 Hello everyone. Good afternoon. How are you guys doing? I hope you are not the session just before lunch. But I'll get started because I've been given a heads up to get started immediately. Interesting topic. I was once told that it's easier to love a brand when the brand loves you back. But how tough it is to love back. Especially in a world that's so connected, we all have a box in our pockets right now. That connects us to the world. There's a problem of plenty. There is a problem of, I wouldn't say problem but multiple challenges. Demographics is different. So I'll just open the session with this one question. How tough it is for the brand to love back to anyone? Actually, it depends on, it might not be easy. It might not be easy because consumers are spoiled for the choice in every category, there are hundreds and hundreds of brands which are buying for your attention. But like some of the panelists earlier said, if you focus on the consumers, consumers will love you back. And as simple as that, I can give you start with a very simple example. Because Thomas has been in the business for such a long time, we've been around for about 140 years. Traditionally and culturally, especially after we got listed, we've always been very performance focused. So most of our spends, largely whether a digital or even to a certain extent print advertising went into performance. So most of the time, the language was, for example, if I'm selling Singapore, so Singapore eight days would cost you say, 80,000 rupees, this is what you get. So it was always largely concentrated around the what of it. But I think what pandemic changed because consumers got wiser, people were actually now looking for better choices. And the category itself de-grew. So in the first year, immediately after the pandemic itself, it was the idea was to get people to go out and start holidaying on even think of holiday as a category, because they were actually struggling for basic choices of life. And that was one of the most difficult years. That's where we completely changed our approach. Instead of having a transactional conversation about X destination, you get XYZ as part of that at this price. And we actually drove most of it via social because obviously we were budgets or an issue. So a lot of it was the idea was to drive organically. From the conversation of, or transaction conversation, move the conversation for giving the same example of say Singapore. Now instead of saying that you get this as part of your Singapore holiday, we over the years we had created, curated a battery of lot of consumer images, videos, pictures of them holidaying in Singapore. So instead of saying you get this for Singapore, and say you buy Singapore at this and have fun in Singapore, we started showcasing consumer stories about what they can do in Singapore. So instead of showing what you get, we actually showed how you can have fun. These are the examples of how people are showing So if you go and check most of our timeline from trying to actively sell, we are now trying to actually say how people are actually having fun in those days. So most of the conversation, and we spend a lot of time, effort, and money to acquire this, whether we generate it via consumers, which is largely user generated content, or also when we use our own people on ground to create this for us. So I think that has made a big change in terms of how our engagement levels in social have gone up, our consumer ratings, our CXI ratings, all the scores have gone up significantly as compared to what happened with us. If you have time, I can give another example, very quickly, completely tangential category because we also have a very large here, India's largest forex brand as well. So and student is a very large community for us. So people who are going to study abroad, students who go to study abroad is a very large burgeoning segment and very high ticket value. They pay their university fees and you can imagine it can be anywhere between eight to 10 lakhs at the base minimum. And plus they carry our forex card and they, for their entire tenure of one or two years. So it's a very highly engaged audience with one, but the category if you see as forex is very transactional. Paisa lo paesa do. Aap indian currency do uske saathme main dollar, whatever your whichever country it is. So it is very transactional. What we did again this happened after post pandemic was looked at the entire life cycle of students right from the time they started researching. For example, if I'm going to Australia, I picked up that destination and looked at everything right from the entire time of they started researching which are the top universities in Australia, which are the best courses to go for. Then it would come to how to send your application. How are the best ways to write your essays or send an application? What is the visa application process, whatever. So you look at what you do when you land, how to get a job there, a part time job so that you can actually pay for your own education or daily expenses. So we looked at this entire thing, hired experts in the education consultants and built about hundreds of videos, explainer videos, how to videos on YouTube. And on a channel which was called a study buddy. Instead of saying that I want to sell to you, we said I want to become a buddy of yours in this process and this product or the channel itself was called study buddy which then eventually also now has been launched as a Forex card itself. So that actually changed the entire game for us. So now instead of trying for us to go and reach out to students for and advertising them to acquire, we started featuring when they started researching for their education itself. And that really changed the game. In fact, in the last one and a half, two years with the categories for us itself has grown by 100 and 150%. So essentially if you look at it from a consumer's point of view and not try to actively sell but try to add meaningful difference in their lives, I think it is relatively easier. But it's easy to say, it is easier said than done. It took us a pandemic for us also to figure it out because it's almost, well, it was like a struggle for survival itself. For anyone else? So I completely agree with what Avinash said. I would like to just add the life insurance perspective to this. So it's not the era where we can just talk about our product, what our product offers