 The panel discussion for the day, the theme of the panel is digital strategies to survive and thrive in the new normal. I'm not the expert here. Let me invite forward the leaders for you, everybody. Here they come. Our first panelist, we have Ajay Khakar, Chief Marketing Officer at the Dibrida Capital. As our second panelist, we have Belain Gandhi, Senior Director and Category Head Food, PepsiCo, India. We have with us Mok Chopra, Chief Marketing Officer at KFC. We have with us Nidhi Hola, Director of Integrated Marketing and Microsoft of India. We have with us Ruchira Jaitley, CMO, HMD Global. And we have with us Dindharta Bhutalia, Chief Marketing Officer at Asia. And chairing this session, everybody, is Vivek Bhargava, CEO of Dance Performance Group, Dentsu Ajay's network. Now, he's the one who began his entrepreneurial journey in the year 1997, when he founded Communicate to the company that joined hands with iCrospect from the Dentsu Ajay's network in 2012, and led the new entity iCrospect Communicate to as founder and managing director. The company would be running at iCrospect, India at the end of 2015, the debate as CEO till 2016, where he is in the investment position. I'm gonna hand this over to our able moderator for the rest of the session. Have a good one, everyone. And thank you for joining us and giving us your time. They too, of their time. Thanks, Gideka. Pleasure moderating the session. I think we've had very exciting conversations just planning the panel. So I think now is the time for the show. So I'm gonna start off with each of the panelists where they can just give a very, very short introduction of themselves and sort of give their position and take on the topic. So I'm gonna go with the screen, the way I'm seeing the screen. So we start with you, Moksh, would love to have your two minutes on the topic and your position. Sure. Thanks, Avik. So my name is Moksh Chopra. I work at Yum Brands. I head marketing for KFC in India. You know, I mean, the fact that the last few months have tested our ability to adapt as humans, resultively as businesses as well. And let me tap into a couple of aspects that kind of are relevant for our conversation today. One of the biggest emergent responses, I would say, has been what we call the accelerated habit shift. The digital adoption curve, I think, has accelerated quite a bit. You know, while this suits the digital natives just fine, you know, the Gen Z, the millennials, maybe some of our kids or nephews and nieces. The fact is there is a whole slew of new users who are entering the digital ecosystem for the first time. And this is both your desire or compulsion. In fact, there was a study I saw by McKinsey in the US. Yeah, I'm not able to hear you very clearly. Is all the most clearly than we just go on. Is everybody able to hear? Yes, we can. Okay. Looks like my connection is bad then. Okay, fair enough. No worries. Yes, I was talking about the study that McKinsey did in the US, about 33% of the digital users in the last few months have actually been first time e-commerce users of the respective categories. So something that I call digital debutants for the categories. Even back home in India, you know, the Arogya Setu app, 150 million users plus in just a few weeks. So there's obviously a clear need to provide both intuitive and easy experiences, not just for the digital native, but I would say for the digital flirters, for the digital debutants for our categories and making sure that we design the UI and UX which is easy for them. The other observation that I'll quickly tap into is what we call the rise of the home body. The fact is, you know, people's relationship with their home has evolved over the last few months. They've been engaging in what we call comfortable indulgences. Creative sites have been emerging. A small set of people have got comfortable with working from home as well. And, you know, and while there's no doubt that people are gonna start stepping out for work, for important tasks, meeting close ones and over time, even for entertainment, the fact is the comfort that the home has provided in the last few months is going to stain people's psyche for some time. And hence I feel that, you know, businesses would need to and continue to enhance the relevance on this front, build home accessibility, using tech, propositions like contactless, and you know, and initiatives around those funds. So while it's clear and undeniable that there is a digital thrust, the one thing I will leave us with is that in the midst of the digital thrust, I think we can't forget the aspect of providing what we call a trustworthy human interaction. We shouldn't forget about that and keep finding ways to merge the digital and the physical worlds through the respective journey our businesses and brands go through. So that's a quick overview of my take on the topic in question. Thanks a bit. Awesome, Moksh. I think one of the things that I remember about US was that in 10 years it has grown, the e-commerce had grown from seven to 16 and then grew from 16 to 27% in last four months in just terms of e-commerce, right? So I think everything that Lenin said, right, sometimes decades happen in a few weeks, right, sometimes decades nothing happens. So I think that's what's happening in the digital industry. So over to you, Nidhi would love to have yours on the topic. Sure, thanks a vacant. Thanks for the perspective, Moksh. I'm Nidhi, I lead integrated marketing at Microsoft India and I wanted to share my perspective from the customer lens. So as to what has changed from a customer perspective, the way we interact with the customers. So there are three broad trends that I personally am seeing. The first one is on the customer behavior. The same customer is easily distracted like always was and the same customer can be indistractable. So let me explain what I mean. So our traditional classification of a customer as one personality type was always flawed. There's multiple personality types in all of us. There's ying and yang in all of us. So on one hand, we enjoy Nike longish format content or body form room stories. And then the same customer is also sharing TikTok videos. So this combination of distracted and indistractable mindset or behavior of the customer is really exaggerated and magnified in this virtual world. And so as a marketer, having one strategy to crack that customer behavior will not work. So that's one thing. The second one that I want to call out is the virtual world. How we need as marketers to embrace the virtual world. How do we see it as an opportunity, get creative in a way to help the customer manage the current situation because we're not limited by geography anymore. So in the B2B world where I come from, if I had to host a conference and call somebody from Coimbatore to a Delhi, I'm taking away a full day, but now it's an opportunity. I can actually reach out to the customer, educate them, skill them and meet their needs in a virtual scenario. And with that, I can actually build what Moshe also suggested, which is meaningful, honest relationships with my customer. So the third one that I want to call out is customer centricity and empathy. So these are not just phrases or words in the brand manifestos anymore, Vivek. It is here and now. And for this, the age old debate of brand and performance really needs to end. We