 All right. We're moving on to our second panel. Talking about everybody becoming a publisher. Everybody is an activist as well. And we have another robust panel who's going to be Discussing this particular person an issue. And we have an interesting moderator for this panel because She's neither from the comms team nor from the brand, so to Speak, but she's representing you and i. And i specifically wanted her because while there are a Lot of fires to be fought considering everybody is a publisher. At the same time, i am somebody who's a very strong activist, So to speak. And i love the fact that i have so Many platforms to voice my opinion. So how do you handle people like me? Yeah. All right. Shabnam Siddiqui, director, center of excellence for Governance, ethics and transparency, united nations, global Compact network. India is going to be moderating this panel. Shabnam, please take your seat on the panel. I'll be calling out your names. Request you all to please join Shabnam. Sudeep Bhalla, senior vice president Corporate communication and sustainability, voted for India Limited. He was also a part of the Jury for IPRCCA. Manansha was also part of the jury. Director, marketing India, true caller India. Nikhil Day. Thank you so much. This is the coms couple of India. Nikhil. All right. President jenesis. Mr. Deepak Jolly, founder and director. How do you say this? All right. Deepak, of course, everybody's aware has had a very long and successful stint with Coca-Cola prior to him founding this. And before I forget, please use the hashtag IPRCCA. Talk about what you like, what you don't like. Talk about what you would like to see using the hashtag effectively. And there are some goody bags to be won. Over to you, Shabnam. Good evening, everyone. And welcome to this middle panel. As I was standing by the door, I realized that quite a few of the recent cases were already being discussed in the first panel. So when we met on the side, we were trying to see what new could we bring to the evening. It's a real privilege to be part of this panel because we have on the panel people across different experience and sectors. So it's good to see the kind of viewpoint that we come to it. And literally and otherwise in the middle of it all, myself, I'm an activist at heart. Wherever I go, whatever I do before the advent of this huge social media, I was an activist and I will continue to be wherever I go in future also. The essential thing that this particular panel is wanting to look at is like social media activism and crisis management. We just heard that the indigo case was discussed in detail already. So such examples we might not be taking up again in this particular panel. But what we have been talking about e-mail and otherwise also has been eight or nine particular aspects of the paradigm shift that has happened in PR activism. Essentially like what constitutes a crisis now, the kind of crisis that existed before in companies around public relations, how have they changed over the years, how people express dissatisfaction, the speed at which they express the dissatisfaction, the forums which are being utilized to voice these things, how information is obtained and distributed in real time, the speed, who can be trusted, what is the response mechanism like the human aspect, the authenticity, what are people actually looking at going beyond the words, also looking at the meaning behind the words. How are social media and traditional media becoming more and more enmeshed? Because we see that the 24-hour media that is taken over our lives is quite interlinked to the social media, so that kind of activism, what kind of impact it has. It's not only about what responses and what strategy has gone into responses that businesses come up with, but also what is the response expectation from the people and how in tune you are as to what people are expecting, how you will respond to a particular scenario. And I think businesses in this particular factor have to learn a lot from the political constituencies of how they have inroads into the mindsets and they can respond effectively. And finally, the spotlight is on how you handle crisis, what are the current scenarios, how is crisis management changing, the understanding and the execution. So these are the few different aspects that our panel will be looking at. We don't necessarily have a very rigid structure, keeping in mind that all of us come to this particular elephant in the room from different sides. So we'll see based on our own experiences and our own backgrounds and our own understanding of how we can unravel the topic within our panel and what can be the takeaways from this. So just in order of the way we are sitting, may I just invite Manan to go first and share his view point on the topic. Thank you. Hi, good evening, everyone. So coming from a company that was that was purely built on public relations and word of mouth, what we've seen and we were discussing this earlier in the speakers lounge also is the fact that social media, while it can be an amazing tool for people to voice their opinions, but there are a few things that can really affect and sort of negatively affect brands when they are playing with social media, they're utilizing the power of social media. The fact that everyone with an internet connection can be an activist is good and it can be scary also at times because most of the times people they have a very, like they say there's this freedom of expression that social media really amplifies and gives you access to so much information and all of that stuff, but sometimes what happens is, and I like this particularly saying that a human being individually is a beautiful piece of creation, but when it becomes a mob, it's a different breed all together and that's what actually social media has the power of affecting negatively and positively and I think it's about, you know, making the job of people who are in communications and in public relations to, you know, look at things like these, but sometimes it's just and there are so many examples where brands have been caught completely off guard not realizing that this could really impact their standing, their reputation and I think that power rests with the human, with that internet connection, but how they use it is something that you can't control, but in this day and age it is really difficult to be present at social media, be present in all the different touch points that your consumers are, but at the same time, you know, still manage what you as a brand want to project to this mob as I would like to call it. So I think I'll probably ask Shabnam to take it off from here, but yeah, that was something I wanted to put on the table and I'm sure there will be a lot of different point of views on this. I think to begin with if you can just have our opening remarks and then come back to the questions. So Nikhil. So one of the roles that Reema has given me is to lead our crisis and issues team, so you can see why I have no hair left. But you know when I was thinking about this topic, I had never really read up on activism. I know nothing about activism. I'm always at the receiving end of how to deal with it. So when I was reading, I stumbled upon an article in India today which talked of, I written the guy's name down, Sundar Lal Bhaguna, the Chipko movement. Early 1970s, 1972, so I was born in 71, so 72, the Chipko movement happened. So I excused myself for not knowing too much about it, but as I read about it, I was fascinated because if you look at it in a pre-internet era, to be able to