you. It's the era where you need to understand them, provide them knowledge, add the value, talk to their needs and at the end of the funnel or the stage comes where you put your product in front of them. So for example, buying a life insurance policy, the communication will not be this is my product, this offers you this, this is the premium you pay. It has to start from what life stays the customer is. How much will you need 10 years with growing inflation? How much will your family require in case something unfortunate happens? So it's also about educating them, knowing their pain points, what are their triggers, what are the barriers, what are their lifestyle like, talk to them, educate them, add value, what is life insurance, how much do you need, how much cover according to your life state, lifestyle, annual income. So that education, that value add is the complete process and that is at the end of the funnel, we talk about our product, that is when the brand love is built. If the brand is coming to me and just talking about selling the product, I'll not love that brand. But if the brand understands me, understands my pain points, talks to me, I am like, oh, I can resonate with this brand. They know what I need. So that is when how you build the brand love. Yeah, I think I absolutely agree with Harshita. We also come from like life insurance, we are a life insurance brand. And what we have realized is, you know, a lot of new audiences find this category very complicated. And today is the time we have been talking about, you know, creating thumb shopping content and the speed of that thumb swiping and sliding, the content is increasing year on year. So what's working really for us is, as Harshita mentioned, it's, you know, creating relatable and snackable content. But we have realized this short vertical videos are giving us a good result when those are shot on mobile phone in the real setting. And then you are communicating with your audience. Is more authentic is actually giving us seven times more completion rates than our other video campaigns. And we are segmenting it very nicely between, you know, Gen Z's and millennials. So for Gen Z's, we try to keep very lighthearted, entertaining or educational as she mentioned. And for millennials our entire goal, like we did a longevity campaign recently, we try to add value in either informational or a motivational way. And the campaign revolved basically for millennials around, you know, some real life, life changing stories of personalities like Dinesh Mohan who dealt with depression and then became a model. So we are trying to tell, you know, connect with the audience through emotions when it comes to a more evolved audience. And for I think Gen Z, it's always entertainment and, you know, like a snackable, relatable stuff that's working for us. So if I understand you're saying that you're speaking to the consumers as the consumers, where the consumers are. But Devika, this is a question for you. I mean, brand love is very qualitative, right? And we all say that we are not here to sell. We want to build the brand, you know. But what is the key metric then to gauge its impact? How do you gauge the impact of brand love? I think that metric will vary for each business. But I do agree with the fact that it's very important for any business platform service to be able to identify their value proposition for a user, right? And that cannot simply be functional. So I'll respond to your question from our lens, which is glance as a platform when we see user love on a daily basis, right? Because depending on how much love we get, they spend time on the platform, right? So for glance as a platform, I think it's incredibly important to drive content discovery, which is what we stand for as a platform for our users. So enabling discovery of content in a construct that is seamless that allows for serendipitous discovery of content, right? Because there are set sort of content patterns that each user has, right? And you would like gaming content or shopping content or lifestyle, travel, so on, so forth. But how is it that you are able to understand your user better and actually surface content that they may not be actively looking for? And I think developing that understanding of a user will automatically reflect in brand love, right? Because if you are able to add value to their life, create relevance, then that is where you see love. And for us as a platform that directly translates in very key metrics like time spent, session time, engagement rates that we see, and that is what we aim to sort of keep strengthening and deepening. So if I take that ahead, Sarvesh, what would you say? How do I reconcile between having quick results? Because clearly we have to kind of keep the business going. So there are quick results that are needed. But at the same time builds the brand love, which is a long-term strategy. I don't think I can love a brand or love even a person overnight. That's very rare and doesn't last either. So keeping that in mind, how do you kind of reconcile and keep a balance between the two? So for us, we entered the digital space quite later than some of the industry peers. And we had some learnings when we were getting started. So we developed an internal model called AAA Plus, which is purely focusing on awareness, accessibility for the customers, consumers, and then driving the acquisitions through it, adding value to all these three areas simultaneously. For some quick results, after doing some initial performance marketing campaigns for driving business goals or brand goals, what we realized was like, being omnichannel was not working out for us as a brand. And that's where we created platform-based strategies. And one of our approach was we backed by two of the largest PSU banks. So we had our core customer database is very strong. So we curated personalized WhatsApp campaigns for our quick business goals. And that really showed some good results while our performance campaigns or Google performance max or affiliates was building the lead pool. The early acquisitions and conversions came from that personalized WhatsApp campaigns which we were doing. And then in terms of long-term brand loyalty, you could say, or keeping your brand connected to the audience, we realized very early that data and analytics is going to be very important to understand your consumer, to have meaningful conversations. And that's when we