need to focus on performance, but at the same time, not lose sight of the brand. Brand is who we are, brand is our soul. So we need to invest in building the brand equity today, any size of organization, so that we're able to earn the customer's trust. So as I see it, these three would be the changes in the customer way of interacting with brands, which is it's a virtual world. You want to see this experience, customer centricity and empathy and of course managing the changing customer behavior of being distracted and indestructible. I think Bangon, Nidhi, I think, I used to, my daughter is 70 years old and I used to think that she has an attention span of a goldfish, but in the last four months, we had a lot of courses together and one of them was a four hour workshop every day for four days in a row. And she sat through all four of the hours and I realized that each of us have different personas and depending on what kind of content we're consuming, we keep on changing. It's almost a schizophrenic kind of a personality that each person has and as Bangon, I think it's lovely to hear that and how do marketers actually look at that personality and then create content according to that personality which people are. Next, what do you Siddharth, would love to have your views? Hi, thanks and very interesting to hear both of you actually talk. I was sort of ruminating over the different challenges that we've faced in the aviation context, probably one of the hardest state from the pandemic so far. I look after marketing, PR and comms and the capability for India. One of the things which I fall back upon on a lot of these areas that I think has got accentuated in this current crisis is a maximum that was formed by a gentleman called William Gibson who's a cyberpunk author who said something to the effect of, I think the future's already here. It's not very well-developed. And this is a recap thing of what we call the variant rule, I mean, I started economics. Hall variant is a microeconomist but also now I think the chief economist for Google and he said a simple way to forecast the future is to look at what rich people have today and middle income people will have the equivalent 10 years from now, four people will have it in an additional decade. The manner in which that consumer need is met is not necessarily the same though. So digital tends to drive that customer journey and precipitate variant rule in many ways. To take a couple of quick examples, rich people traditionally don't wait in line, right? You have minions, you have butlers, you have concierges, et cetera. The digital rich today have apps and wearables which are fulfilling the same service. Or the rich would always have personal assistance. The digital rich today have Google Assistant or Chatbot. So in this pandemic, we've actively deployed, for example, our Chatbot on WhatsApp. And going to the change in demographic that we spoke about, we've enabled that to happen in Hindi as well because we noticed a lot of contact center inputs that were coming in who are happening in vernacular. People were choosing Hindi or vernacular languages on the IVR. Or the other maxim, for example, is that the rich don't go to the mountain, right? The mountain comes to the rich. The whole gig economy of the Chattin economy, Amazon Prime, Netflix, Uber Eats, your cinema hall comes home, your food comes home, et cetera. So a lot of that is things that we're deploying because we're realizing people are used to that service. One of the things which we took out recently as a service offering, for example, is something called FlyPorter, which is a doorstep-to-doorstep baggage delivery. So you don't carry your baggage to the airport. Somebody will come home, pick it up for you. It'll go to the airport and wherever you're going to, it seamlessly sort of drops off at the hotel at your destination. So I think a lot of these things have got accentuated, which were things that we were thinking would be, like was mentioned by Moksha Nidhi before this, things that would happen 10 years down the line have happened in a very near term. So that's my quick take on it, I think. No, I perfectly agree, Siddharth, but one quick thing out there is that at one point in time in the 80s, Nidhi would find an interesting wind tail, which is Windows and Intel, owned 110% of the industry profits. So companies that actually cater to that rich, but 20% of the customers give you 200% of their profits, can actually have a completely different strategy for that 20%. And I think digital is allowing us to do that. And I think it's going to be a very critical role because we're going to have lesser marketing budgets. We have lesser marketing budgets than would be very essential for us to provide these well-built marketing as Rajesh Jain called, say, services to certain people. And I think that's where the opportunity is because with reduced budget, you're going to reach out to lesser people, then better reach out to the best customers you can. So, okay. So next, Ajay, would you like to have your views? Yeah, hi Vivek. You know, if I look at myself with the gray hair that I have, if I look at myself as a marketer, or if I look at myself as a representative of the financial services industry, so what do I have on my plate? The first is Purani Kahavathar, the old-order changes yielding place to the new. And I've always, in recent years, heard people talking about the importance of learning, unlearning and relearning. And I thought it was meant for veterans like me. I think what the pandemic has taught us is that this applies to every single one of us, the youngest in the profession, the youngest in the consumer, and of course, the senior citizens because everyone is at par when the surrounding world changes and changes so dramatically. So a person like me who would never do without my morning newspaper today has discovered the e-paper and doing very well with it. Thank you. On the other hand, a customer who I thought financial services would only want high touch, today is discovering high touch within high tech, like we're doing out here across the table. So if you ask me, I think it's just like driving or swimming. While we all look forward to getting out of our confines, we all look forward to getting back to life as usual, behaviors have changed and changed dramatically. But while on one hand, I'll say never say never, I believe technology has to be an enabler. The mistake some of us do is we start and end with technology and consumer comes next. If we start with what is the consumer journey, what is the consumer pain point, what can we address and then find the technology? I think we will be able to find out that high tech can lead to even higher touch. And that's why I think we are very fortunate at Aditya Birla Capital, which is a financial services conglomerate. And as you reminded me Vivek yesterday, yes, we are the only brand who has gone to consumer as one. So I know that we have emerged far stronger as a brand and business post-Mars 2020. And for example, while everyone is trying to reach out to their customers, we own both health and wealth platform, which no other brand today can rightfully go to consumer as. Two is we've realized that till yesterday, we had push categories like life insurance, today and health insurance, they have become pool categories. Third is we've realized