been around for 15 years, pretty much created a category of sports bikes at a time when the market was all about 100cc commuter bikes. And it is a huge youth favorite brand. In fact, it's the market leader in the so-called sports segment. I'll have to spend the next five minutes orienting a lot of you onto two wheelers. My guess is many of you might have given up riding two wheelers quite a while back, might not be studying that category or using it or looking it up, unless those of you who are wanting to become what we call as a born again rider. That's somebody like me where you kind of suddenly get into becoming a bike rider again in your mid 40s and the whole world is surprised what he's up to. So let's talk about Pulsar a bit. It's a huge youth brand in this country. If brands like these is what you thought are really the ones which dominate the sports bike space, you've got to really think again. It actually sells about twice of Yama Suzuki and Honda put together in that segment. So it's that big a brand. I wouldn't spend too much time talking about the brand, but just to orient you, let me play a couple of ads recent ones because somewhere while TV advertising is getting very unfashionable, one good thing is that it's a very good summary of what the brand is all about. So let's look at these two Pulsar ads. Just for you to get an idea of what it's about. Can you play the video, please? See the slides have got a bit disoriented, but so what you see about the brand just to keep at the back of your mind, it's like it's like a badass. It's somebody who just thrives on adrenaline, loves to live life on the edge, is all about power, punch, the rush. And that's what brand Pulsar is all about. Now, more than just that and more than just being a market leader and a youth brand, it's a very loved brand. I've had the privilege of working on some great brands, but I haven't worked on any brand that's been loved by its customers as much as the Pulsar has been. And I compare with brands the likes of a Samsung or a Gillette or a Duracell. There are people who love and worship and they know about the Pulsar brand more than what we do as the marketers of that brand. So that's the kind of customer you are talking about. So now, if you want to talk about the brand experience for this kind of a customer, you really can't go the conventional way because he's perhaps more of a brand expert on that than what you possibly are. So when we are talking about brand experience for a product like this, which is a loved brand, then to me, if I was to say that brand experience management, well, that's all you can do, you can just manage brand experience, is customer conversation stimulation. If you can stimulate those conversations in the right manner, you are perhaps creating the right kind of brand experiences. I'm talking about automobiles, but there are several categories where you form a view even if you've never tried that product out or you might not even know somebody who's personally using it and I just shared with you what it's all about and that to me is the complexity of a brand experience. For some of you who are waiting to buy your first Armani suit, perhaps already have a view on it and it might not be shared by a user. It could well be what you've heard from some experts. It could well be what you've heard on some kind of chatter. When you drive a BMW and you find it much sportier and you would always believe it's sportier than a Mercedes, which the two brands have been trying to fight out for many years, certainly it's not kind of a result of any actual product experience or any rational reason given by any of the users of that product. So that brand experience is going way beyond many things and very difficult to shake that off. Or for that matter, if you are really looking forward to that special day to go to that really expensive restaurant, again, that experience is perhaps basis what you just might have read on a magazine in a flight some time four months back and that's one of the destinations you want to go down to. So we're talking about so many of these various chatters around so many conversations which are influencing what you feel about a brand. And if a brand experience is all about what you feel about the brand, then it's important to stimulate those conversations. And that's why I would call it that this customer conversation stimulation is what I see as one of the ways of managing brand experiences. So I'm going to go through a few examples through this framework where I look at four key, call them buckets, call them pillars, call them whatever. But which is going to be, first of all, stimulate an anticipation for your brand, for your product, especially if it's a passion category or if it's a category people wait for or you've got a new product coming on. So your first task of experience starts before you launch that brand. Second is stimulate around the product. Let people get more excited about the product. We often, as marketers, tend to give the product a secondary role and saying that brand is everything. Yes, we all are aware that products can be copied. But finally, when it's a rational, when it's a category where people spend a very considered time purchasing it, the product experience, per se, becomes that important. So how do you stimulate people around a product? Or what I would call as a community