 Welcome to this next virtual series which is presented by ABP. It's called the Pitch Virtual Brand, Pitch Brand Talk Virtual Series. And in this series, we get you the thought leaders from various domains who talk about various facets of what we are going through as brand heads, as marketeers, when as far as COVID is concerned and how it has impacted and changed the entire narrative of marketing, brand building, and the like. So with me today is Mr. Anush Bogar. He's the executive director of the George Electricals. And the topic today is very interesting. We're going to talk about the strategy to bounce back in the heart of customers, something which is we're at the fag end of a certain kind of a lockdown in lockdown four. And we are thinking that businesses would come back in some way, in some form. So we'll talk about what it means to win back customers in this situation. So Mr. Bogar, welcome to the Pitch Brand Talk Virtual Series presented by ABP. I want to begin by asking that, we are almost in the 50th day, how has it been for you these 50 days? It's been, to confess it's been a trial by fire in every which way. It's all the usual playbooks, all the learnings, all your standard practices, processes, structures, delegation of authority, nothing works. Every day you had to reinvent the wheel, relook at everything that you were doing and look at it differently. Before I just go ahead, Ruhail, I had a confession to make. Since this is change for media and Pitch, and I guess there's a lot of brand and marketing experts out there. So I'm not a qualified person to talk to everybody. And the reason I say that is the tag that I always carry is that I'm a professional Banya as so to speak. I've not done an MBA, I'm not a marketer, I've never learned marketing. The way I look at all of these things is simply that you have a consumer and the way I look at this whole consumer and brand game is that what's the game? You have humans and you have people out there. And you have something to tell them. How do you actually make an impact and how do you connect with these people? And just as a person aside the analogy I draw is I have two teenage kids. And if you can deal with teenage kids, that's the biggest test of what you can do. You have to understand their psyche, what's going on in their head. What is it that you want to tell them or get out of them? And how do you make that message work to them? So, but coming back, I think in a larger sense, that's to me is how I look at brands, consumers and all of this communication, et cetera. But what is it that I want to tell them and how can I get through to them and connect with them? So it's just in a very plain, simple way. I don't understand jargons. I don't understand marketing. I just look at people as people and what do I really have to tell them? And finally, since I'm a banyan, you know, marketers don't like business people sometimes they'll be encounters. But I think it's important we look at the numbers at every point. It has to all it makes sense. So I'll just stop at that. That's the confession I want to be shared with. Great. So you're saying number crunching comes very naturally to you. And of course I think marketer has learned a lot from the streets itself. I think that's how it is. So we can begin my, the format is simple. We're live on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and we'll be taking questions in the last 15 minutes. It's a 45 minute session that we have. So they can, people can start messaging us and maybe we'll post those questions. My first question to you is that why we are nearing a semblance of normalcy as far as businesses are concerned, what would be the three big win back strategies that brands can look at in this phase to win back customers? So before I talk of the three points or whatever that come to my mind, the most common phase being bandied about right now is the new normal, right? And everybody's talking about the new normal because they believe the old normal is dead. You're never going back to what you thought was normal. I think the world has changed and it's changed forever. And the reason for that is, people try to compare this to other things, events that we've had 9-11 or the 2008 financial markets crisis or earthquakes or floods or wars across the world. I think none of them match up to this for the simple reason that this has affected every single human in every single country, every single business, every single society, right? None of all these events that have happened in our lifetime had such a wide pervasive impact on every single person across the world. In that sense, it is very different. It is going to leave, to my mind, a deep impact on everybody else. Coming back to my analogy that I said earlier, when we talk consumers, who are we talking about? These are people. You have to understand what is their psyche? What are they going through in this process right now? To my mind, they're no different from, take a child who is deeply scarred and confused by what's happening in the events for the last 50 days, right? And that child really doesn't know now what he wants. He had a set of stable needs that he was used to going and getting fulfilled. And now suddenly his world has gone upside down. And now he's trying to figure out what of his needs he wants to go out and fulfill. What can he afford? And even before that, before he can exercise those choices, I think he needs a level of reassurance and confidence, because he's lost a lot of confidence in. He's really in a state of