that as one brand, we look at all customers as customers for our businesses, rather than for any one business. So at the back end, above the wall, as they say, this has become a great advantage for us. So our model has actually been tested and proven, let me say, right thanks to all of this. What was direct, what was advisor driven industries today are direct to brand category. And last but not the least, we were relying more on offline consumer connects. Today they have become predominantly online consumer connects. So I think we've benefited a lot, but as long as we keep the customer experience the hero, rather than the technology, I think we shall remain in a good place. So just adding to that, I think I'll remember one incident with my father. So I bought him an iPad and they refused to touch it. But what I realized was that he would get up at 4 a.m. And the people would come in at 6 a.m. So that two hours he was so anxious what's happened in the world that he doesn't know about. So then I taught him how to use the newspaper on his iPad. And then it became his morning newspaper much before the newspaper came in. So I think as you said, right, if he can solve a problem, then even the hardcore people who probably my father was not that tech savvy, but he adopted it because it solved a problem for him. So I think that's what we as brand owners must try to do. How do we solve our customers problems? If you allow me to come back for one second, I think what you said about yourself and your father is what brands need to do. If each brand decides to teach one rather than hold for the consumer to find himself or discover himself, you will suddenly find the market expand dramatically. Yeah. So actually I invested in this company called Empowery that teaches elderly people using technology. But we found that now 50% of our users actually are not elderly at all. They just take challenge. They're learning technology through these kind of things. Okay, Ruchira, your views. That's a great segue actually. Because you spoke about two or three things about consumer first technology later. Let me give you a contrary view, Ajay. We are about technology first. So I'm the head of marketing at HMD, the home of Nokia devices. So for us, the phones that we hold is the technology. I also look after, by the way, the portfolio, which is what kind of portfolio of products that you launch and go to market. And it's an interesting confluence. And if you look at it, two or three things I'm going to reference which actually talks about what our big experience has been of the last quarter. When we connected earlier, I think the singular piece that I'd like to leave you with, and I heard Laurent say that in the last session as well, is the pivot and the transformation for a business and how as someone who's holding together business, marketing, consumer and product insights, you can actually fuel the strategy to drive that pivot. And that's why it's a really exciting time if you ask me for a marketer or indeed for someone who's running categories in a business because the ability to pivot and use this moment to actually drive the organization towards what will be the future and thinking future back towards what Siddharth said earlier is probably what's going to distinguish one organization maybe from another in terms of garnering share of moment. I think two or three big things that we did. One was we've done a pulse index. Surprise, surprise. More Indian consumers than global consumers intend to shop more frequently online and use digital payments. So versus a global average of about between 40 and 50% for some of these, we're at a 60%. Equally, Indian consumers are happier to go on to Omni channel and therefore looking at a blended experience to your point, not just high touch but high touch and high tech. I mean, remember, I'm in a category where if I don't see the device, how do I know it's going to work? Interestingly, again, to what Vivek you alluded to earlier, the people coming into the market, the new upgraders and there's a really nice piece of work by Google about it, which talks about people who understand or who are internet savvy and recent upgraders. Recent upgraders are coming on, not just for entertainment, they're coming on for learning or for access to services, products and services. So the world is changing. Whom you can talk to and the products and services you can deliver to what you said, Siddharth, a lot of it isn't in vernacular. So everything that you're saying and I love these panels because sometimes you actually congregate all of these different insights from different industries and you'll find what's driving it is an overall consumer energy that is much larger. And then of course we see it manifest in different ways across our different categories. So it's a very exciting time for me personally, moving from what was beverages and food and Dylan comes next, the category I used to be on but moving from there into what is a tech product and then looking at therefore, what products do we innovate on? How do we go to market with those products? Is now becoming a completely different set of questions and a different opportunity to monetize and as a marketer, a very exciting time. Yeah, thanks. So one thing I'll add, Ruchira, you know that I think even though sometimes it's tech first but I think that, so let me give you an example. I have a friend of mine who uses a Nokia phone, the old phone, right? The reason he uses it is that it's got an eight-day battery life. So if you're just speaking and not doing anything else other than speaking in the phone, it lasts for eight days. Now he travels a lot and he's not found any other phone that has an eight-day battery life, right? So I think- No, so you'd be surprised. Yeah, yeah, you'd be surprised. I'm sorry, I'm gonna cut you here. This is really exciting. A lot of our feature phones that we sell today at a considerable premium, a premium of 100% plus maybe to some other devices are to people like you and me. We've got a primary device and believe me, a lot of those device owners are iPhone users. But they want a device in which they can put aside their smartphone and all the distractions and get down to work, stay connected. And actually our connectivity on those devices is above par and superior to anything else in the world. So stay connected, but at the same time, focus on the task. So to your point on digital, I mean, there is just ADHD. And I'd say, hyperactive digital disorder actually is the way I'd put it. So in that ADHD age, there was a police officer from Orissa who actually turned around and said, total given advice to a UPSC aspirant. He said, what do I do? He said, to get through the UPSC and he said, just buy a Nokia 5310, it's on Twitter. And it went viral, right? Because then a distributor of course stepped in and said, I'm gonna sponsor it for this guy who wants to aspire to it. And there were 15 other students who said, oh, we'd also like the same devices. Because the fact is, you want connectivity, but not, so yeah, I'm sorry, that's a really, it was really cute, it happened just five days ago. Really, really interesting anecdote. We spoke on indistractable, so I had a chance to attend this webinar and there is an app called forest. You install the forest, you pick up your phone, then the tree dies. So anybody who wants