mobilize women, not just women, but largely women starting from Rajasthan and then moving all the way up to the Himalayas to save trees must have been an incredibly difficult thing to do. And how he did it from what my reading is was that he came up with a slogan. So it was the good old big business versus the trees argument. So business houses were trying to fill the trees for various commercial purposes and the local people's livelihood was being impacted, so they were trying to save the trees. So Chipko was about Chipko on to the tree, embrace the tree, save the tree. So women would gather around it and stop the contractors who were coming to sort of cut it down. But I think the key takeaway for me as I read about it was he came up with a slogan. And his slogan was ecology is permanent economy. So for all those detractors who were saying that the economic progress was being halted because the trees were being cut, he made the point that ecology is a permanent economy. And then he came up with a series of poems and these poems to my mind were the Facebook posts and the Twitter posts of that era. They did the rounds, they mobilized and galvanized people. So I leave the first point I made around activism started with its roots in doing something noble and good. So I think we must embrace as communication professionals who suffer it that essentially intrinsically something really powerful and good can come from activism. Moving on to activism in the internet age, I think example that played out in front of us very recently was the entire Save the Internet campaign that was spearheaded by Nikhil Babab, media Nama. And while most of you will know about it, I think what it did was put a spotlight to bring discussion and debate on a topic that needed to be discussed and debated. The problem is even today after studying it and reading it, I can talk maybe for 10 minutes and sound educated about it but I really know jack shit about it. And that is the problem of dealing with activism or spearheading activism in this day and age. Deepa mentioned the phrase slogan versus substance on the earlier panel and we discussed it a lot. I think it boils down to both right brain and left brain thinking. It's not slogan versus substance, it's both. You need to have a strong substantive point of view to be able to drive change but that's not going to work in 140 or now 280 characters. That's not going to get the emotional public who doesn't understand the matter to support you. So you need the slogan. The slogan which is yes, I must save the internet tweet, armchair, flick channel and move on because that critical mass is what gets policy makers worried. There's a huge mass of people out there who seems to support it. So let's now take a look at what's going on and that's where the substance comes in. So summarizing that my experience after going through it, reading about it is best summarized in a line. It's new rules, new tools but same old game. Thank you. That was quite insightful, Nikhil, takes me back to several years ago as well. But I think let me try and give a different take on this from the way I see activism. I think fundamentally all of us believe activism is good. We are all activists in our own rights because we want to stand for what is right. The challenge happens when what you think is right and what I think is right could be different and we are both trying to justify each other. What I say you may not wish to hear and vice versa. So I think the fundamental thing is what is at the common ground on which we are fighting about and how then comes into the emotion, the intellect, etc. which gets associated with it. The second point that I would like to lay on table is that very often, especially in this age of digital fast age communication, it's not what we think about it. It's question of what the others are thinking about it and do I want to be associated with that lot or mob or whatever terminology we want to use. And I think that is in some factor, some way, deciding our actions. The third part is, if it's from peers who I acknowledge, my friends whom I respect, seniors whose advice I value, if they are saying it must be right. I'm not spending time whether to associate with the cause or to give my support or not. I just blindly do it. I think the one more point which I would effectively like to make is you refer to the Chipko movement. These were movements which ran for years, years, years, years. How much of activism is actually running today in that true sense? It's the spur of the moment. It is a customer grievance. It takes forms and narrates. It comes on the Twitter top 10 trending for few minutes, maybe an hour or two, and then it just dissipates or disappears. It then comes back into the public domain when something else of a similar nature happens, maybe a day later, a month later, a year later or maybe five years later. I really don't know. But effectively that is what activism is coming down to, spur of the moment, what is hot and trending? Am I with it or am I against it? I think that's where most of the activism that we as organizations and brands are facing today is there. There is no core. There is absolutely no ethos behind that. There is no value behind it. It is just happening. So let's be either part of it or be against it. That's it. Thank you. I think it's always a disadvantage of being the last. But let me add a few things. One, we are all blessed to be in the world's largest democracy where we have the freedom of voice. And I think we should cherish this. Yeah. So I think that aspect said, I think the second point which is important is that what is activism? There have been many shades which have been discussed. And I would like to add two points to that. You know, one of India's tallest politicians went to Pakistan and almost dropped him off his chair here. Because in the end he realized, he said, emotional quotient is much more important than intelligence quotient. So remember as a part of communicators, I think what is important is that once you have the emotional quotient and you learn to deal with the emotional quotient, you will learn to deal with activism and respect activism. After all, why is that? So I would not go into the fact that activism is right or wrong. I would say activism could be qualified into logical and illogical. Now, I realize that when somebody called me and said, oh, Deepak, you know, you are now the head of one of the cola companies 20 years back for communication, why don't you go and learn from how it is to address a group of gnu people? Believe me, I was thrown into the five. 45 minutes, I was boiling, and it was like, you know, you were put in a lot of fire. And there I learned how to respect the messaging which comes from an activist. Now, we are today talking about social media. Now, here everybody is wanting to express his or her opinion which has never been heard of. So it's a beautiful platform. But because it is, you said it, it happened, it's fine. Now, there is a term called brand jacking which happened a few years back. And many of the cola, the two cola companies I worked for, both got brand jacked in one or the other way. Because the brand was so big that the activist said, okay, if you want to bring a social change, why not push this? And till the time you respected them, it was fine. But then if you said, no, I will sue you, things went in a very, very different way. So what I would say is, in today's context, activism and social media is something which we all need to learn. So I would just give you one example because I just