stimulation. If you have a brand which has got a community or it can be formed. And finally, stimulative experiences. Now what we often do in most of our marketing, there could be an ATL. And then we might want to get into doing some activations around a brand. That's just, to my mind, the fourth bucket. I think there are opportunities in the first three as well. The other thing which we often end up doing as marketers, and I think that's where we have to think beyond, is if we don't have the luxury of creating a great brand experience at the point of sale or consumption, like the examples I shared in the beginning or from the retail or the service industry, we try to create our own brand zone. And we would have those ideas that in the mall, let's do an activation. Create a zone where we are celebrating every attribute, every virtue of this brand. Great, but I have yet to see many of these examples being scaled up. And we've got to recognize that influencing experience has to go a lot beyond creating these surrogate retail points, which can become your brand zone. So I just want to spend some time talking about these four. I must warn you, I have loaded this up with a fair number of videos. So the good thing is you're not going to be hearing my voice a hell of a lot. But depending on the time, and I can see the ticker, so we might skip a few in case we feel it's taking way too long. So let's kind of look at the first part of stimulating anticipation. I've just taken the example of a brand that we launched last year around April. It's called the RS 200. We actually first exposed this bike in the Auto Expo two years back. And immediately there was a lot of chatter around this particular product, because it looked very different. But when was it going to come? In what format? Nobody knew. And finally, when the time came that we're going to be launching this particular brand, we said, OK, if a big part of this brand has been the anticipation, why don't we just build on that? And this is what I often call as the Harry Potter marketing model, where you almost sell the product even before you launch it. So you build enough anticipation before the launch that you've already created the right kind of perceptions. So which is a perception before you create before you launch the product? I think that's one area where a lot of different categories can also take a leaf out of. I'll just share with you a little teaser video just again to encapsulate our thinking, which we put out, which didn't show the product, but kind of stimulated the anticipation. Let's take a look at this video, please. So the first stimulation that we created was we exposed the name. And everybody's thinking there's a lot of online chatter which happened on what does RS stand for. And this thing pretty much just put the market on fire. Now, thankfully for us, it's a passion category, so people are actively searching. Thankfully for us, there is a whole auto media which looks forward to new launches and what's new and what are the new scoops, per se. So conversations around what the brand is, as if you are able to read some of the comments over here, guys saying, wow, what a great bike. Somebody commenting, but they didn't even show the bike. What do you mean by what a great bike? And that's what I think stimulating some of these senses is all about, where you just do a little tease, show a little bit, but keep the rest for later. I think we very often tend to downplay the product, as I mentioned a while back. And to me, romancing the product and putting it on everybody's to-do list is something which has to start from the marketer. If you feel excited about it, your customers will feel excited about it. I find the automobile industry does it pretty well. I find the food industry again does it extremely well. It's got to get onto the guys list that I want to see this particular product next weekend. This is my task for the weekend. So, and that's where, and I'll skip this video, is where there was a nice reveal romancing video about this product talking about the features. Something interesting over here is a timing for these kind of initiatives from your side. If I do this today, it'll be a super flop. But if you do it on the day of launch, and that's what we did, we did it exactly on the day of launch, it goes live. It suddenly virals because that's when it's hot news. After three days, it was no good. And that's where we could see the component of organic to our video views pretty much came down when we tried to play it again after about two weeks. So that's, again, to my mind, a part of stimulating anticipation to build overall stimulating conversations. And something like what, thankfully today there are enough measures that you can really see that have you been able to strike a chord with your customers or not? If a guy is searching, clearly he's interested. So today, I mean, to my mind, if you're really able to see your analytics well, it pretty much tells you a lot more than what a brand track would. But this is actual behavior. Everything else is really claimed. What you see as a blip over there is the kind of searches it got. And I've just put some other brands over there. Just picked up some popular automobile brands just for you to get some kind of comparison on the kind of blip the brand got on the day of launch. So that's the kind of