indistractable stuff is an amazing app. Dylan, on that note, your views? Yeah, so I'm just gonna build on what I've heard so far. And I think the paradigm that I see happening is that this current situation is actually not a disruption, it's an acceleration. Everything that we are seeing today would have happened eventually, whether it is more in on consumption of our products, whether it is more adoption of digital technology in terms of consumption of media, or in terms of purchase behavior, all of those things would have eventually happened. That kind of paradigm then leaves you with kind of two implications, right? Number one is what we are therefore experiencing is a significant acceleration in that adoption, right? And that means that speed is going to be a significant lever of comparative advantage or disadvantage. The other one is that expecting consumers to reverse back to what they were in the past is probably not going to happen because over a period of time, they would have gotten used to it. So both those things put together are kind of going to have an important implication on how we not just market to the consumers, but how we serve them, right? The two things also that come through that implication is that the underlying behaviors or the underlying needs have not changed, right? The new ones are still looking from bag of chips. They're still looking for great quality and at great value, right? The context has changed for sure. But if you think back as marketeers, the context has always been changing. Some of us who have lived through the earlier rounds of transition, right? Whether it was from print to analog, from analog to digital, had to adapt to the different contexts every time. What therefore is important is that we understand how the context has changed for consumers and adapt ourselves to that. The fact that the distribution reach that you have is no longer a source of competitive advantage because a lot more of your shoppers are on e-commerce and e-commerce has suddenly leveled the playing field for everyone. Means that you need to activate other levers of advantage. And that's where I think data comes into play because you can really, in a very, very fragmented world, where consumer experiences are fragmenting, use data as a means of convergence. You can serve ads to consumers differently. You can serve product assortments to them differently. And that I think is the way in which the context will influence many of the choices that we need to make. So I 100% echo the, you know, and that's probably because of our Pepsi lineage, what Ruchira said. It's a very, very exciting time to be a marketer. And, you know, I just can't wait to see where this journey takes us. But the challenge is that in the linear world, if something gets accelerated 10 years, right, it's still linear. The problem is we are living in an exponential world. So when one becomes two, becomes four, becomes million, the million goes to 2 million, 4 million, 8 million, 16. So the challenge is how do your organizations match up with it, right? Because that's where the biggest challenge is. So I attended this singularity university and one thing they taught us was just to create an Excel sheet and say, okay, if this technology is 1% today, what was it 10 years ago, 15 years ago, 30 years ago? And then you draw that graph and it's scary because in five years time, it is going to be scary proportions. But unfortunately, in the last four months, 10 years have passed. So there are a lot of technologies that have broken out, become an exponential, reach a certain size already, and now they're going to multiply exponentially thereafter. So I think we, all marketers have a pretty tough job to do in the next 10 years because a lot of things have suddenly become big and they're going to start multiplying at a very, very rapid scale in the next few years, right? So while I'm with you, Dylan, I would love to have your views on two things. One is the customer journey changing because of what has happened in COVID. And the other is also the, how important is keeping track of sort of customer sentiment. So I think it's a great segue of what you said. I think the biggest change whenever the context has changed, biggest change actually happens in between the years, right? And I think the mindset that we've actually adopted is one to be much more iterative, right? And I'll take an example of what we recently did, which will kind of help answer that. You know, Siddharth mentioned, and Nithi, all three of them actually mentioned about the need for consumer centricity. And fortunately, we have social listening and all of these tools that enable us to kind of keep track on how the consumer is feeling. What we realized was, you know, that there is a very strong need for empathy with consumers. And that's where we said, okay, we have this one piece of content that we had not done much with and how do we, you know, put it out there? And it's called, it's a campaign that we did recently called Lay's Hard Work. And it was an ode to everybody who's involved in bringing a Lay's Package to life, right? Right from the farmer to the truck drivers, to the retailers, to the factory workers and all of that. And that was always a story that we wanted to tell, but we thought that through the listening that it was going to be a very pertinent time to tell it. And it was just this little one thing that we were going to do and then move on. And then the responses started coming in. That's where we, the agility point came in, you know, we scored the highest completion views of any video that we had put out ever on YouTube. And we said, okay, we are on to something. And then we started building up from there on, right? We got influences on board, you know, and now we're sitting on a campaign which is 225 million views, 66 million, you know, engagement, 150 million in PR value, you know, and most importantly, along the journey, we also partnered with the NGO and we were able to get 50,000 PPE kits made available for the frontline workers who are not PepsiCo related. These were people who are not related to PepsiCo outside the PepsiCo ecosystem because those we had already taken care of. And this entire campaign would not have existed if we had not kept our ears close to the ground and then adapted as we understood. One of the things that we heard was, you know, great. Why are, you know, why are other brands not doing it? And so we created this whole brand chain where we invited 40 other brands to participate by thanking them, you know, and they are a frontline for the hard work that they were creating and Moksh is a customer of ours and we were happy to thank AFC on behalf of, you know, their consumer. So I think that that kind of momentum that some of these things can create can catch you by surprise. And one of the enablers for me in this period has been to be able to push the decision making lower down in the organization and trusting a lot more, you know, those who are actually at the frontline of the work that we do, you know, the young brand managers or the young digital manager, marketing managers or even the agency folks. Taking bets on some of our intuition is something that really paid off for us. And I think that's something that I will carry forward and hopefully that will help answer, you know, some of the challenges that you