found this six Months back, this advisory company, and I was advising one company, A rice company. And how many of you have seen the plastic Rice video? Yeah, quite a few, right? So the plastic rice video was something which went viral, Which went into millions and millions of views across. Till the time in Andhra Pradesh, 84% sales in one city got stopped, halted because people were believing that they are buying plastic rice. And then the companies came back and one of the companies asked me to, okay, Deepak, can you help us with this? So the idea would have been, okay, if there is a controversy which has erupted in social media, so it should be handled by Social media. No. I think the interesting aspect is that it has to be done through public advocacy. It has to be handled with social media and also print media. So it's not that, so all three are relevant. While I will come to that once I get more time, but I just wanted to make a point that today's discussion is very, very relevant and I think I respect activism, but at the same time, it's the question of logical versus illogical. Thank you. Thank you so much, especially for the fact that we have made these brief comments which gives you a taste from where we come along. Now I realize why Subhadna put me on the spot. Because I'm thinking now that more or less when we are talking about how we are handling stakeholders, what comes to my mind is that whether it is PR, communication, or activism, it's more or less about what kind of whose interests are we propagating, what are the avenues, channels that we have, and what are we up against. Because depending on, so, I do not believe in like, you know, same thing as there's three kinds of truth, yours, mine, and the truth. Keeping that in mind when a crisis emerges, whose interests, like how are we, how do we, in our own board rooms, in our own team meetings, in our own strategic meetings, what is the kind of discussion that we're having, how does the situation need to be handled, what is the understanding of situations, and what are the interests that we are safeguarding. Putting through JNU was a good example because I remember when I started my anti-crafting transparency work, I wanted to work with the police and the first thing that was a sign given to me was that I had to shadow, to be a silent observer, external observer to see what operates before I give any recommendations. So that comes from a completely different angle, but from the four panelists in any particular order, I would be really appreciative if you can give any kind of example or anecdote within your own company or outside, in which you have seen different kind of responses that might have emerged that would be similar or completely against the expectations that the other stakeholders, your own interest that you were safeguarding, and the interest of, that the activist was safeguarding, presuming that both the interests are different. So something towards that end, if we could put a light on anyone. So I'll take a cue from where I started about the plastic rice controversy. So the moment the sale dip happened and the bottom line and top line was being impacted, the rice company said, boy, this is, now, we really need to, is there something called plastic rice? We really need to now quickly educate or we're going to have trouble. Because what happened was, in India, once you start, an activity starts on social media, somewhere the regulator gets embroiled. And the moment the regulator gets into the picture, he starts putting together a thinking, oh, wait a minute, I have to go and test this. And some tests, because he doesn't know what he's going to test, may come not to the exactly what the truth is about. So what we realized was that we really needed to go to the grain scientists of India to actually go and tell what is the story about plastic rice. And the second part, so we had to go to the regulator first. Because all over India, the Hindi newspapers used to keep saying because of this plastic rice WhatsApp, the regulator, the food regulator in this state and that state has started picking up samples and told these shops not to sell this. Now, that was a very, very dangerous situation. So the first and foremost was at the regulator level, you needed to, so it was more of advocacy. Then we picked up India's best known consumer reporter or consumer correspondent of India, which is Pushpa Girimaji. And she interviewed several scientists and said, what is this about? And they said, sorry, this is nothing. The ball which you are making, the rice also has elasticity. And that's the reason when you throw the ball, it bounces back. And these videos needed to be shot again under the ages of rice distribution and went back viral. So there were three or four different elements as a response strategy to this crisis. And this was the most recent one, so I thought it would interest all of you. But the fact is it was all working in conjunction, advocacy, social media response on the social media platform and the print media. And all three when they started collaborating and collaborating, I think that is when the sanity of people's mindsets listening to such messages started increasing and the whole controversy died out. So i just wanted to share this. I just wanted to share something from our own experience at times and i think this is something that some of you might find funny. But a lot of brands when they are in a crisis situation and they are managing a crisis, i think it's the stakeholders inside the company who need to decide when the brand needs to just shut up. A lot of brands don't understand the power of keeping quiet at times and they mistake certain trends or certain twitter trending as such as activism. That is actually the time when you have to take a hard call as stakeholders to decide whether you should speak up right now or is it really good that you just let the fire die out on its own. And that's actually the most fundamental thing in crisis management that brands need to be taught today. Because a lot of them don't know, frankly, a lot of them don't know when to shut up. And it's very important today. And we face this a lot of times. A lot of times there have been people and again in the earlier discussion when we were having in the other room. I frankly feel that, you know, and I don't know how many of you will agree with this, but social media has sort of taken up the role of a customer grievance redressal forum today. You know, I have a problem with electricity. I will go to twitter. I will not call up the customer care number of the electricity board and check with them what the hell is the problem. They do. I am not joking. You will be surprised. You will be surprised with the quality, level of quality of customer care of hariyanabhijli vitranigam. I am not joking. If you actually pick up the call and talk to them, they will talk to you extremely politely. My wife is here. She must have called at least a million times. And she's not on twitter, by the way, but she knows how to get her work done. But a lot of people have started using social media as a grievance redressal forum. And that is good in a way that is maybe not good for brands at times. Because, you know, that is the last thing you want. And again, I bring you back to mob psychology. The moment you pick up something and tweet about it or you, you know, post about it on facebook, you will find 100 people who will align with your opinion and start talking about it. But 200 trolls who will start joining the mob who have nothing to do with your activism, who