started developing our intellectual property, which is the UMatter app. It's a overall wellness app which revolves around your physical wellness, your financial wellness, and your mental wellness. And it could be an everyday app for people. It has interesting things in the app right from, having your health vitals. You can have your smartwatches connected to the app. You have curated yoga. You have live wellness sessions. Similarly, then there are many resourceful blogs, article, meditation audios, free mental health assessment. Then further going into having financial literacy modules, because for the end user financial as a subject gets slightly complicated. So when you're selling life insurance or any financial products, there's only so much you can speak with your consumer. But we are trying to add value by creating this property. In fact, we did a soft launch which went successful internally for our customers and our partners and employees. Two months back, we were launching the app this month. So we are aiming that this app is going to be our way to connect with the audience in the long run. I mean, Ash, would you want to add to that? How do you keep a balance between getting quick results, which is relevant and important for business, but at the same time, go forward with the long-term strategy of brand building? See, I think with the proliferation of media, there is so much of choice available. Every market year is spoiled for choice. And this is across both traditional media as well as digital media. To my mind, I think both these can run parallel. It need not be either or. At any given point of time, for example, for us also, there might be at least 30, 40 different kinds of tactical campaigns where you are constantly focusing on trying to acquire customers and feed into your e-commerce channel or feed our retail stores from a query point of view. So that we qualify as performance. But at any given point of time, there are also campaigns where we run for existing campaigns. Or like I said, the curation of content which is not necessarily trying to sell, but trying to engage in. And for us, we want to stand or intend to stand for building memories, lifetime memories for brands. And can I, via all our messaging on a one-on-one, large format campaigns, or we use a lot of connected TV also these days, can we continue to pass on that message? And these can actually happen simultaneously. It need not be one over the other is what I think my personal. Has one overpowered the other ever? Not necessarily. I think increasingly. It would have been maybe five or 10 years ago. But today, you can actually run all these campaigns, parallely micro campaigns. It's not never, earlier it was like you do two or three campaigns a year. Right now you can actually have, every month you can have a large high impact campaign, run it on digital or connected TV. At the same time, through large programmatic advertising, search advertising, you can even have hundreds of other smaller tactical campaigns running at the same time. So to our mind, I think this is the best time to do that, where you can actually run purpose-driven campaigns at the same time, at not very high scale, at within maybe medium budgets, unlike the past, but at the same time also run tactical campaigns on an ongoing basis. Fair. Devika, you spoke about engagement and experiences that are important for brand love. One of my favorite recent examples is Barbie, which was launched like in 1959. It's still relevant because it's not only evolved, but it has used the emerging technologies, perhaps in the best way possible, to engage with the consumers and the audience. How do you think we, or as brands, one should use these emerging technologies, one to stay relevant, second to engage, and create experience that's worthwhile? Sure. I think the first thing is to understand what is the user's engagement with a particular technology, platform, or app, as the case may be, right? And if for any brand to be successful, it's important to understand that value equation and leverage communication and experiences that are built on that organic equation, right? So again, for instance, so on Glance, there are, you know, given that, sorry, this is a bit of a segue, but Glance is not an app, right? Glance is a platform that is published in conjunction with OEM partners. And so therefore, simple things like user flows or user actions to read an article or to, I don't know, download an app, play a game, et cetera, are uniquely constructed keeping the platform in mind, right? So, one, it's important to sort of leverage that organic user behavior to see how best, you know, you can plug into the user's existing behavior and thereby establish your value as a brand in that construct. The second thing, of course, is what is the relevance of your communication to that particular user, right? So it is, so if you are theoretically looking at gamers at a younger audience at Gen Z, and if gaming is a key sort of interest area for them, then how is it that you are able to fit into that space organically and create messaging and content that would, you know, establish your value proposition without saying, hey, I like gaming too, you know? Which is very in your face. So I think leveraging that organic behavior, ensuring that there is relevance of messaging to the user and then trying to see how you can go over and above your performance-led advertising or, you know, ad-led behavior and see how you can leverage content to create that bond with consumers. I think that's really, really important. And I think that's what Barbie did beautifully, right? Oh, it did amazingly well. Contextual. It's amazing that how all age groups love Barbie even now. I mean, that's brand love in true sense. Harshad, do you want to add something? So regarding the emerging channels, it's all about to start with, say, the user journey mapping. Might be some business, the turnaround time is shorter versus some financial product where the turnaround time for the, is for few months. So starting from how will the user interact with that channel, at what stage will he or she come to that channel? Like for example, someone coming to my website surely has a higher intent than someone scrolling through my social media. So we need to understand at what stage which channel is user interacting with. And accordingly, the message, the communication, everything. For there are many emerging