were alluding to earlier. So there are two things that you covered. One, I think was that partnership with different brands and I feel that I think that's a very interesting thought because collaboration has become a new competitive advantage and all the wall gardens are finding out different ways of not sharing first party data, whether it's the iOS updates, whether it's anybody who pursues following the cookie apocalypse that is happening with Chrome browsers, et cetera. I think brands have first party data and non-competitive brands actually come together and collaborate. I think they can actually improve each other's advertising substantially and I think as a segue, what you mentioned, I think it's a very interesting idea which I think a lot of brands definitely must explore. One of the other things we mentioned was empathy and I think that is a question that I think Ayan Siddharth have been discussing that I think what is the role of empathy in the binary world? And a lot of tasks are being replaced in the marketing advertising as well as in the customer service world with AI and people like Nidhi are helping in that process. So how do we balance that? How do we get empathy in the binary world? Siddharth, I'd love to have your views. So I mean, it's interesting as I was saying all of this has got quite accentuated and I think as Dylan was also saying the levers of competitive advantage have changed. Now, unfortunately, I'm cognizant that we come from an industry that has moved from its heyday of service differentiated experiences to what is relatively cookie cutter and not many, I mean, we'll speak up on it, but we must admit that the airline experience across brands is not very differentiated and brands have started now playing on what should be hygiene factors, whether it's safety credentials which everybody essentially has as an industry if you don't, that's an issue, right? Or on time performance and we hop on it ourselves we're quite proud of the fact that we've been number one on time performance across the last year, et cetera. I think what one digital has enabled us to do is to drive a lot of that because behaviors have changed in the last month, for example, we've effectively hit been able to hit a record 98.1% on time performance because consumers have almost entirely been web checking it or they've been doing contactless payments and things like that. But in that environment in a very regulated environment where prices are controlled currently and I mandated it across the board we don't have price differentiation. Everyone from the guests to the cabin crew are wearing masks, face shields. You don't get to see the crew who are otherwise filing it to you, who are the beacons of what the service experience is. You don't see the uniforms, they're wearing gowns. We're not serving meals in the flights. How do you differentiate yourself in this? So from small aspects like the crew trying to retrain themselves and how do you smile with your eyes from behind a face shield or a mask? Or how do you bring alive that service experience? I think it's very, very important as we go down this route of digital by which is by nature binary in remembering that we must bring out the empathy and the human experience, especially in a service industry. And it's a constant dichotomy that we face as we deploy more and more digital things. That whole thing of binary versus exploration, density exploration or you look at other elements like even what we're doing with data in terms of hyper personalization versus what you may call privatized surveillance, right? How do you bridge the gap between these two as you deploy technology to do that? I think that's a constant struggle that we're dealing with, honestly. So Siddharth, I have a content idea for you. I think you need to teach us also how do you smile with your eyes? Because that's the problem I've been facing. I'm always smiling and I generally go for a walk in my building and I would give this smile behind my mask to so many people and nobody would smile back and I don't know if they're smiling back. So this is a great content idea for Asia, teaching people how to smile from behind their mask. I mean, it's been phenomenal. I saw the crew and I guess it goes back to work to a culture at the end of the day. But I saw a lot of the Kevin crew, actually it came from them of this thing of, I'm not being able to connect with my customer. We're not going up to them and serving them. You're not greeting them in the same way that they did. And they went and asked for training almost on gestures and actively trained themselves was surprising to see the difference of just the way in which small things like the way in which maybe makeup is applied even to accentuate how you might be able to smile with your eyes. Which as a consumer you never think of. It's not a tangible difference that you will associate but it leaves you with some small emotional feeling that something happened in that experience or the kind of music that you play in the flight. Can we make it a bit more upbeat when everybody's relatively deadbeat? How do you get an optimistic tone coming in over there? Those small things I think drive low key long-term affinity. Sure, and I would definitely prefer the non-makeup idea. Okay, so Nidhi, I think AI and ML obviously is influencing our industry a lot. And I think measurement of digital and the role of AI and Microsoft Organizational Services has really, really progressed a lot. We'd love to have your views. What's the role of AI, ML in this unprecedented new normal? Yeah, we'll make. So let's step back for a minute and figure the purpose of this transformation that we're talking about, right? So we believe that the essence of any digital transformation journey, its purpose is actually is to generate value and technology becomes the means to an end. So how do you generate value? And I think Ajay also spoke about it earlier that this can be achieved by focusing on the people within your organization first. So how do you align the leadership teams and various business leaders behind what you're trying to achieve in marketing through digital transformation? And then you enable and empower your teams to create more, do more, solve more with the right technology. So don't just go off to the shiny toy. First align the teams and then figure out what technology will help you enable and empower your teams. And that is why at Microsoft, we believe that it's people plus process plus technology but people come first. So now let's talk about the technology since the question was more on deck but I just wanted to kind of call that out since it was being spoken about earlier. So we look at technology as the bridge between the art and the science, excuse me. So the art is creating the right story and the science is plugging it into the customer's journey in a seamless manner, not as an intrusion and da-da-da that we talk about, right? So let's look at how AI and ML brings it to life. First of all, you get to know your customer. You start with listening and reflecting and this is where empathy comes in. I think a lot of the panelists have spoken about empathy. So this is where empathy comes in because you need to start with listening and reflecting. You need to understand their journey and then you seed the market for effective demand creation and this is where