have got nothing to do with your problem. They are just there because they are having fun out of whatever is being talked about over there. And that's where you need to draw the line that is this the time I need to speak up or shut up. And that's something that brands have still got to grapple with and understand. And that's where good, you know, advisory from stakeholders inside the company is actually important in a situation like that. I think that's something I want to add. How many of you have seen the twister, the movie? Yeah? So it is a twister analogy, you know. When that twister comes in and they stand in that entire hurricane. So what happens is the best thing was they saved their lives because they did not stand up but went under the table. So taking that, sometimes brands need not to face that hurricane but just go under the table for a while. I think I'll just take this analogy a bit further because, of course, it's important that at times silence is good, like in all argument, whether PR, personal arguments, anywhere. But at the same time, when you see crisis happening in businesses nowadays, and anything that blows out of proportion. So some grievance to address it is because people are just out there and tweeting. But major crisis will only happen when there are repeated mistakes. So if the same kind of mishandling of a product is happening or somebody has been non-responsive and we don't realize that when, so being silent is one thing but not responding to customers in a strategic and effective way. Overtime, multiple things. So those are the small bushfires that we are fighting when they would turn up and become a huge fire that engulfs the entire brand is something to watch out for. So I wonder if Nikhil or Sadeep could say something about it. Yeah, so in the traditional crisis rulebook, you're supposed to speak fast, fill the information void. So I want to disagree, I don't think you can disappear and go under the table and hope that it's going to go away. But I do agree that there's a time when you should stop talking because there's nothing new to say. But I'll just give you an example in the days then we were working with pepsico. There was a particular brand of theirs that faced a crisis on social media. It was an imaginary problem, right? It was a problem which started saying if you drink brand xyz you get something called hbf, high bone fever. It came at the time when the dengu fever fear was coming. It morphed into the fact that doctor gupta from aims has said that not only are you going to get high bone fever, but you're also not going to be able to conceive a child if you're a woman and you drink this brand. Now, I think the fundamental mistake companies often make is they look at that, they laugh at it and say what shit? I mean this is so ludicrous that nobody is going to believe it till your sales start falling because people do start believing it. So the point I want to make is own the problem. However stupid it may seem. It is a problem. It is a problem your brand is facing and if you take that ownership and I think the cooler companies both went through fire with the pesticide issue and both of them got really smart at dealing with issues and crisis. So in this particular instance they didn't ignore it. They got into active management of it and I'm hoping not many of you have ever heard of this particular issue which means it was quelled before it became something that could actually become a front page story. Can I just add before because he's provoked me into the core man. I think I'm in the most comfortable position right now. Silence is golden. No, because of the slight provocation I just only want to add one point that why I said you need to shut up at that time is because you need to analyze and look at what is the stakeholder mapping. What is the entire issue, the environment around that subject and if you don't go and analyze these two things believe me the pesticide residue issue what happened in 2003 was a learning for the cooler companies because that is the time when 51 press releases were given in just six months time and it kept the controversy burning. 2006 when I joined Coke at that time we realized we gave only two press releases but third parties need to respond more and that was one lesson. So I just thought I can put an end to that. So I represent a company which has over 200 million customers. I hope most of you in this room have been my customers. You would have had complaints. You would have had grievances. You would have had tips battles. Several of you have written to me privately one-on-one messages here. Resolve, etc. Fine. All that is part of the deal. That is what a service industry is all about. But let's look at some calculated campaigns when happening. I'm just narrating these. I'm not saying these are right wrong. I leave that to you to judge. So we ran this program when the whole data boom was picking up about three years ago which was about first time waiver. You know people used to go overseas or suddenly their data bills used to be humongous. So we said if it's happening for the first time we'll wave it off for you. No questions asked. Okay. We did this as a pilot in select circles. We then rolled it out nationally. Went off quite well. Till one fine day we suddenly realized that therefore gaming happening with this because the same guys would take different numbers go abroad, run huge bills and ask for waivers. A service element suddenly turns into an activism of sorts which is completely damaging my business and brand. Here I'm trying to be encouraging people, please use, please be wise. Use data wisely was the kind of verbiages we were trying to tell people when they called up to request for a waiver. Just narrating one incident like this. Another one which is on similar lines, we've all read and heard about EMF. Right? You have activists who will want to call you on the phone and tell you that your phone is calling EMF. One, I don't manufacture phones. So if the phone is causing EMF, I'm not responsible for it. Two, have you even bothered to read where the norms are, what India standards are, what the level is? It is a big issue for every industry, for the telecom industry across the world and we are happy to address it. This is a very young industry unlike some of the industries which are hundreds of years old. The whole mobile industry is just about three decades old. So obviously we all have to work together to create a few things, but do we even have the right approach towards it? Are we even willing to sit together and talk or do we want to make noise? I'm just throwing these things where this is what happens to me as an individual and as a professional working for a large telecom company. No rights are wrongs here again, each to his own view. But fact is those are the challenges which are grappling. Are we supposed to open the discussion within the time frame that is there on the screen or this is for the panel and the questions come later? I think the third interesting point for me also is that most of us city-focused, city-based professionals look at activism or look at interventions that are there in social media like in Twitter and other places. But keeping in mind that all your brands reach to the end customers that are distributed throughout the country in really remote places, what are the other kinds, like what is the other kind of activism that you might have come across and what are the different forums that you have used to address, so rice activism, the plastic rice that you spoke about was one. But