conclusion right now. If you can understand that, that's the psyche of consumers out there that you're talking to. And then start looking at, to your question, the three steps that as brands we need to do. I think that's the starting point. You're dealing with a fracture, a confused or a highly stressed and then a scarred set of people out there right now. And therefore as a brand coming back to three points, I think the first point really is, you have to engage with these people. These are people with whom you have a relationship. You've been selling to them or fulfilling the needs for all this while. You have to engage with them and communicate with them. But not as a seller. You have to keep your instincts to sell aside and you just engage with them in an authentic and empathetic manner. Just keep your relationship at the core of it. That as a brand, what is the relationship that you think you have and want to maintain with these consumers? And what does that mean in these times? How do you resist reassure them in the current times that you are there for them and that relationship matters to them? And in tough times, people who stand by you in any way or form of relationship, I think people tend to remember that. There are various examples of what we've done, but I'll save that for later. So that's point one, stay engaged and communicate with them. And in a manner that is authentic and empathetic. Number two, coming back to business, you have to adapt your product and your offering and be able to demonstrate that whatever you're offering to them, you are able to be responsive and able to address their concerns. Their needs would have changed because of the current situation. Your standard product or solution offerings may not completely meet or match their needs. And therefore, how are you going to tailor that and adapt that to meet their renewed or differentiated needs? Not all of these needs may change, some of these needs may change. Just two quick examples that I can think of. You know, I saw, I read a couple of days ago that Disneyland and Shanghai has reopened. The standard need was to entertain the kids, entertain the families, give them a great experience, right? And now you're dealing with a consumer who is shaken and scared to come back. So first thing they needed to do is reassure consumers and their families, parents or children that you're safe to come back to Disneyland. And without even getting into it, I can assure you they would have done the kind of communications, put in so many steps out there, et cetera. You assure them that, you know, this is safe to come back and we've got to cover. Once you address that, provided reassurance, then you have to go back to the need that has not changed. The need that has not changed is to give the kid and the family a ride, give them a thrill, give them adventure, give them fun, give them entertainment. So don't throw the baby out of the bathwater, give them reassurance, but come back to what your core purpose is. That's point two about adapting a product and offering to this new consumer, new requirement. And point three really is about you have to go to the consumer. He is scared, he's sitting at home, he doesn't know whether it's safe to come out, he's not sure whether he can touch you, feel you, pick up your product, you know, eat your food in a restaurant, et cetera. And you have to go out to him. I can again give you examples about, you know, let's say, you know, and I will talk about our examples later, we've changed us to go to market models. We were, you know, we were largely sold through general retail trade out there, but we're looking at omnichannel services right now. People can call us, book online, et cetera, and you'll have somebody come to your door and deliver your mixer or your fan or your light bulb to you at your home. I can get into details, but the point really is the consumer's not coming out and you have to go out to them. So consumers are facing another problem, which is the purchase sentiment is very low. And brands have to sell, they have to appeal to them in some way. So first is changing the entire paradigm of perception. As a brand, how are you, what steps are you taking all to that perception? Make a very different posture perception. So people with whatever money they have in the phase of layoffs and pay cuts and everything else, they still go and go do that purchase. How are you trying to build that sentiment and perception? Say, so, you know, building that perception is really about, you know, connecting with his mind space right now, right? Or his or her mind space right now. And, you know, building a narrative around that, that connects your product or your offering in the brand to his current mind space. Having said that, you must always remember what your core purpose is. What are you really offering? What's the core purpose of your brand and product? If I take our examples, whether we sell the appliances or fans or coolers, et cetera, that ain't gonna change. My fan and cooler is meant to cool his environment. My mixer or grinder or kitchen appliance or cooker, et cetera, is meant to help him or her cook their food. But how do I build a narrative around that that fits their current needs? We've launched the summer fans and cooler range that, you know, is anti-German, anti-bacterial. So what that does is cater to his or her elevated need of feeling safe and having a safe, clean, healthy environment around themselves. And therefore our product of anti-bacterial or anti-German fan or anti-bacterial