brand storytelling comes in. The right story, the right context, the customer's context and the right customer and that's where the right targeting comes in. Especially in our B2B world, it's very critical to go out there, the spray and pre as we call it doesn't work, right? I need to talk to the right customer at the right time in their journey. So that's when we use data and insights to identify the right interventions and also cork the leaky buckets that might exist. So you're continually optimizing performance thanks to all the data and insights that you're getting from the engine and that data and insight actually contributes to how the buyer-driven multi-touch journey is going forward versus one engagement is one lead. We're all past that. Just because somebody engages with your content doesn't mean that that's a lead. All of this done right is when you accelerate the customer journey, you drive sales velocity and you deliver on the lifetime value that the board is asking you to deliver. So we at Microsoft track marketing engagement index and map it back to the sales stage that the customer is at. So you could be a highly engaged customer but you don't have a pipe in my system or you could be a customer which is low engaged and also has no pipe. So then we define, okay, this is the seller's job, this is the marketing's job, this is the partner team's job. This is how we all come together and make it happen. So marketing engagement index or marketing engagement, this modern marketing concept is fundamental to everything we do here. So yeah, quite an exciting learning. Yeah, so actually I was having a discussion with somebody about AI and ML and we were discussing that if today somebody was to make Tom and Jerry cartoon which would earlier take thousands of people to make can be done with two people but we don't make Tom and Jerry anymore. So we make Shrek. We still require thousands of people. So I think the more and more AI and ML comes in our expectations as marketers, expectations as consumers keep on going up exponentially. So the tasks required keep on increasing accordingly, right? So Ruchira on that, I would come to you. I think in the, as a role of marketing and our roles as brand managers, are we gonna play a more pivotal role because post pandemic? Like is it gonna influence business, profit formula? Because earlier we used to talk about digital marketing and marketing now, digital is the age we're living in. So what do you think this transition is gonna be like? No, absolutely. I mean, first of all, for a lot of people who are either on the panel who are listening in I'm sure that's good news. But beyond the fact that we want to, you know make yourself feel a little better about it. A lot of people have spoken about empathy and about staying close to the consumer decision journey. I think if you look at it, the tools have expanded dramatically for the market to have. And like Nidhi was saying, it's not just about engagement but where are you in the journey and how can I get you further? But I think what this pandemic has done in particular is it has even, it has heightened the need to get closer to the consumer. So when I was talking about earlier the technology comes first. It was not that, you know, you don't have empathy because technology is meaningless if you don't understand what role it has to play in the life of the consumer, right? Only a marketer today in an organization is resourced to understand what is the role of this product in the life of that consumer. And particularly in this point in time whether it's selling a bag of lease which gives you that treat and that moment of connect whether it is KFC which my daughter just picked up on Saturday as her ultimate treat moment, you know with her friends, you know, you name it only as a marketer and someone who's close to those insights to understand it. But if you stop there and you make it a case and I think a lot of people have spoken about it have make a case about getting closer and being empathetic. You'll find that at this point in time when businesses are trying to conserve as much as they can on their cash flows and maximize really outcomes it's gonna fall on deaf ears. What we've done at HMD is over the last six months and you know, we saw this maybe coming a little early because we saw in our global markets China as a market, APAC is a market for us and we saw already the impact happening in early Feb and we could see some of the repercussions of markets shutting down, et cetera coming through and then there was Europe which is a large part of our business as well. So we saw it coming and therefore saying how do you impact that journey for the consumer and employ all your tools at the right moment. Nidhi spoke about it and as did a lot of other people. So going omnichannel is something that's no longer it's not a fashionable word. It's not something that's just like untrained. It's something that you've got to do. You've got to be at that moment helping the consumers. So the number of consumers who are desperately looking for a device, right? You know, when Kerala opened up Kerala was the first state in India to open up and on weekends, on a Sunday, you could go in and all mobile stores would open. It was the only state that opened up mobile stores. Consumers were walking and buying the first device. They didn't ask for finance. They didn't ask for discounts. They didn't ask for anything. They wanted to know that they had a reliable and a trusted brand that they could buy. And yeah, I mean, we do really well in those markets. So it was amazing how they'd come in but also they were looking for brands under a certain price because they didn't want to spend too much money. They wanted it in a certain way. They wanted to have certain features and functionality because it had to enable the ROGSA to map without which they couldn't move around. So suddenly there was this whole slew of needs that they had, which could have been reinterpreted maybe six months ago into a completely different set of needs. So to your point, one, knowing that the shop is open in my locality, two, what are those hours? Three, how fast can I go and what are the options? Can I talk to you about the options that exist? So when you walk in, it's a seamless process and your safety is not compromised because suddenly the biggest thing in my head when I'm going through anything from food delivery at home to my neighborhood retail store is how safe am I in that context? Who's pulling all of that together, right? And therefore that seamless understanding of insights to go to market to that product proposition. I mean, do you sell a big bag of chips because people are gonna be at home and sharing from their family versus focusing on just a price point, flavor innovations, because you can't travel so you might wanna eat. I'm sorry, I mean, it's obviously a category I'm still very passionate about. But for HMD, I mean, it was an opportunity and I'm sure Microsoft saw it so that as well where people were looking for technology to solve their problems. And therefore how you could get to them not just about targeting them and talking to them on the right part of their journey but also how you could get to them in that moment of truth and be there physically with them without the person-to-person interaction became very, very important. So it was