 now. So it's great that Anand actually asked the question how many marketers are there in the room and most I think there were a lot of fans I guess most of the people in the room are marketers. I come from the other side which is the world of consumer insights which I think all of us marketers believe we get all the insights on our own when we are monitoring social media because we get our dashboards when we are walking our dog I guess in the park because we talk to our neighbors or when we are doing market visits because we talk to a few retailers. Well that's one of the reasons why India is one of the least penetrated markets for consumer insights. India is also I think if you look at the ratio of GDP to marketing and advertising budgets would also be probably on the lower side and the reason for that in my view is the kind of data based decision making that tends to grow advertising and marketing is something that we need to do a lot more of and we probably don't do as much in investing in understanding consumer data at scale. So my topic is different my topic is I'm going to speak on purpose but I thought I will just give this bit of introduction on the consumer insights industry which I think all of you would be interacting with in some form or the other. So today I'm going to speak on purpose and what purpose means in a world which has been disrupted or not disrupted maybe just amplified by technology. So our world is obviously different today we have had wars we have had supply chain disruptions we have had unprecedented level of inflation maybe to some extent India has remained a little insulated but we are seeing recovery which is Bharat and urban India moving at different pace volume recovery has still not happened its value on which most of the FMCG companies are still riding on so there is a lot of uncertainty and in that environment in which the consumer is also facing a lot of ambiguity can brands really stand by. So some data from study we did on purpose to look at financials of brands that believe that they have a purpose versus those that don't clearly have a purpose and what we found is purpose driven companies tend to over perform on financial outcome metrics. Now this is as evaluated by the companies themselves but if we also looked at consumer data and this data comes from Cantor's brand Z which is the world's largest brand building database that exists and this data also supports the fact that if consumers believe that you have a purpose your brand valuation tends to be higher and there is a 1775 percent higher growth in 12 year brand value if consumers believe that your company actually has a purpose and in an era which is completely disruptive with digital innovation, hyperlocal marketing, value perceptions changing, sustainability I think this is as strong data as you can get and last year when we again did brand Z we again found that there is about a 62 percent valuation growth in brands where consumers endorse that they know and they understand what the brand's purpose is. So if the data is so clear then why I think Byron Sharp had written famously that purpose marketing is the depth of marketing. Why are there so many questions on should we actually do purpose-based marketing or cost-based marketing? I think that comes from a fundamental misunderstanding of what consumers see purpose as or brand purpose as. Purpose simply is the reason why your brand exists and the impact that you seek to have in the lives of your consumers the people who are also people and their ecosystem or the world that they live in. So it is not necessarily about doing something for a social cause it is it can just be delivering excellent high quality consistent service it can just be about high quality products that make life simpler. As long as we are clear on that and as long as that is consistently felt by our consumers they will believe that the brand has a purpose and last year we actually felicitated we have been felicitating purpose driven brands as seen as consumers for the last two years and last year we gave the award to Tadati for what we believe is communication led purpose. T is about refreshment, T is about wake up and they chose a theme that goes with what T stands for what their consumers look for in T and therefore and very nicely embedded socially relevant messaging into it. So it the product and what they are talking about actually go hand in hand and consumers consistently believe that it's a purpose led brand. But what has technology really changed we have been speaking a lot about I mean there is zoom there is hybrid we don't have to meet each other we can do this entire thing over a zoom webinar if we want to. So what has technology actually changed for brands? I think there are four things that have changed the first is it has bought in a lot of new influencers. India in Indians in general compared to the global average are way higher on being influenced by influencers as claimed by them. So this comes from a global study that we do it's called a global issues monitor and consistently we find that Indians believe and trust influencers on social media a lot more than their global counterpart and that's why you have not faced the kind of big technology backlash that's happening across the world till now. The other thing is that through social media we can express in anonymity. We love expressing ourselves through social media and that's again higher than the global average. So not only do we follow influencers and get influenced by them we also love to express ourselves a lot more and influence brand narratives to that extent and that means for brands consumers own your brands now it's not a one-way dialogue anymore it's consumers are feeding you back real-time what they feel about your brands and that makes it all that much more difficult and therefore the judgment is fast. So I won't take an Indian example there are thousands of Indian examples but I don't want to I mean I don't know so I won't take an Indian example but let me take a different example the Bud Light controversy that happened recently in US was because Bud showed a certain kind of person who their audience their relatively conservative target audience did not like and the kind of backlash that happened reflected immediately in sales drop. We have seen instances of this in India we have seen instances where brands have communicated and then taken back to the communication. So the importance of understanding that consumers own your brand and the judgment is going to be extremely fast is is really really really critical. The other thing is therefore if judgment is going to be fast do you want to lead or you want to be led this question was not there when you were doing one-way messaging when you were doing television advertising consumer could not feedback you could tell the consumer look I think you should adopt this progressive agenda on something or the other. Today if you are doing that you better be sure that you can stick to it and not fall back the moment there is a backlash. So either let's find ways of nudging the consumer in a culturally socially inclusive way or not go that route at all and therefore the question of remaining