anticipation you can build around it. I think the second stimulation is all around the product. And you got to excite people about the product. And that's been one of my learnings when I moved from FMCG into categories like telecom and automobile. You can build a great brand, you can talk everything about the brand, but if the product is just not gelling with people, there is really nothing you can do about it. You've seen, I'm sure there are case studies written and many more will be written about, for example, an example like Anokia. Great brand. Number one, number two on the trusted list, but if the whole product strategy just doesn't go right, there's little you can do about it. And same holds true even for our category. Now the interesting thing over here is that people don't believe you and therefore you've got to communicate your message through others who would be more credible, at least in their eyes. And that's again a little channel you can use to stimulate around the product. So for example, I mean the visuals you see over here are automobile experts. People who are worshipped as real experts on knowing what an automobile is, and we've all seen all these auto journals and journals and blogs around. So pretty much these are influencers for our customers and holding a session with them, giving them the bike to ride on the track, giving them a full day with the bike and then capturing their experiences becomes a great piece of content to once again influence what people are going to feel about the brand. So let's just see a part of this video just for you to get a feel of it. So the state, it showed an indicator speed of 150 kilometers an hour. This is far more than what we've ever achieved on any other pulsar till date. Definitely feel faster than the other pulsars. 151, 152 kilometers per hour at the back straight here at Zakat. It is, it is, it is. Definitely the fastest pulsar. You can push, you can lean harder and harder until you run out of guts. The bike is built to live. It's a lively machine which is an extension of yourself. It's like a proper new age pulsar. All right, let's just pause it and move on. Definitely the most important. And there's a clear vision. Yeah, can you pause it? Where the bike is heading and the brand is heading. You can see the evolution of the pulsar range over the path. Sorry, I'll just skip the rest. You do get an idea in the interest of time. So I think getting experts to talk about your product, and dose your products, and how you socialize it amongst your customers is a great part of stimulating your customers around the product. The other part is something like your feature dramatization. And how can you make it very convincingly? Because if people believe in those attributes, they'll believe in the product. Let's take a look at this video, which is all about. One attribute about this bike was it was one of the very, very few in the market which came up with an ABS braking system. Now, most people don't have much of an idea about what ABS brakes are and what do they do. We all know that it's a superior form of braking. And so was the case with our customers, which meant that if we went on and talked about that, oh, this has got ABS, so that's better safety, that's just about a one line expression. But if I could change their perception and their knowledge base about what ABS is, not are they going to love the bike more. They would also love me more for making them a little more educated about the product. So let's take a look at this video on the ABS dramatization. The new Bajaj Monster RS 200 comes with an optional ABS, that is, anti-lock braking system. The ABS is an extremely important feature in a super sports bike. This video demonstrates the braking performance of RS 200, which comes with ABS compared to other sports bikes without ABS. These tests attempt to replicate extreme braking conditions in real life scenarios. Braking on gravel has always been tough. As tested on extreme gravel surface, as seen here with sand and mud, let's first see how the bike behaves without ABS. As seen here, the front brakes have locked up the wheel, and hence the bike has lost traction and gone out of control. Monster RS 200 with ABS prevents the wheel from locking up and giving complete control to the rider. Now let's see how the bike behaves on wet slippery conditions. And what can be more slippery than a tarpaulin with lots of water sprayed on it? On the Pulsar RS 200 with ABS, the rider is in complete control and has also reduced stopping distance. The best feature on the RS 200 would undoubtedly be the ABS. It's so very progressive, linear in it, why grab everything? The front wheel is going to prevent riders from locking up, say, while entering the corners or under panic braking. Experience the ultimate speed and control on the Pulsar RS 200, which comes with ABS. Not doctored, a genuine video. This is what you would have normally wanted to give a brand experience. You would want to do about 1,000 of these zones and let people experience it themselves. Obviously, there are practical issues, but that's where creating something that's totally genuine, not doctored, and then socializing becomes a great way of stimulating conversations around the product. I'll skip the video of the third one, but another part of your product stimulation is where you build an evidence for performance. And