incredible how fast we were able to ramp up what used to be traditionally just a lead or a like on Facebook to something that was actually more about delivering a physical good in let's say in Patna and Bihar in Kerala and wherever it was. We had red, amber and green zones mapped up in May and we were talking about which markets you could open up to and deliver to people. So and who did that? I mean, at the end of the day it's an intersection. It's always cross-functional and lots of people. It is empowered teams like the lane talked about, right? Someone sitting at a local level who comes up with an innovation and you ramp it up. But if you pull all of that together the center of gravity and the strategy finally does come back to how do you reach the consumer at the moment where you are the most valuable for them? And that and revenue maximization at that point. And while revenue sounds like a really, really, you know it's a very shy lock in term in this moment but the fact is they want that. They're willing to pay for that service. Our challenge was that people were saying, I want your device. And of course, there was this whole, you know geopolitical situation evolving. So suddenly North became a brand of choice, you know and at that point in time, not altruistic and not become materialistic and say, Hey, you know, this is who we are. It takes a lot of restraint as well. So at my point, your authenticity has to stay in place. So it was fascinating. Sorry. So I just want to just take one round with all the panelists quickly and then we'll come back to you for some more insights. So I think, but I agree, you know I think I've seen a lot of vendors around our houses small medium scale enterprises. They all have suddenly transformed themselves so quickly and it's just unbelievable. Means my wife has been buying saris online and the amount of Instagram ads that she sees her all around now and she negotiates like and she tells me that this saree would cost X and now going for one 10th X. I said it's still very expensive at one 10th X but I've seen that suddenly the whole digital has gone. It's no longer demographic, no longer gender. It's the entire population. So this note, Ajay, I'd like to come to you. I think in a way your business was sort of build pre-COVID for post-COVID. So we talked about collaboration being a competitive advantage. Would love to have your views on what are the things you've done to stay ahead of the curve and how that collaboration is being able you're able to leverage it well now. Yeah, so wait, let me just distinguish ourselves from possibly the other brands in the market or the other brands on this panel. One is we are not a touch and feel brand, right? And two is we are not a category that people wake up in the morning and say I want a mutual fund or a life insurance or health insurance. So I think the pre-work we had done in anticipation of a consumer need rather than a COVID opportunity was that we said let's look at the consumer and his need and his need was to have a good life. His need was not to have a a mutual fund or a life insurance. And we said, how do we bring in money in the context of life? And therefore we are the only single mother brand in the industry today who says A to Z of your money needs in the context of your life. And therefore I think the first and the biggest learning for us pre-COVID and I think it becomes more relevant after COVID is how do you remain distinct rather than part of the Bhercha? And I think what COVID taught us what is Bhercha? I think the day COVID hit, everyone started sending out emails, I'm available online, I'm available on website, I'm available on call. The first person who did it, I said good. The second person who did it, I said great. The third person did it, I said, hey, isn't that the norm? Why are you suddenly making that into a hero? And when you talk about collaboration, I think the exact same example, Vivek. I had a great offer to have a newspaper reach the house of my customers and it was a win-win situation. The media house gets circulation like never before. We have 20 million active customers. I'm sure very few have those circulations. And for me, it's great that, hey, you don't have a newspaper, I'm bringing it to your house. Very exciting. But I think what's important to see is that within the first week, the same offer was made to every single brand and every brand was offering it. Luckily we didn't fall for that. I think therefore being different in collaboration and being true to your brand and what your brand represents rather than rushing into the first opportunity to tie up. So collaboration gives you the expansion, collaboration gives you the entry points you never have before. But how can you create relevance to that collaboration is a learning for us. Second, whether it's ABC that we formed or ABC that is needed today and these times that is the capital, I think it became important for us that many people got tempted to sell their products, sell their brand, light the bandwagon and today is the best time, right? I don't know if you've seen this on YouTube. They've actually taken an edit of some 10 or 15 of the biggest brands in the world and taken their films and made it into one film. And it's amazing to see that every brand is saying the same thing. I care for you, we are there for you. We've always thought of you and things like that. The same words, but different nomenclatures by leading brands in the world. So how do you differentiate yourself? And I think, yes, our whole architecture is different. Our whole go-to-market strategy is changed. We are saying we're the only single brand in the country, single financial services brand. That really helped us in collaboration within our businesses. So let's just try. Like I told you in these times what a few things everyone wants. Normally, we say roti, kappad or makal. In today's time, people wanted, they had health worries and wealth worries. Now we have collaboration within the Aditya Billa Capital banner because we have health insurance business and we have life insurance business and we have mutual fund business. We have wealth management business. We have shares and growth. It's all within our banner itself. So that's what Vivek, it's very kind of you to say that collaboration we did before from a customer perspective rather than helped us in good state and therefore in these times, we have tried to not sell our category. We've not, we've tried not to sell our brand. We've tried to address apprehensions and fears. So if you see on Facebook, for example, we have a health and wealth platform and we have podcasts on health and wealth. There is nothing about Aditya Billa Capital or its product. It's your needs. My belief is that in collaboration within a brand if you like what I say, you will ask me, hey, don't even have the solution. For example, every day we started during the lockdown but lockdown continued, we continued. Our health insurance business is on Facebook every day, whether it's your nutrition needs, whether it's your health needs, whether it's your yoga needs, whether it's a doctor on call. So we started collaborating with people and brands who can extend the relevance of just health insurance to health. Sure. And what is your vision? Yeah, so I'm going to ask my last question to Moksha. What are the discussions that are