cooler, it gives him a sense of reassurance. If I look at our kitchen appliances, you know, I have to move my communication away from just the basic fulfilling a functional requirement of, you know, making a toast or, you know, blending a masala or et cetera, to giving him a sense of what has lockdown done for people. It's brought families together. It's made the men folk become part of the kitchen duties. It's allowed people to indulge in, you know, baking or cooking as a hobby, as a pastime for family. It's a, you know, lever for bonding between families. So how do I change my narrative for my kitchen appliances to now tap into these new, you know, thoughts or, you know, priorities that families or my consumers have discovered and use that as a bridge to connect to them and to yet, you know, repurpose, you know, our sale proposition of our kitchen gadgets. I can give more examples. Let me give you one more example of a tougher sell than, you know, I would yet think a fan of kitchen appliances, fairly essential product, right? What consumers, like you said, you know, if they're challenged right now, either for economic reasons or simply because they don't want to do things that they think are wasteful, are going to be less and less likely to indulge in indulgences. The most challenge sectors right now for you are hospitality, hotels, restaurants, eating out travel, right? Typically these were sold on the premise of guiltless indulgence, guiltless consumption. Go out and have a good time, indulge in luxury. That narrative is not going to, you know, find repraction right now. You will, if I'm a hotel or restaurant, I need to change my narrative to say, this is not about guiltless consumption or indulgence. It's about mental wellbeing. It's about you coming in, you know, connecting with your spouse or taking a family out for an outing that they've been locked down for 50 days. So again, you have to probably, you know, you can't try away from the fact that a product to sell is a hotel or a travel or a meal or fancy meal. But you cannot sell that to the same peg of indulgence and luxury and, you know, consumption. You have to change the peg to being about wellbeing, bonding, family, whatever you want to make a jump. The last bit is really about, these are kind of brand repositionings or narratives that one is looking at. But, you know, there's this classical go-to market and sales steps that you will take, okay? You will have to revisit your pricing strategies. You will have to revisit your packaging strategies. Are people going to buy the big unit or the small unit? From our company, we are re-looking that all our SKUs are people more likely to buy the expensive fan or the cheaper fan. Are they going to go for the frills or are they going to go back to, you know, basics? So you have to re-look at all your SKUs, all your pricing, your bundling. This is a classical FMCG pricing go-to market strategies or sales strategies to actually make the more likely product sell versus the less likely product sell in an environment like this. I have a bunch of don'ts, but maybe we can take that up later, you know, what you should not do. So while you're saying that you're taking all these steps are required to bring back that sentiment, I also want to know that why do you are reaching out to customers now and making all of those attempts? The tone, the marketing tone also has to undergo a certain shift, you know? It cannot be first, it can't be purchased directly, you know? It can be very subtle. And from your brand perspective, this tonality, how is this tonality being redefined in your case? Yes, I think good question. So, you know, I spoke about how our messaging or narrative is being redefined, but that's the what, you know, the how is equally important as to how are you connecting with these people? You know, I already spoke about how you're trying to connect to a changed mindset or mind space of people out there. And, you know, the need for you as a brand to just engage with them. I think the tone of that engagement needs to be one of empathy, it needs to be authentic, okay? I think it's very easy to see through fake people. It's very easy to see through a fake brand or fake, you know, commercial communication. So in this situation, the first thing you have to do in your tone is, I think be authentic and empathetic in what you're seeing as a brand and respect your consumer for what you're telling them. And again, don't be in that sell mode. Don't try to over commercialize what you're trying to see right now. Very often, you know, brands tend to put out a PSA or a public service announcement to, you know, feel good message. And then they, you know, spoil that completely by, you know, plugging their products so up, you know, in your face and don't do it. You know, it's a complete waste of opportunity. Resist the temptation to, you know, plug your product. People will connect with you simply because you said them something that they like. You don't have to hard sell that. I can talk about a couple of examples that we've done. You know, we rolled out an, you know, online app for recipes, you know, you just interact. It's an idea based WhatsApp based and created a whole, you know, body of recipes that people can interact with because they're sitting at home and cooking more. And therefore, you know, dessert, appetizer, main course, whatever else it is. And there's nothing, there's no budget sale in that. I'm not plugging a product, et cetera. It's just something that, you know, I think meets the