other than that, what are the kind of customers, grievances apart from Twitter and others, the other forums that you have come across and how have you managed to respond to those? I get the first shot, thanks. So I'll take a narrate an incident from some, a few years ago which was not in this industry of telecom but in the banking and financial services. I used to work with a large MNC bank at that point in time. And the activism was very interesting. You remember credit cards, now we're all in the digital MNC but credit cards were still at one point in time the biggest growth story for the industry. And we have this very interesting situation where one particular politician of the ruling political party actually wanted us to use his and his gang, I'm using the word very loosely here, to actually do certain part of the collections business for us. Now collections is obviously a hard job. We have given unsecured credit to people when you try and recover money from them, they obviously don't like it. Because one, there is an intention not to pay and then there is an ability not to pay. If the ability is not to pay, you can sit across the table, restructure, do something about it. But if the intention is not to pay, then when you need to take a slightly more harder measures, file police complaints, go by the law, use all the resources that you have available, take the matter to courts, whatever it might be. This politician wanted a pie of that business because he said that I will give you better returns but you will have to give me a better cut from the collections I make. And he created one huge dharma outside our offices under the guise that we are MNCs who are looting communities. That's activism for you. So one of the most common activism on social media nowadays is you go to a reputed restaurant, you have a bad experience, you put a narrative of that experience and then the whole world comes and sympathizes you with you and once you have tweeted about it, the extent of damage is so much that the restaurant has to even shut down. And this has happened rightly or wrongly. I mean, I was with the restaurant association guys to about 30 to 40 restaurants. So this is one new phenomenon which is coming. Now, yes, in 50% cases there was, the case was there. But what happens in activism is, remember, 25% is fact, 75% becomes exaggeration. And then as I think you pointed out, there are many people who love to like that post. And knowing nothing about it. Oh, I'm sorry. I didn't know. I didn't mean it. But I just saw that so I thought there must be something wrong because typically one side of the brain is wanting to hear the bad news. And that bad news typically helps. So if somebody has triggered that bad news, so that is it. So I'm just saying that I'm the other part of activism which I think it should help in a positive result is the burning of this, you know, the rice husk, the rice husk in Paddy. This has been there for years. And you earlier, the Indian satellites, when could not capture it, the NASA satellite used to show that how the fires are burning after the harvest. And because Punjab uses those big harvesters, these guys just would want to burn it. When I went to the farmers, they said, Oh, my farm is fine. And I said, but so we were given a task to actually use that husk to make energy. So I, in two years back, I was at Wharton and we did that project. I went to Punjab government. I went to everyone. And the typical answer was, oh, you don't know, you know, actually freight is very, very expensive. So I said, sir, but no, no, no. Burning is simple. Look, that burning is simple. We tried to convince them the environment angle. Today it become a burning platform. And if we had taken this about five years back and really put activism behind that, I think we would have had a solution. So I think these are a few things which I think that activism can really help in living a better and, you know, better world environment becomes really less polluted. I think this is very interesting because it leads me to my next question, which is that if two people, like if your enemy is my enemy kind of a thing, and if the business and the environmentalist or the different kind of activists are on one side of the forum, what are your strategies of combining your energies to talk or to deal with like something that is harmful for the entire environment? So has there been opportunities? Have there been options where your brand has teamed up with activists of different kinds and come up with a common strategy to deal with a social problem? Has that been a case that you know of? Like maybe you're not in the company, otherwise also. Let me give a shot at this one. So at Vodafone we crafted a very simple statement to, you know, kind of address these issues. We said if it's good for society, it must be good for business because our system is, our business is all about connectivity. And we believe connectivity is empowering and encouraging. So if it has, if it is largely good for society, it must be good for business. So there was this peculiar, so there are these issues which keep on cropping up about pollution levels. We use a lot of diesel generator sets because the electric supply in this country, in the country is erratic, especially as you go in the interiors. The quality is not good, frequency is not right. The duration for which it is available is very limited. So we have a very, very diesel consuming industry in that sense because we have to run a lot of our towers on DG GEN sets because battery backup is only for a few hours. So we had to take a conscious decision that if we are going to be polluting the environment and house and we got representation from a lot of environmental organizations talking about what is it that, you know, we can do. So we said, okay, fine. If you have to address this issue, then obviously we need to, we need to create a layer of, you know, greenery around. Now I can't create greenery around every tower that I have because obviously the tower is either on a building or somewhere. Sometimes it's in the fields but then the field belongs to the farmers. So what we did was we created a program wherein we said we would plant about 300,000 trees across. We created a private forest corridor between Kanhai and Pinch Wildlife Reserves. 300,000 trees were planted over a three-year period. And what we did was very clearly we said this is, this will offset my carbon footprint to a certain extent till a certain point in time. Beyond that I will have to revisit what more I need to do. At the back end what we started doing was we created a lot more environment-friendly things which were ACs were not required because as technology was improving you could take things out and keep it out in the open rather than in AC environment. So it reduced your overall energy consumption. For three to four years we've been consistently doing this at a good success rate. And now is the time when we're actually going to review that again and see what we need to do at the next levels. So 300,000 trees planted, a unique corridor created, and we further tied it in business because if it has to good for society it has to result to mean a business benefit. We linked it back to our customer engagement and service programs. So in certain circles where customers celebrate their birthday or anniversaries they just get a small message from us saying that we have planted a tree to wish you health and happiness in this particular forest. If you ever visit there do remember us. That's about it. There's just one case because