 Now I would like to invite Mr. Ashok Bhasin, head digitization hero motor corp to join us on stage and share his insights on driving business growth through marketing effectiveness. I request you sir to please join us on stage. The evening has just begun ladies and gentlemen you can do a better round of applause. Thank you, a very warm welcome to you. I don't know what you did to enjoy yourself. Good evening everybody. Thank you, Anurag, for the very warm introduction to the evening and I see lovely friends and fellow colleagues from the jury as well and I can absolutely vouch for it Anurag that we didn't try to be honest I think we were just being ourselves and I saw somewhere that this is the toughest jury. I don't know how what the benchmark is but yes the intention was to be real because this is about real people, real marketing, real advertising, real business and it is about real awards. That morning when Anurag sort of kicked off the morning he spoke very briefly like he did today so man of few words but a lot of achievements and he said look this is about the awards and this is the jury and it's for all you people and we will now be out of the room and absolutely apart from the lunch break where also he kept a very brief interaction with us sort of how you what time is your flight and where are you going. They absolutely stayed clear of it I think that's wonderful Anurag, Naval and the entire team to keep it that way not that if you tried we would have got influence but I think it speaks volumes of what you are trying to achieve as a mission and the fact that several of us from reasonably preoccupied jobs were here that day and including today it is because we see an honesty of purpose here so thank you very much for that and ladies and gentlemen welcome I'll keep it brief so the mission was delivering business growth through marketing effectiveness there is so much that can be said about it but I will keep it brief to a few points that I want to underline nothing that I'm going to say is going to be new and nothing that I'm going to say is going to be radical some of it would be known to you and you say why did he have to repeat it but it would be repeated because in my judgment and experience it is worth the re-iteration second it would be because we may think it is true but this ain't affecting yeah my industry many other yeah this is good this is for those FMCG guys or this is for those durable guys this is happening in telecom and this is happening in auto wheels and this is happening in two wheelers the most important thing is I would just like to edit on the title and I know that must be the intention I think the first thing is it is not about driving business growth and I see senior investors and stakeholders like Mr. Rai who build companies and businesses across sectors and several of you it is about driving profitable business growth business growth can be accomplished and we can see several examples of that so the first thing please read the word profitable before you think business growth is the end goal it is about profitable business growth of course sometimes the profits don't come in year one sometimes they don't come in year three but they have to come they have to come soon enough to pay for everybody including all of you in marketing the second is very important and we went through this when we went through the jury this is about marketing effectiveness and this is much beyond advertising and media advertising and media plays an important role but as all of us know marketing is a lot more it is about the product the price the distribution and all of those things and the most important thing eventually is about effectiveness I was born in the age when televisions were moving from black and white to color and it was about broadcasting the word that I learned was broadcasting I think from that we have reached a stage today the more you can narrowcast the more you can narrowcast the more likely you are to be talking to the right consumer at the right time with the right message and almost certainly hopefully with the right cost unless you're getting swung by this very sexy media property of the New Age called the YouTube Masterhead I have certainly signed on YouTube Masterheads at a certain cost at a certain stage a few years ago today I see a huge amount of sorry for my words but an advertising marketing person's greed our campaign had a YouTube Masterhead guys if it doesn't make sense please don't do it it's costing a few million rupees now think about whom you want to talk to and how you want to talk to so I think we have to get into narrowcasting the third thing is if profitable business growth has to be driven it is not about consumers and categories and I go back to the first point that I said that we say let me give you an example live from the industry that I'm currently a part of and I would say two things here first is about our industry and the second is about is it about product or something else so you know the automobile industry the worldwide some by confession some by necessity and some by at least cocktail circuit conversation do recognize that the three largest disruptors of automobile business in one form or the other is not General Motors it's not Ford it's not Volkswagen in some form or shape it is Tesla in some form or shape it is Apple in some form or shape it is Google who would have thought that when it happened to cameras from codec to digital we thought that was the end of it and then something came like a camera on the phone the whole category wiped out then it happened to music on the phone category gone it's happening to automobiles the other related point is distinguish between product service and solution if you stay very focused on your product all the time there is a high risk it's not a guarantee but there is a high risk that in today's world you will make a mistake of either missing the bus or boarding the bus at a high cost or boarding the bus and the bus doesn't go too far and you reached hundred meters and the world moved on it's about solutions I know it's not yet happening to Hershey's chocolates but in a lot of product categories it's about the consumption of the service there is a huge wave huge wave of moving from ownership to consumption in a large room of this nature a few months ago of extremely talented young people I asked and they're 20 plus something so most of them are probably on a rag and you know mr. Bella's age but not mine and the question I asked is how many of you own a two-wheeler hardly any hands went up so it prevented me from the next question how many of you own a hero because I want to get my market share but coming back to the point how many of you have a driving license let me assure you when I crossed the age of 18 the first thing I was trying to run for was somehow to get a driving license several of the youngsters are not even looking for that license they would they would look for mobility solutions which would come without owning an asset which would come without owning a driving license which would be without owning a two wheeler which would