needs. We put out, you know, a video on Mother's Day. It's simply, you know, saluting mothers and, you know, I remember mothers in this lockdown, you know, phase, et cetera, et cetera. You're not selling your products. Point two really is, even when you do all of these feel-good things, the other extreme of that is people go so overboard with feel-good that they forget, actually they're a brand, right? You are a product. If I give you an example, you know, the examples of, you know, families at home and they need advice. So why don't we give them advice about how to engage the kids? How to indulge in learning for the kids? How to, you know, play games with the kids? How do you, it's not my job. You know, there's a thousand and a hundred, you know, thousand blogs out there that is talking all the same stuff, right? If I was yet working in a previous organization and I was just, you know, plugged their name and Nickelodeon is one of our, you know, brands and channels out there, then yes, I would, you know, talk about mother, child, child keeping kids engaged because that fits into the brand. It's not the Bajaj brand space to talk about kids and mothers and, you know, what, how should kids be kept, you know, engaged in this period of time. But yes, as a brand, you know, I am in it for, you know, people for families, for cooking, for et cetera. And so all the communication that I've done here, even if it's non-commercial, links back to my space that I choose to operate in, the, you know, the space of my relationship with my consumer, which revolves around food, around the kitchen, around, you know, environment, whatever. So somewhere there has to be some latent connect to why you are saying something, even if it's a non-commercial message, you have to keep it relevant. Third part, which is linked to this is don't be cliche. I mean, there's so much of herd mentality that happens out there. Everybody is going to rattle off corona statistics to you. You get a hundred WhatsApp messages at this point of time. Every guy is a walking, talking expert on corona and how many people, you know, got that disease. Don't add to that crowd. They don't need it from you. Okay. You don't have to be that meter that is publishing corona data or some, you know, medicines or whatever for that. That's not your brand space to be it. Let somebody else do that. So if you have something to say, make it different, make it count, make it impactful or say it differently and if you're saying the same thing or keep a mouth shut. Cause say three things in this 50 days and people will remember you for those three things. Say 50 things every day that everybody else is saying and you've completely wasted that opportunity. And last point to tonality is, I think there's enough doom and gloom. You can choose to be real. You can choose to not, you know, say that, okay, it's all great, but you don't have to add to the gloom and doom around that. You have to create a sense of positivity. That's what people are looking for. Even in downtime, even in war times, people want and gravitate to something, you know, to something that gives them a sense of positivity. You have to learn to be operate, learn to operate and be in a positive space. So what's also happened that I won't understand. How have you kept your grants, sorry, stakeholders engaged in a non-selling phase where you're not selling but you still have to have a connect with them. How have you made sure that it's not a manufactured empathy, you know? It sounds real and it's not something empathy and then end up with a message to sell. So how have you made sure that it connects, you know? It has the same point, you know, across. Let me give you three, four illustrations of what we've actually done. I was trying not to plug what we are doing to keep this session also as genuine as I'm claiming. But, you know, our example is what I have best to share with you, right? I think we put three or four specific, you know, communications out there that are separate from any of our commercial, you know, product communications at this point in time. The first one was, you know, really when the whole lockdown thing started, it was more in the space of a public service, you know, communication, you know, guys, we need to take this seriously. And it was about, you know, disrespecting our healthcare workers, you know, and therefore our need and social responsibility to stay home. And we put that out as a video. It was a slightly somber video, slightly not on the positive space that I would say. But it was, I think at that point, it was a need for a reality check for a lot of our society. We just did that as a corporate messaging from a public service. But the other three examples that I'll give you is more in our brand space, not so much from a corporate space, is, you know, again, to keep it as natural and as real, and as I can take to almost play on the empathy point that I spoke about. And that how we are just like you, right? We are no different from you. We are no different from our consumer. We understand you. We are going through the same as you are. And therefore what we did is got all our employees and our senior people, including our chairman, including myself, you know, some of our leading leaders of the company and people across the company, across different functions and across levels. And we chose men from across the company, actual employees and got them to kind of, we put together a video on work for home, but how all the males in the company are now contributing to housework, whether