you asked a question that how do you bring the activists and the brand joints together? Sometimes. So you know the sustainability report mechanism as people get evolved. The GRI 4.0 and then later on all these, the new processes which are being adopted have a wonderful process where they say that when the company starts to compile a sustainability report they have to bring in all the stakeholders in one room, those who are for and those who are against. So my learning five, six years back was when I put all these stakeholders and 15, 18 of them were activists and real, real hard activists. It was a day-long exercise. We listened to them. Listening is very, very important. So we listened to them. They went back, more learned about the company I worked for. We learned about listening to them and understanding what caused their anxiety. So when the report was ready we said sir this report is because of your inputs and that made them feel very, very proud. As a brand we've also faced a lot of issues where consumers, I don't know, I mean is it a challenge of finding that information or otherwise but a lot of consumers have asked us questions like do you guys still upload phone books? And it's something that you have to really be very careful in answering such questions like that because if you actually look at the primary source of downloading an app, is Google and Apple app store and play store, right? If you look at their privacy policies, they do not allow, forget us, they do not allow any app to crowdsource from anybody's phone. It's not possible. Even if I have a toggle switch which says okay I give you permission to access my contacts, it is not something that we are allowed to do at all and that's where you have to really work very closely with, for us the activists are so to say are people who are technology journalists and people who are opinion leaders as such to say and they have a lot of following in terms of people who follow them for technology news and updates and stuff. We have to continuously work and it's been a long drawn process. I mean Google and Apple actually stopped crowdsourcing, stopped allowing crowdsourcing since 2012 but we're still fighting the battle today. Even today people think that we're uploading the phone books and it's a continuous battle. You have to fight it out. But again like I said the moment and it would be actually stupid if tomorrow we started going out and promoting ourselves as we don't do this. The moment you start doing that, the moment you speak up about something like that you are definitely going to get pulled back on it because then there will be definitely people who will have 15 different things that they want to talk to you about. And the topic gets easily deviated again when mob psychology is at work and that's where we continuously keep working. Apart from that also like whenever there's an issue, like recently there were a lot of reports that came in where a lot of these mobile shop owners were actually storing data like storing profiles of women who visited the shops for getting their phones recharged and they were selling that data. In such events also there have been times when we've worked with the local authorities, we've worked with the policy makers, we've worked with journalists and we've worked with even telecom companies to combat these kind of things. But it would be really stupid to actually open your mouth and speak up about it because then you will get pulled into 15 other things. Because like I said you have resolved a topic, people will take you somewhere else in the future. Manan I agree with that point because I remember conversations that we have had in the past on this one and actually what Manan was referring to about ladies databases being sold. As a telecom company we saw a business opportunity therein because it had addressed the problem at the same time it enhanced privacy. We introduced a pack called Vodafone Sakhi which was effectively that you didn't have to give your actual number to the wherever you are going for your recharge in the small shop in the village etc. You would get an OTP, you just have to use one time password and your mobile would get recharged. So effectively you didn't have to give your number out there because of this problem. Yeah I think we can throw open the floor. I will kind of go back to instance since Amit is right there. Amit, why didn't you pick up the phone and speak to Indigore rather than tweeting about it? Because that's what Manan says that why don't you pick up the phone and speak. By the way have you ever tried to call up a credit card company or a Vodafone or an Airtel? First it's like your call is on hold. Then somebody comes in, then somebody else. Then in between if they cut the phone you go through that entire dial one, dial two, dial nine, now customer care, now customer care is X person and then when it falls down there. But if I tweet about it I get immediate response. You have to love banks for that. You have to absolutely love banks for that. They have figured out the system. And I have been personally fighting with the bank for almost three months now on something that was so simply solvable by them. But it has come to a stalemate situation where I have said, you know what, I am not going to pay for this. Do whatever you can. I have been pushed to that level. And by the way even tweet did not help in that situation. Yeah, Amit. So I think I will take two minutes. I will come clear on this. I have nothing against Indigore personally. I have traveled Indigore. I have loved Indigore. I have traveled Indigore from 10 years ago, which launched the airline in the country and it is still a client. And I remember sending that press release out through fax and email in 2005 from the Bangler office then. The point is two. One is what happened was not in anybody's control. The two guys fought with the customer, the customer fought back with the two guys that was on video. My concern was three things that happened after that. One was there was a chance and a possibility for the, and I wrote that in the letter, for the CEO of the company to come on a video with that customer, point number one. Point number two, they had a choice to go and visit their customer because it was a physical assault on the customer. And apologize for that. That didn't happen. The worst was the next morning when the statement came out, there was a mistake in even the customer's spelling. They spelled it as R-A-J-I-V on the tweet. And in that screenshot it was R-A-J-E-E-V. I mean they're small things, but for a customer it matters. I don't think that customer was an illiterate guy. He looked like an educated person. I don't even know who he is. And my point was there was no, and somebody mentioned the brand name earlier and the copcom head's name as well. I don't even know the copcom head personally. But I think it needed empathy there. The copcom head was actually tweeting from his handle or he tweeting tweets that were to do with people talking against their customer or making fun of their customer in those tweets. And his own bio, his own cover picture was all negative things for somebody who should show empathy, who should show relationship with the brand. And that was my concern. So I actually sent an email to the email address I found online of aditya.gochartindigo.in with this mail. There was no response. Even the ecologist was saying, wow, I mean some random customer has sent that. And that's when I said, okay, maybe a day later I'll publish that and that was it. So I had nothing to do with calling