be without owning a car so what does it mean for the market here there is this huge example going on of you know cross category competition etc which is about shared services but let me talk of another aspect which in marketing I think is more important today than ever before and I know our Volkswagen colleague from the industry here and that is about the sea not of the consumer not of us it's about collaboration the future money spinning is not going to come out of products automobile industry is already talking about money from services not the repair workshop because as the electric vehicles come the repair instance is going to come up number of moving parts will be few dealers are already thinking what will happen to the workshop it's about services the critical thing is how are you going to collaborate I don't know if several of you have heard the Volvo the Swedish brand one of their most important collaborations most recently is Volvo with Amazon and this is about the in car delivery you hit the app you order your groceries which in any case the app knows from artificial intelligence and machine learning and all that and it knows your car it has the code you're working the delivery boy from Amazon comes delivers your two cans of milk six eggs Hershey's ketchup couple of other products thrown in locks you get the delivery notice they're done it's in car delivery this is about Amazon and Volvo would we have thought Panasonic a digital mobility company is today doing a business of about seven to ten billion dollars just with automobile company Panasonic when I started my career it was about televisions it was about Panasonic those rice cookers and today they are in the car so I think profitable growth narrow casting solutions not products think of money beyond the product to be made services not by milking the consumer but by addressing needs and then think about the ROI of all of that and lastly do remember and this will come out of not because anything in this world has become easier but it has become significantly easier to experiment we all know the compute power right the compute power on my whatever iPhone 7 not even 810 is probably more than the first computer that we ever worked on right it is compute power is high data storage is like virtually free Abdul virtually free what's happening with that the computer is coming right where you are I haven't had the courage to get a Google home or an Alexa or something in my home because I'm dreading if it comes there is a likelihood that the level of conversation that me and other members of my family will individually and collectively have with Alexa will certainly be more than the conversation that my child has with me or my wife probably will have with me but imagine the amount of mining that Alexa is able to do the kind of movie you asked for the kind of show that you asked for that your wife actually wants to go for the afternoon that the child actually is looking for which bar it has all of that it is all of that so marketing is about leveraging all of these things it has become easier to experiment and therefore please raise the level of experimentation and guys I'm talking very little about advertising because it is normally the I would say over positioned element in the marketing mix and I know you're all advertising cats so less I try to say anything about it better because I'll learn from you as we learnt at the jury looking at some very fine work please experiment but as they say please try try more fail fast but please try to fail cheap something and working out stunk works and clear modeling is the in thing you can't get it perfect you try to make it perfect the ROI will not work on it in three years you got 80 90% right go to the market model it try it experiment it and see what happens and then from there if you can fail forward which is really learning from whatever didn't work that would be brilliant a classic case of what I call and I'm making very bold statement here because I want to be provocative to myself and to all of you let me give you the example of the automobile industry to towards the closing so every month in this country which has only 35 40% penetration of two-wheelers almost 2 million two-wheelers get sold there is enough data to say that the average conversion rate in two-wheelers and I know the cars number are slightly different I'm just saying the example of two-wheelers because it sounds bigger and sexier average conversion rate is 25 to 30% which means for every two million consumers who bought in the most liberal definition there were only six million who are even seriously considering evaluating assessing moving on the predisposition curve to perhaps eventually consuming 6 million there is research clear research that most people at least in two-wheelers entered the category active search phase only about three months before actual buying most people now visit a store only one point two times this used to be five times so one store visit that's your opportunity to convert they probably make one or two calls to your call center on which all companies say we are raising our spend on digital on true caller on cloud telephony and I can bet pick up 10 websites pick up that dial number and you'll say your call is important to us and then it'll go back to some kind of English your call is important to us your call is important to us and you don't hear a human voice you don't hear a chat bot you don't hear nobody call ends 55% is the drop rate of average calls call centers of top hundred companies in most cases if six million were in the search phase and average three months at most the entire two-wheeler industry should be trying to talk to at any point in time no more than six into two equal to 12 that's the only people you need to talk to when the rest of the people need some kind of air cover of reinforcement etc but what's happening we're talking to billions of people so it is about narrowcasting it is about profitable it is about experimenting and please reinvent the business model the business solutions how you will make money how you will get your customer engaged otherwise the customer that you are acquiring is actually not going to spend a lot of their wallet whereas actually if you work on that consumer there is a lot of stuff that can be done in all product categories in cross sell up sell depth of consumption more chocolates more drops per glass of milk etc etc so those are my few key thoughts the jury was extremely interesting I won't say more to it and I can tell you that some of the awards were consciously discussed and debated and not given because in many cases the issue identification was right strategy in most cases was not too off but the connection between what good great work we saw of advertising with the brand Harjeet was missing so what's the brand connect what's the how's it working for your business what's the business outcome so ladies gentlemen thank you for listening fail fast fail cheap fail forward and eventually succeed and make money for whoever your stakeholder is good luck and thank you very much have a nice evening