it's, you know, make somebody making a dosa, somebody, you know, dusting his, you know, how is somebody actually, you know, you know, cutting or ranging, you know, vegetables? I, you know, I had a glimpse of myself, you know, ironing the clothes of my daughter, et cetera. And, you know, in a way that was as natural as can be everybody doing household chores, which is actually what everybody in a lockdown is doing. So it broke the barrier between the consumer and put us out there in a mode of not just empathy, but understanding and being one of you. And just, you know, it's a nicely packaged video. And, but having said that, since it's a brand, you know, webinar that we talk about, it does set, subtly revolve around who we are. We are about household appliances. We are about the kitchen. We are about the fan. We are about the iron, et cetera. I'm not saying that there is not a commercial purpose or not a brand purpose somewhere woven into that. That is there. There might not be a marketer or a brand company that should not be a session on Brandon Martin if we did not bring in that aspect, but it is not in your face. It is very, very subtle. The third example I can share with you is on the Mother's Day video that we put out. It's just about memories and learnings from our mothers, you know, about how do you manage with cooking? How do you manage the chores of that? How do you manage the chores of utensils? How do you, you know, in a stressed day, how do you keep your wits about you? How do you, you know, laugh? How do you cry through this? How do you keep up the, you know, feel good environment for the family, et cetera? And how all these lessons of your mother actually really help you to release tough times when you have to carry a family along with this, right? It's a beautiful, you know, touching emotional video out there. It does occupy the space of, you know, kitchen or other spaces, et cetera. So it does revolve somewhere around a brand without actually paying the bank card. The third example, which I already touched upon earlier is, you know, just the online app for recipes, self-help cooking tips, et cetera, et cetera. So that's just a flavor of three or four different things that we did at this point of time, which can mirror what I spoke about earlier as to how do we engage our consumers at this point of time away from adverts for our products and, you know, feature the power products. So we also talk about marketing mix taking the new color. It won't be the same again, you know. So in your brand category, how would it shape up according to what you see going around? Where is it going the most and where is it going the least? So first to borrow from what I said earlier is you have to go to the consumer, right? He's not coming to you. And you have to figure out where he is and go there. Like I said, you know, conventionally, we are sold significantly, almost 60 to 70% through physical retail trade and all the local electrical hardware stores, you know, MFR, multi-format details, et cetera, et cetera that they still do. Right now, you know, that mix is changing. That is, you know, we were always available online through the e-commerce platforms, et cetera. I think the share of that has gone up and will go up. It has been increasing, but I think that will accelerate a little more in terms of the pace of growth of online versus offline. And therefore we have to make sure that we're present there. So conventionally, we had these two different, you know, selling buckets, the online channel and the offline. I'm not talking about the other channels of government sales and the installed departments, institutional selling, et cetera, et cetera. What we've done interestingly over the last one month is blended all of this together. And we've created our omnichannel, you know, models, hybrid models. We've just opened it all out, you know, telling the consumers you decide what you want to do. You want to go to Amazon and Flipkarts and all the other e-commerce platforms and buyers from there. You want to go down to your local store, buy us from there. You want to go to your large format, Chromars and Vijay sales and multi-format retail, you can buy us there, which is conventional. Or we've enabled all the selling channels to our platform. You come in order on our site, on our website, and we'll find a local distributor or retailer will come and deliver the product to your house. You call us up, you publish numbers, we'll find something to happen. We've also enabled that for our retailers. No, because our business sales force cannot visit every retailer in store and counter like they used to. We've created an app that allows them to actually, you know, place their orders. So same facility that we offer to consumers, we offer to retailers. We are planning certain, you know, engagements with all the RWA's, residential colonies, et cetera, as to how do we, you know, reach out to them. A couple of other things that are work in progress, which I cannot share on a public platform right now, but we're putting those channels to play. So my larger point is we had very structured two, three buckets of how we'd sell the channels. We opened up three, four more such channels and blended it all together and made it all hybrid and almost created every permutation combination that's possible out there. Having done that, then my philosophy is I'm neutral. I'm not here to decide that e-commerce will grow faster or retail will grow faster or this will grow faster, that will grow faster. It's a consumer