Indigo because it was not about Indigo doing something to me. It was how a brand, which is a leader in the market, should react to something like this. And that was where I was coming from. I only spend money, usually on flights. Most of my money is spent every month on flights. And I choose between Vistar and Indigo largely. But in the last few months, because the terminal that Indigo uses has a bus ride and things like that, I prefer Vistara. And I go through similar problems with Vistara. But I've never seen them, even though I've been reactive sometimes like an activist customer, react to me with a method of being physically assaulting towards me. Even yesterday I was in Hyderabad with Roshan to plan next year's practice venue. The Vistara guy at the airport was very rude to me. But immediately his manager took charge and said, hey, we'll solve your problem and make it work. And it was a very silly thing of changing my flight from 8 p.m. to 6 p.m. and he said, no, we can't do it. And they had seats. But things like that. So that was where I was coming from, Superna, to answer that question. Thank you. Good evening. I'm Mukesh Anand. I'm an army officer's son. I've been advisor to PepsiCo for the last 17 years. I've got the, from Indra Nooyi gave me the Havira's award for turning wounded soldiers into entrepreneurs. I come here with a message first for Deepak. He said something, marketing with an emotional angle. That is a very important thing. That's what Amir Khan does. Now that's very important for the factor what happened in my life about 10 days back. I got a photograph of a disabled soldier with no eyes gone, with hands gone, from Ladakh, 15 years back. In three days time, thanks to Lions Clubs, I got him. I'm getting him artificial arms and eyes through a woman who's blind from age 5 and can do everything. I wrote to the army chief that we're going to transform these 25,000 wounded soldiers into the best entrepreneurs. Because their brains work, they lost their arms and all that. My message to even Vodafone an idea, you can't fight the richest man in this country because he's just pouring in money, no names. You can only fight him with emotional content. Now the emotional content comes with the 3 million educated ex-servicemen, 90% of them living in rural India. When you say 3 million, you have multiplied that by 10 because 10 immediate members of the family. You got to touch them. You got to touch them for any product you want to sell. I'm going to get together PepsiCo and Coke and we're going to open 25,000 outlets in rural India with refrigerators not given by Pepsi or Coke but given by Lions International. Why? Again the emotional content because Lions wanted to do a project, an international project on beating diabetes. So I won, I come in the good books of Lions, I've come in good books of PepsiCo and Coke. We will get them together. I would like Vodafone an idea to come together and do your marketing. That's my concept. It's a long story. I have a question. So I can connect with you after the session. I have a question. I must thank the two gentlemen for giving us their experiences. I think it's a great panel and from Deepak in the last session to Deepak in this one, I'm glad we've moved into context. Essentially the democratic context is what we are talking about here and calling them a mob doesn't really work because it's for this mob that we make our brands. It's for this mob we expect them to buy them etc. But let me take you from what you called IQ and this is a question for the chair. From IQ you took us to EQ. Let me take you to JQ which is the journalist quotient. Ma'am is it a fact that media loves activism because that's the norm of democracy and therefore the brand is the norm anymore. In the sense that the more you fight the brand, particularly the large global MNC brands, the better you are as a journalist. You probably get higher up in the scale. This is an old format but apparently it still works. Would you like to comment on the journalist quotient of being an activist first and journalist is obviously the byproduct? That's a very interesting stakeholder group because what we are realizing more and more that journalism effectively from the time that I started my activism right in college and afterwards was more value driven, was more issue oriented. But moving on in the last decade or so when lines are getting blurred between different formats of disruptions and the fact that people have short term memory, I think that was something that was discussed in the panel also, that people have very short term memory. It's not an activism like Chip Co that goes on for years and people are committed to it. You make a point, you sign a petition, you do something and then you have forgotten about it. If your petition has worked, you congratulate yourself and all your family and friends that are on Facebook because now entire families are on Facebook, will congratulate you. So the lines have gotten blurred and the journalist quotient and so it's become again a lot of, so it's about numbers. There will be some quality journalism still but more and more it's because of the quality of journalism going down in the traditional media is why the social media has been in my estimation on the rise in the past couple of years because most of the media houses are owned by corporates, are owned by political parties, are used as propaganda mechanisms for different formats and that is why this PR and activism becomes more important because we have to be more responsive to the right kind of people whom we are reaching out to who are our own stakeholder groups is what I would like to say. I think it's a very good answer. Public memory, I'll just complete the point I'm making, the public memory may be short but corporate memory on the media side is very long so they actually hold print, they hold the residual matters in Coca-Cola and they can raise it again after 6-8 years so essentially issues don't die out anymore and that's the democratic form that we got to come to terms with. So this is not really a mob, this is a very intelligent educated mob. Thank you, thank you so much for your point of view. Just to clarify I didn't mean mob in necessarily a negative way but it's a collection of people who can go either ways and that's where I'm talking about the mob psychology. They can do good things, amazing things like India against corruption also and that was all social media that activated that... The question in the chair is that the journalist can rake it up and be careful which side she or he is raking what. And sometimes if we're just using hashtags for the sake of trending but isn't the brand themselves, aren't they themselves responsible for it whenever they're launching out with something and then at that point in time you use the hashtag, it trends and then when activism takes it up you know this is just like, you know, you just want to... Essentially everybody's just contributing to more noise in the system which leaves us all confused and frustrated at one point in time and elated rarely. Right, because it's interesting, I don't know you guys didn't touch upon influences as being Boone or Bane because for now as far as I'm concerned I know for a fact as many followers that you may have how many of them are engaged with you at least as far as social media even in terms of tweeting those hashtags and things like that, they're literally bought, I mean there are companies out there as far as social media is concerned I picked up the phone about a couple of weeks back because this guy