again, you use somebody outside your brand. And in this case, what we did was we tied up with the overdrive and we created this little event where this young rider, he wrote what they call what in the biking world is called as a saddle sore challenge. Saddle sore is where you ride 1,600 kilometers in 24 hours. So that's 24 hours of nonstop. So this guy starts from Pune, went to Hyderabad, turned around, came back. And that's the kind of journey he achieved. And the film was all about capturing his experience and not every bike can hold up to such a long kind of a distance. So that's again creating this kind of stuff which would stimulate people around the product. Now, this is where I think many of you might be thinking that, how is it different from normal 360 marketing that we might be doing, or the holistic marketing we're going to be doing? Maybe not very much, but there's one thin line of, one thin dividing line. I think if there is a purpose, and if you are mounting a different experience which would stimulate something, then yes, I think it's stimulating brand experience as well. Otherwise, likely it just might be getting into a lot of activism, or it just might be getting into multiple touch points, same message. So a little thin dividing line over here. The third part is, I mean, today we are living in an era where communities are being formed around brands. In some categories, they could be very visible. In some categories, they might not be very visible and identified. But there's a lot of task required in identifying your communities. So when we moved out, we realized that over the last two, three years, riding groups have been coming up across the country. Biking as a weekend passion activity is growing not only in the large cities, but even going down to smaller towns. So it's a question of identifying those groups, forming some kind of an equation with them, so that now you at least have visibility to their chatter, or at least in a better scenario, you can influence it. Now many of these people who are part of these so-called brand fans, brand passionates, riding groups, et cetera, these are like the local experts. The last time you thought of buying a car, chances are you might have spoken with somebody in your friend's circle who you know is knowledgeable about cars. And somehow what he would have said, if he said something about the ground clearance of that car, I mean, that was enough for you. You didn't want to even see what the data said. For you, that was all important. And that's the kind of influence some of these guys can play. So I believe these guys are great assistant brand managers. So you must delegate a whole lot of your marketing to your brand community if you can stimulate them. And that's what we've tried doing. So for example, you create experiences for them. So for example, with our brand, we started promoting a lot of breakfast rides, which they were anyways doing. And then we added some more glamour and some more services to that. So now they're going on an official Pulsar breakfast ride. So those are the kind of things that we could bring it to them. You provide them content that they could share and then forward it within their community. You treat them well. There is another brand we relaunched sometime back. We did a refresh sometime in November called Avenger. Avenger is a cruiser. It's, again, quite a cult brand. And we launched it in a very different way. We said, why should we launch it? It should be launched by the users of this brand. And we were launching a refresh. So we invited the riders, the passionate riders of Avenger to a place which was through about 100 kilometer rides. So people from Pune and Mumbai went to Lonavala. And we did kind of an event for them over there. And they unveiled the bike. And we did this across some 810 cities across the country. And suddenly what did you have? You had people who were actual users of this product for the last few years suddenly give you a thumbs up on the refresh. Otherwise, sometimes current users might be the ones who are most cynical about a refresh, saying that I think my version was much better. And what that helped create was fantastic experience for a lot of people. I think what you need to also create is if you have a community, you got to create content that they would not only like to consume, but even like to share. So we said, what can we create for people who are into riding? One thing what we often keep creating are little posts, little videos, which is all around the biking thing. And they would very happily share with each other. But we said, if you want to make something more meaningful, and if you believe that riding is growing as an activity, not everybody is an expert rider, and not everybody understands the rules of riding in a group. But they might be aspiring to do that. So we created a little content video which was about the riding language. So when you ride in a group, obviously it's about 30 riders going. And if some of you who are into riding, there's riding language of how there's a signal on how do you speed up, how do you stop, go on to a single lane, make a two lane. So accordingly, there's a language with riders follow. And we said, people would love to have this kind of language democratized, brought to everybody through Pulsar. So let's take a look at this video, which is all about