who's gonna make that choice. When I put my marketing monies also, I follow the same theory. People tell me digital is growing faster, TV is old, good for you, okay? I will put some money on digital, I will put some money on TV, I'll put some money on every media out there. But because digital is growing faster and TV is not, will I put more money on digital? No, TV is yet a bigger medium. I will, the consumer is deciding which is a bigger medium then, which is not. And I am only, you know, loyal to the consumer, whichever is the biggest medium at a point of time and gives me my best bang for my buck and for my rupee, will find my rupee, come to them, right? I am not here to have a bias as to which one makes me look cooler or which one, you know, is trending better or not. I just have to move at the times, but I don't need to move ahead of the times because then I'm misaligned with the consumer. So I'm neutral, I will move my products and my marketing money as fast and to the quantum that the consumer wants it to be. That's my only, you know, Dharma in life. There's another shift happening, which is that news channels were seen in a certain way before the lockdown. And now you have news channels like breaking all records as far as viewership is concerned. Yeah. As a brand head, do you think it is gonna alter the way we perceive news channels forever now or is it a reversible thing that we might go back to everywhere? Some of your colleagues in, you know, I don't know who all are listening here, all of you are my friends. That's news entertainment channels. I think, yes, there's a sport and new shells relative rating and a share of new shells rating on the genre right now. I think that's natural because people wanna follow the news on Corona. If you wanna follow the news and events, there's new government announcements every day. People wanna follow that number one. Number two, you've seen a huge sport and do that. Thanks to, you know, the Raman and Mahabharat and everything else that's come back. Number three, you've seen a huge sport in the movie channel, you know, genre also. You've seen a sport in the non-prime time ratings because people are sitting at home through the afternoon and you have seen a drop in the GEC ratings. That's simply because they are not shooting new content. I don't think you can, you know, extrapolate the current ratings and shares forever. I think there will be a point in time when, you know, GECs will start shooting, you know, fresh content, you will have the slopes back on it and people will start watching that again. So I think, you know, yes, news channels, you know, Eminence or Share has gone up but we would be exaggerating that to Zoom and extrapolate that to being forever, you know, settling at these shares. I'll just leave it at that there. Great. So I think we have getting a lot of questions. I think we should go to some audience questions also. Let me start with one, which is from Julian Thadathil. He's asking, post-COVID, would a consumer durable company such as yours pivot into products and services from safety, personal hygiene and preservation of life, those kinds of carrying? So let me tell you what we will do and what we'll not do, right? What we will do and are already doing I've given example of our fans and coolers that have now created, you know, features of the anti germs, anti bacteria, et cetera. Therefore that becomes a value add functionality or feature that, you know, just makes my product, you know, fit in with the needs. We are working on some other solutions right now that, you know, cater to health and well-being or functionalities or features in our existing products and product categories that, you know, build in enhanced need for well-being. You can do that with kitchen gadgets in various ways. That's what we are doing. What we are also looking at is close adjacencies. So any product categories that are very closely aligned to what we are presenting, but borrow on existing competencies or competitive advantages that we have. What we will not do is things that we don't understand or things that we're not competitive in. For example, you know, as a socially responsible corporate actually there was a point in time a month ago when we very closely looked at manufacturing ventilators because I realized that there's a supply demand gap and as a country and as a society, we need ventilators. And therefore we offered our production facilities and engineering skill sets to make that happen. We did get some offers to actually set up that as a business to run that for the future. That was not our intent. And to that my answer was a clear no. We're not getting into the business of medical equipment just because there may be a rise in medical equipment requirements in the country. We don't understand that. That's not our competence. We will not be competitive on that. So we need to be careful as to when we diversify what are you doing? Are you diversifying? Are you simply adding value and tweaking your products? The best case is to tweak your products to fit in the new requirements. The second best business case will always be to diversify and to close adjacencies where we'll find competence and advantage. The worst thing for you to do is to get into something that you will completely, you know, lose money on and add no value to anybody. Right. There's a question from Narayanan Ganesan. He's asking, do you expect a revenge purchase post COVID? You're going to come back out of the homes and purchase everything? I would certainly hope so. I