had tweeted this number and if you want your brand's followers or whatever the guy sitting in Jaipur I speak to him, he said, I said what kind of, you know, engagement do you do, what kind of followers do you have What do you have to do? You have to trend You have to make likes What do you have to do? Tell me you'll have everything So this is, you know, literally there are you were saying something Manak? In fact I was just taking a cue from what you were saying Your best influencers are your consumers themselves You don't really need to buy influencers as such I believe, and this is something beautiful I read when I was working for this agency called Liubanet There was a beautiful letter that the Liubanet himself had sent out to his employees saying that, you know if you're working on a brand and they used to handle the McDonald's and many other businesses at that time he specifically told them that if you're not living the brand that you're working for then you have absolutely no reason to be inside this agency If you are working on the McDonald's business, have you even tried the food that they've served? If you're working for a coke, have you tried the brand? Have you lived with that brand? And only then can you be an influencer. I'll tell you one very simple thing that we did Our focus as a company has always been to make the users experience simpler and more efficient safer and more efficient And one simple thing that we keep adding is always understanding what the consumer wants and adding that feature into the app It is something that has really worked for us because one simple button that says after you've got a spam call if you want to share it it is a very powerful tool and you will see so many people sharing that that Truegaller saved me from this spammer and that is actually your influencer network that's working for you They are the people who are advocating your brand because they have had a great experience with you and that's the most powerful way to do it There is no better way to do it than have your own consumers your own users become advocates or influencers for you Just taking a cue from there you know we didn't talk about influencers when the fact is that influencers become extremely important in such cases when there is so much of noise and I still remember that there was noise about the pesticide issue and one day out of the blue the Punjab Chief Minister Dencha he said I've been drinking Coke since I was a kid my favorite drink I would drink anyway it was good enough you know it was good enough it just got picked because it was the heat of the moment it just got picked up at that time what I am trying to say is that if the brand has values and the company has values ultimately there may be noise the company may go through the rigmarole of going down but it is that heritage which brings it back to the fore and that's why the employee onboarding with values is so critical because they then become the brand ambassadors and not the Virat Kohli's of the world Question for Mr. Sudeep Bala of Vodafone you had spoken earlier about the EMF scare that the scare that has been going around for years that cellular phone handsets as well as the mobile phone towers cause brain cancer and other diseases now what are the operators and the telecom equipment manufacturers doing to counter the scare because the scare is not just in India it's all over the world and in India it's very effective use of social media by Juhi Chawla and a few other activists who are all over social media as well as the press and the host events so I would love to answer that question but that would take a very long time so maybe we can connect slightly later on this one and just for the record there is a lot of work which has been done is continuing to be done in collaboration with the entire industry with the government with the policy makers across the board happy to take it offline okay sure I am Ram Kumar Singaram running a PR firm my name is Catalyst PR in Chennai I need a clarification one of my clients who faced environmental problem he wants to fight with the government but he wants a great activist movement but it was not possible so simply you put a petition PIL in the court through a lawyer and whenever the case came to the court all the publications published the news finally he won the case finally he got the things what he want PIL in my purview does fall under activism of some sort the question is there are enough PIL's which get thrown out of the courts as well your client was lucky that he filed it got accepted and he won the case but you will see enough and more examples of PIL's being thrown out because they are being considered frivolous by the judiciary so earlier they were all being accepted even the judiciary has wisened up it is a form of activism according to me in fact there was a time when the friend of the court the judge would tell somebody file a PIL on this issue and I will adjudicate on this my question is there any other question I guess we will wrap it up there is one question on my side specifically to who do you want to address it to in your name my question is to Mr. Manan Shah as you mentioned there are two the psychology between the individual and the mob is totally different if you put some light on it it will be very good that will go into a very dangerous conversation I can tell you see basically what happens is and I will give you a very simple example as you grew up from being a child to growing up as an adult in school and college and however you were given opinions whether it was through textbooks it was through papers it was not simple reporting that you had you were always given opinions and that's the same thing that's happening with social media also today the moment you start making a political or any other kind of an opinion public you will see that over a period of time your social media wall or your feed or whatever will change in a way that it is aligning to your opinion and not necessarily giving you a contrary opinion and that's where like minded people again in quotes sort of have started ganging up together and you'll see a lot of this in political conversation specifically as an individual you always have the right and you always have the wisdom if you well read and if you know both sides of the coin that you will make the informed choice but at times when there is something that's trending everybody is somewhere somewhere or the other sort of feeling that you know should I click that retweet button or not and that's where I was talking about when that mob is moving in a certain direction everybody wants to go with the flow everybody is having fun if I put it that way I'm glad that we've stopped some fires and this conversation is definitely not going to get end here we'll have to wrap up in paucity of time thank you so much for taking the time for being here and to please come up on stage and offer a token of appreciation on behalf of the exchange for media group to this robust panel here and of course we'll request you to stay back on stage since you're addressing the audience next thank you so much Mr Jolly Mr Bhalla Shabnam Manan and Nikhil yes we can clap I guess we can be engaged and involved as an audience we can use the hashtag IPRCCA and there are people who have been tweeting about this particular hashtag I'm not asking you to trend it but that was actually also the idea that's the reason why we were also giving you goodie bags and I do have a couple of names here with me Sahil Verma who here Sahil come on up grab your very first goodie bag yes