channels, but is that utilized just for information or that is to deep drive what are the pros and cons of this product, for example? Whether the audience is in market and thoroughly into researching about my product or is it just, I'll say, Zensi who after, say, three to four years will look for an insurance. So it completely depends and needs to be mapped thoroughly so that we are very relevant with our communication to the audience. Let me ask you a radical question. Leaving the brand that you own currently, tell me a particular brand that you love the most and that has evolved or changed over time and any particular reason why you love it? Pick any brand that comes to your mind, which is that one brand that you really think has built the brand, is loved by the consumers and thus loved by you and why? Coca-Cola. Sorry, I don't think- Coca-Cola. I think they've done a brilliant job. They've taken their core proposition of happiness and they've been able to build on that for decades. And I think that is truly commendable and take the core construct of happiness and build such relevant stories globally for consumers that I feel I find very, very powerful as an advertiser and as a human being. Nice. Yeah, I think there are two brands which I keep closely following. One is Zomato and another is Suggy. And these both brands keep, while that was a good point on, having a long-lasting brand positioning, these brands I'm seeing that they're creating relatable content and they're like these small snippets which are like quickly engaging and it's not just out there on their social media platforms but you have the app, you get these notifications. Those are also equally engaging and I feel they are doing a pretty decent job. Yeah, I actually agree. I would have said Zomato as well because I think they do some amazing job in terms of content creation and not trying to actively sell and just engaging users with topical content. But maybe apart from that, what I would also add may be relatively boring, slightly un-traditional brand but Amul I think has done a great job over the years how they've tried to stay relevant in spite of such a huge pedigree and creating the topical content. I mean, I know we've all looked for those Amul hoardings everywhere, small little ad in newspapers they're not trying to sell, they're just looking at topical content and creating and giving it a little bit of twist. So I think Amul has also done a fabulous job in terms of how they are engaging user and creating topical content. To my mind, I think that's also relevant. Harshata? So I'll just like to quote an example. So that's again Zomato, we get a better context. So like for example, there was a discount offered by Zomato and Swiggy and the communications said, leverage before our CFO finds out. So that is the sort of content that really uses engagement. When it says sort of match or something, the push-up notifications, like you want to watch match and not cook, order now sort of. So the way they have leveraged the micro moments and also the contextual and it's not the same notification or same communication across India. If it's raining in Mumbai, their communication is for that Mumbai rains. So I mean, they have done a fab job and they are till date relevant at every point of communication and touch point. My last question, I can time's up. I can see that. But one last, what is that one learning you want to give to the audience out here when they're looking to build brand love for their consumers? Just one. I think everyone spoke about the fact that identifying your value to the user is really important. But I think it's very, very important for brands to think about how are they driving discovery for their respective brands? So there was Rohit Shankar on stage earlier from Bain and he raised a very interesting point where mind space is equal to, well, that's what drives. So I think that's a very important consideration. While it's very, it's critical to identify who you are as a brand and what your value proposition is, but it's also equally important to be, to stay relevant and contextual and drive discovery of that value for your consumers. Anyone? I think, yeah, good, good. Yeah, so I think accessibility for the consumer or customer is one of the important thing with the emerging platforms coming up. So I feel it's not just about communication, but when the customer comes on your ecosystem, you need to have shorter journeys, shorter timeframes and very easily understandable products out there so that the entire accessibility part of it is convenient for the end user. I think for me, and this is more of our own learning than this and I know there is no right or wrong answer for this, I mean, there can be 100 ways of actually building up for your brand. One big revelation for us at the risk of maybe repeating is we don't try to actively sell anymore. The idea is I don't, because there is so much of choice for consumers, people will see through it when you, it's more of an active sales message versus what you're trying to do and trying to be relevant or more adding value to their life. So instead of trying to actively sell, is there something that you can, the message can enhance the value of consumers? Like can I add value to that? That's our biggest learning in the last at least post pandemic. I think one thing will be focus on the research, your existing audience. I mean, a thorough research is very, very important, crucial to building a brand, who your audience are, how are they interacting? How are they seeing your brand? It might be you were targeting an affluent customer, but then you discover that your data tells you that a non-affluent is equal market, equal customer base of your customers. So that is really important. I mean that research part, the homework, the background on fields not, I mean, there's a saying that brands are not built in the office, they are on the fields. Well, how you, people perceive your brand. So I think that research and homework, that groundwork is very, very important before you go and map out a strategy to build a brand. Thank you. With that, I think the panel comes to an end. I would end by saying what I said at the start. It's easier to love a brand when the brand loves you back. And as I understand, there are multiple ways where a brand can love back its consumers. To that note, thank you very much for the conversation. Thank you very much for listening.