hope people come back and start buying everything out there and get the economy going back again quickly. I don't know. I think there will be a sum level of that. There is pent up demand. People have needs. I have needs, things that have not been able to go and buy. The last, you know, whatever 50 days I've not been able to go have a meal. I've not been able to go visit my barber. I've not been able to go, you know, whatever. There's a bunch of needs, consumer needs that have not been able to fulfill. I need to, you know, go and fulfill those needs. After that, how long will that sustain? I don't know. Take the Disneyland example that I gave you from Shanghai. Disneyland is open. First day is full. It's sold out for, I think they opened out tickets. So, you know, booking for the first two weeks or three weeks, it's full to capacity. You aren't getting, you know, people are not getting tickets for that, right? But the catch there is they're open to 30% capacity. Maybe if they're open to full also, maybe they've been full for the first two, three weeks to this revenge demand. The question is how sustainable is this? And is that going to be a U and a V? Or does that then become an M or an N or whatever? So that's, that stability is important. I don't know what the answer to that answer. The question from Dr. Om Prakash, Haldar is asking now no direct selling or through traditional logistics is happening. Do you hire likes of Amazon, SCM? What are those strategies you are adopting? I'm not fully clear on the question, but just to answer it. So, yes, I mean, we've always been on these channels. We are on Amazon that he mentioned all other platforms. And through these platforms, they're not just present as products, but obviously we have ongoing marketing and promotional initiatives on those platforms. They've always been there. We may step some of that up. The conventional sales channels are equally important to us. The country like India, we must not forget that's yet the dominant share of trade or selling and revenue, both from our channels, those channel partners are important to us. We value the business through them and consumers do like to go to a shop and buy it. We also want to continue to service that. Over the last two weeks, as we speak, actually the logistics and supply chains have opened up. Warehouses are open, trucks are moving. Many of the stores have opened about 50% of the districts of India. And we are servicing those. We are starting to see some sales happen through that. As things step up, we'll continue to service that. Just a question from Sanket Rastogi. What will change in terms of pricing? Will there be some offers coming for the end user as to attract them? Yes, but you have to understand you have to make a strong value proposition because consumers are not feeling rich. Making a strong value proposition is not the same as dropping prices. Those are two different things. You make a value proposition that A means which of SKUs which products you're focusing on. There will be a certain amount of down-trading. So in any category you have products that straddle various price points. So he'll yet come down, there will be down-trading for a lot of people who will buy the lower price point product. So we'll just try and promote a plug or make that more available to meet their needs than a higher price product that he or she may have bought earlier. Which doesn't mean you drop the prices of everything because you have to understand that businesses are also hurting, their margins are also taking a beating. They cannot go below a certain price. Second, there are other ways to make a value proposition where you bundle products, but we offer them some schemes that we offer them this higher value by offering them higher quantum, et cetera. There are many ways to make that happen. Not through price drop, but higher value to consumers. There's a question from Manus Sahu. He's asking, is it a good idea to work on cash flow to increase demand by passing on the profit of the product to the consumer? Let me answer for our business. I don't understand every other business. In our business, we had small ticket size in our purchase decisions. So there's no concept of me passing on cash flow. It's not even an EMI built product product. You know, appliances, a couple of thousand bucks is not really very conducive for EMI's or cash flow benefits. So I think values will be passed on differently from what I spoke. I think where the cash flow questionarily comes into place for the whole channel, okay? Retailers, our distributors, our vendors, I think that's the channel that needs lubrication because of, you know, on liquidity and cash flow really. So as a company and as a brand, I need to make sure that I'm also catering to all of these players and they are also stakeholders. If I have to lubricate all of these players, people, and you know, make sure that they're all benefited or able to come back, that will help me get my sales back to the consumer. So that is equally important for me to service the consumer that everybody in the chain is, you know, able to stand up, you know, do business again. From Atul Salman, what would be the best media to reach out to distributors and retailers for a new brand with limited budget for, for instance, in current pre-vaccine scenario? Pre-, okay, current pre-vaccine scenario. That's a very complicated question thrown in everything in there. I think the question is mixing up a couple of things, you know, reaching out to, you know, if you're talking a