steadfast also comes. So there are four broad ways in which purpose can manifest itself purpose as a commitment I think we I mean Nike does it purpose as a commitment essentially purpose as a product I think Apple the kind of products they make the consistency which which they have stood for great user design is purpose as a product they have been deviating a bit so when a user design kind of organization wants to become a technology organization then they have to think through how they are going to manage that but fundamentally our purpose can be expressed through your product. I think the Polotire example is a great example where we connected what the product is to what we are doing purpose as an experience which is what I think a lot of airlines need to learn from and purpose as simply communication I think the way Tata T did it I mean you don't really have to do anything big they just simply picked up what T stands for and linked it to a socially relevant cause. But what we have to keep in mind as marketers that the value action gap in India is real so whatever you do considering that the question that is always asked is ROI the fact is Indians may say they want sustainability but they're not going to pay more for brands that are sustainable maybe niche maybe at a very upper premium end but not if you're if you're in a volume market and I'm not even talking about volume market as rural I'm talking about standard urban volume market so that value action gap is a real gap so in a sense if you want to do sustainability see it as hygiene don't see it as a way to premiumize see it as where consumers will penalize you for not doing something not that they will reward you for doing something and that is a big mindset shift because we have to also balance our PNL I guess. Therefore I think I really like this example of Tesla in China unlike I mean to some extent in India as well they instead of inclusiveness sustainability are all there but the main thing main what consumers believe what brands should be doing is to make in China is to build the Chinese pride and that's what Tesla did they set up a factory in Shanghai and they made the first EV there and and and they sort of led in some sense they became a part of China's electric vehicle revolution so it doesn't have to be about inclusivity or about any any any such specific today's buzzword it can be something it has to be something that's relevant to your consumer and that is why what we need to first understand is what does your target audience or your consumer believe or want from your brand and you have to nudge the consumer I think the the mistake a lot of brands make that we try to disrupt we try to provoke especially in social media and I don't know how many social media marketers are here but a lot of social media content wants to break the clutter and that's the only thing it seems to want right provoke break the clutter stand out now provoking breaking the clutter standing out is one objective of communication not the entire objective of communication and it does land a lot of times in the wrong way so nudging the consumer along I think there's two great examples of communication one was iodex which actually changed their prototype to this female IPS officer and the other one is Unilever does a brilliant job of what we call un-stereotyping they do it through most of their communication this is a great communication by Wim where they followed the same pattern of basically promoting neutral portrayals you don't have to disrupt you don't have to show something that Indians are not comfortable with as yet you can nudge them along and consumers do reward when brands do the right thing so this is again data from the work we do on creative testing and and what we find is that if consumers see a ad as being progressive or gender neutral there is a much higher impact on the brand equity and short-term sales likelihood much more than many other countries but finally what is really really important is to just remain consistent when the consumer thinks about your brand they should be very clear what does the brand stand for and what technology has done what social media has done is to actually because we are reacting and responding ended up at times make us forget that the class the the basics of brand building haven't really changed the basics of brand building are still the same so brands even when they are built on social media are also I mean even your direct to consumer brands the digital first brands also fundamentally are brands where consumers have to know you they have to feel what you're offering to them is relevant and you have to stand out from your customers other competitors so I think I am actually I've saved some time but yeah this is what I wanted to end with these were the brands that we actually awarded in 2021 for very different reasons and you will not be able to find a single theme I mean to the purpose for Amazon the way consumers see it is about the fact that they deliver fast and convenient I do not have to I don't have problems when I order on Amazon and for them that's fine that's Amazon's purpose it is not a purpose that is I don't know if that is Amazon's purpose but that is how consumers that's what consumers want from Amazon so as long as they are convinced that they are getting what they want they believe the brand is living up to its purpose so I want to leave you with this to say a brand with purpose is a brand with meaning but meaning for your consumers I have a short AV of what I really liked as one of the communication during that sorry can I can we play the AV I just lost it I think in my can you just play the AV please I'm not getting it from my clicker if people say your dreams are crazy if they laugh at what you think you can do good stay that way because what non-believers fail to understand is that calling a dream crazy is not an insult it's a compliment don't try to be the fastest runner in your school or the fastest in the world be the fastest ever don't picture yourself wearing obj's jersey picture obj wearing yours don't settle for homecoming queen or linebacker do both lose a hundred twenty pounds and become an iron man after beating a brain tumor don't believe you have to be like anybody to be somebody if you're born a refugee don't let it stop you from playing soccer for the national team at age 16 don't become the best basketball player on the planet be bigger than basketball believe in something even if it means sacrificing everything when they talk about the greatest team in the history of the sport make sure it's your team believe in something if it means sacrificing everything now for us to have the courage to take that path we will have to not end up doing what i mean not take the route that bud light ended up or ben and jerry went up a lot of the indian brands end up with if we have to take that route we'll have to stand steadfast in that route the trick is to balance that your consumer is not going to pay you more for this you have to still have your balance sheets to manage so what you define as your purpose has to be that tricky balance and it's for you to figure that balance out we can only provide insights around it thank you