content for the community, but in the form of creating a language for them. Let's see this video, please. Cut through all pieces of content, experiences, et cetera, is that badass attitude of the brand. So even if you are talking over here a language of discipline, which is what riding language is all about, and it kind of contradicts what the brand is all about, somewhere it's like discipline the way a badass would teach his friends. So obviously, the brand essence pretty much has to see its way through all touch points. Finally, I come to the fourth one, which is stimulative experiences. And that's what we often call as the activations around the brand. And I think if you can find some ways of entertaining your customers, there's nothing like it, because nobody wants to ever come and attend an activation, which is all about giving you a lecture on that brand or creating some kind of an educative environment when he's out. Nobody really wants to do that. But I think if you can entertain the guys, and while entertaining them show performance and attributes of your product, I think it's a great win-win. So something over here what you see is what we've been doing a bit is what we call as a pulsarmenia. It's a module which has got biking performance, stunt shows, et cetera. And we take it from town to town. What we figured out after doing the first round was that it was received well in the cities, but in the smaller towns, and I'm talking about towns of population about 3 to 5 lakhs, and even smaller, it was a huge hit, because that was probably one of the biggest entertainment event which happened there in the last several months. So that is another big opportunity. I'll just show you a little video, which just shows you over here again on how maybe I'll just skip it in the interest of time. But it's a traveling stunt show because the brand has taken stunts as a measure of demonstrating performance. And therefore, if this is what you're talking about in your advertising, there's no reason why that should also not be the format which you would want to demonstrate to people live. And if it's entertaining on the screen, it's equally entertaining on the ground. So let's skip it in the interest of time right now. Another example I picked up could again be another way in which you can experience brand in everyday life is if you can somehow become, I would just call it become the daily lingo. Somewhere enter the mainstream conversations, even if they're not talking about your product. So what we created, for example, was a little app through which people could send messages to each other. And those messages would be in the form of a burnout. Burnout is when you see the rear wheel spinning and it kind of creates lines and all. That's what we call as a burnout. So let's just see this video. It's a short one. And then I'll just talk for about 30 seconds after this. So can we have this video, please? This is a message that you want to be converted into a burnout message. So this is a message that a customer types in. So every alphabet was kind of created. And now imagine if you want to wish your biker friend a happy birthday. And let's say with his name, let's say Anand. And you say happy birthday, Anand. And he gets a message like this, which is a burnout message saying happy birthday, Anand. I mean, if that's not a brand experience, then I wonder what it would be. So that's another way of creating a stimulative experience for which the customer need not necessarily have to go out somewhere, but he can pretty much feel every aspect of the brand. So that's where I think we've got to look at avenues where you can become a part of their lingo. So that's pretty much from my side. So if I just sum up, I think some of the key messages I have over here on this subject is, I believe very simplistically, brand experience is how you feel about a brand. And you can't really achieve it through a one-way conversation. You can't really doctor it completely. There is a whole lot of uncontrolled, unordited conversations happening around. And you have to therefore take brand experience beyond the point of sale or the point of consumption. It might be too late for certain categories to have a great brand experience at the point of sale, because the guy's already formed a view even before he's reached over there. And forming that view before he reaches that point of sale is where I believe stimulating customer conversations is perhaps one of the more fertile routes, which at least I have come across in recent times. We stimulate customer conversations is one way in which we also impact brand perception, and therefore business, sales, and equity. So that's it from my side, guys. Thank you very much. You've been a great patient audience. Thanks a lot. Yes, sure. Thank you so much, Mr. Narang. That was truly an interesting session. And to give away the momentum to you, I'd like to invite on stage Mr. Suresh Badakrishna, CEO of South Asia and Middle East Kinetic. There you are. All right, ladies and gentlemen, time to put your hands together for Mr. Narang. Thank you so much, sir, for being here and for sharing those amazing. Well, Suresh has been one of the key partners on this journey. So it's actually unfair taking a momento from him. Really speaking, you should be taking it as much as I am. Thank you so much, sirs, for joining us. Thank you.