communication to consumers, that's where your media comes into play, okay? I do have a bias for TV as, you know, or broadcast as many of, you know, against a lot of pushback from our team. But simply, like I said, I'm guided by numbers, not by any bias release people, as far as consumers are concerned. For a new or nascent brand, sometimes broadcast is hard, simply because of the scale of budgets required there, okay? Therefore, digital may be a bit of it, and many other mediums. For reaching out to your, you know, retailers or distributors really, you don't go through mass media. You know, if they are your distributors or retailers, they're much more effective in direct communication channels that you actually can call them. As a company, we've been in very regular contact with them. We have a whole WhatsApp for business group, you know, activated. We have direct daily communication channels with them. What we've done is use that far more frequently in these last 15 days than we normally would. Made sure that they are also engaged. We've been running contest and engagement activities for them also. Like I said, they are stakeholders. You have to handhold them. All the things that I spoke about, consumers dealing with tough times, once through for all of these people also, and you have to make sure that you're feeling or keeping them as motivated as anybody else. Question from Gitanjali Bhattacharji. Your thoughts on playing with gamification to your millennials. Sorry, playing with? Gamification to your millennial. So, Ruhi, this way I'm gonna go back to my first confession, right? I don't understand jargon, okay? Millennials, gamification, it's all nice to read. Nice terms. You'll see E.T. brand page four, et cetera, you know, throws this around all the time, et cetera. You have to simplify some of this stuff, right? I have consumers. It's a consumers, in my case, that straddle across many demographics. They have different age brackets that they fall in, and they have different mindsets that they fall in. As a brand, I'm making sure that I remain contemporary. I remain young at heart. I am the youngest old brand in the country in my space. So we are an 80-year-old brand, but we make sure we reinvent and remain contemporary. That's the message that our brand team works with. As long as it remaining contemporary, you have to yet remain universal, okay? If I start catering only to millennials, I think, you know, on an exclusive basis, then I will, you know, alienate some of my other TGs, okay? If I'm a mass or a multi, what should I say, multi-demo, multi-age brand. So I don't think we should overemphasize some of these hot terms that come our way. You have to understand who you're talking to, what your TG is, and what the breadth of that TG is, and then tailor your communication to that. Let's not get carried away by, you know, over-aginess and some of these things. On the other hand, going back to my previous organization, so a lot of what I just said for Bajaj maybe holds true for colors as a brand, right? If I'm MTV, then of course I need to talk this lingo. Of course I need to be cool. Of course I need to talk to them. Of course I need to talk, you know, then that's a whole different lingo that one is talking. But that's not the space today that's our focus as a company brand. We have time for one last question, though there are a lot of questions which would not show, which will remain unanswered. This is from Pushpa Anant Raman. She's asking, has brand loyalty taken a hit specifically in appliances, durable categories, and also in general overall? Because of this COVID lockdown? I think you'll see two ends to that answer, right? I think you will see actually greater concentration of brand loyalty, which means the brands with whom you had greater connect which should typically be the top three or four brands in any category is the ones you'll end up going back to. Whenever you have a problem, you go back home. You always go back to your points of anchor. You always go back to your roots. So top three or four brands in a way is your anchor points. You will go back to that because that gives you a sense of safety and assurance. So there I would think the loyalty scores would go up. Where the loyalty scores would go down is actually to the long tail of the brands, okay? People's ability or willingness to experiment goes down. People's ability or willingness to take risks go down. And therefore people's ability or willingness to do something new goes down. They will want to latch on to something known, tried and tested. And therefore the leading brands or top brands will actually get greater affinity or loyalty from the consumers at this point of time. Provided they play their cards right and meet the empathy in all of those other parameters that I've told you about. And a lot of the new brands, you and friends will actually find the going back much more tough at this point of time. Thank you so much. We're out of time. Say thank you for joining us for this wonderful session and you have totally decimated the jargon is that you didn't believe in it. You have some great insights and there are a lot of questions still unanswered but we hope we can take them next time. So thank you for joining us on this ABB Presents which brand talk virtual series and hopefully see you next time soon. Thank you, Roel. Thank you to you and your team, to all the participants and to my team. I didn't acknowledge them upfront but I think all I speak really is on their behalf. So thank you very much for having me.