having that digital has now become mass media? And I think the biggest challenge we face is that, digital has always operated in the bottom of the funnel. So it's almost like performance based, right? But now it becoming mass media, we need to completely rethink creativity. And I was talking to Aggie from Taproot who's part of our network and we were discussing of how do you actually create mass media kind of creativity on digital? And I think we were having a discussion on it, we'd love to have your views. How do you fuel creativity on digital? Yeah, it's been quite interesting. I think everybody has discovered creativity, it seems like never before and everyone has seemed to have had a kitchen moment all during COVID. So it's been quite interesting. And KFC as a brand is often stood, I mean stand for originality. So we thought like people are being so creative, what could we do to kind of become a bit of a platform for creativity and even when there was a lockdown, we launched something called KFC Home Studios where we got like a massive amount of participation. It was just providing a distinctive brand platform where people were partnering, engaging with the brand. And we followed that up with what we call home kitchen. So of course there's a performance marketing, omni-channel marketing like Ruchira said that was happening. But we realized people are experimenting in the kitchen and we kind of encourage them to order in KFC and kind of create their own recipes and we had like thousands of unbelievable ideas that came up from people from KFC Noodle, KFC Chicken Storganov and whatnot and unbelievable participation. And it was not like chefs, it was just, in fact internally the kind of entries we got internally was equally powerful, like some amazing recipes. So I think we got a pipeline of recipes coming up for the next two years basis is activation. So just by providing a platform for creativity, we found that people were giving us content, almost 10,000 hours worth of content is what we got back from consumers. And the point was just to create a platform for them, let them kind of create their own content. The other interesting stuff we've been doing of Vivek is working with influencers like many on the panel would be doing. The thing is we've got some really good content going with them, we allow them to interact with the brand, not curb their style, that's something we learned very early in the journey. And over the last couple of, last month or so some partnerships with, influencers like Dhanis Seth or Akshay Nair, they've all been like going viral. And the funny thing is like, the brand is actually completely omnipresent in their content, but the content is so wonderfully done and we don't try to intrude too much into their style. And that's kind of come up with such amazing creativity that, I mean, I'm blown away, I couldn't imagine that, you know, typically when you show your product, people switch off, but the product was so seamlessly integrated by them, that was just a wonderful piece of content to watch. I think stuff like that, and we've typically found that the engagement rates for this content piece that we've been working on over the last three months, home studios, home kitchen, influencer partnership is at least two to three times, what we regularly see when we put out content. So I think that's something we're going to continue doing as people discover their creativity at homes and in the kitchen. Perfect, yeah. I think Giddy has come to put a stop to our panel. So I think we've had a great discussion. I'm glad you were able to cover all the things that we wanted to cover. But thanks a lot guys. This was awesome insights for all of you. Pleasure to moderate this session. Giddy, how are you? Thank you. We know that you both are so easy. Everybody stay with me. We have questions for you. I'm like, red light at the signal. That's just put on, you know, once we've got heading into overtime zone. Couple of interesting things there. Ajay is saying that the key will be to differentiate and more scarcity noodles. Oh, good Lord. I'm waiting for those. Oh, gosh, okay. And Vivek, I'm going to be downloading that forest app. And Mr. Gandhi is saying that the biggest change happens between the years. So true. And Ruchira, your hyperactive digital disorder word was the word I've been looking for for the last many years. Abhi, yeh show safal ho kya. Mele liya, I've found my disorder today. And I'm going to buy the note here for everyone here. Okay. So Vivek, I have these two questions for you for the panel. How effective would be the COVID-inspired digital strategies in a post-COVID world? One, should I give you the next one? You first want to deal with the first bullet coming your way. Yeah, I think- How effective would be the COVID-inspired digital strategies in a post-COVID world? Yes. So I'll share my view. I've been in the digital industry for 20 years plus. Actually, digital industry took off in India in 2012, as far as I was concerned. Because basically what happened was that 2008, 2009, a lot of brands got curtailed spending because of the financial disaster that our country and the world faced. And then they tried digital a little bit and they never went back to commercial media in the same way. So a lot of digital things that have happened today have just started. And we should have taken, as Ajay said, 10 years. It's happened in four months. So now it's just going to accelerate. A lot of people are not going to go back. What happened in 2008 onwards and that transformation happened, the same thing on e-commerce digital is continuing. And a lot of brands who have tasted, I would say blood on digital, are not going to go back. Digital transformation is going to get accelerated. And I think a lot of people who had this digital transformation proposals from agencies like ours, gathering dust somewhere in the drawers, have suddenly all come out. So I don't think they are going back into the drawers. That is my two bits on it, but anybody else can contribute if they wanted. Anyone else would like to add to that? I think it's called the next normal consumer now. To add to your lexicon, it's not the new normal. It's the next normal consumer. Just as an example, I know there are 500 million people who are on digital in India, which is more, I think, more than the US and Mexico and Canada put together. I think that's the number. But if I look at the next normal consumer, that's the consumer who's now entered. Imagine that's another 700 million to go before we exhaust potential. So that's one point, whatever, four times. Point being, those guys are coming in faster than ever and they expect very different experiences. So I don't, I just see this acceleration and there's that point in term when they inflict that inflection point, to a vex point, this is the inflection point. So don't... I have a country point or I support, it's up to you to decide. I just believe that if at the end of COVID, I believe that you forced me or I was forced to use you, I'm not coming back. And if I find it was so great to use you, why the hell didn't I discover you before? I'm never leaving you. It's as simple as that, I agree. As simple as that. All of you watching, you've got your mantra. We have the next question here for the panel. How often should digital strategy be revisited? Do they have a shelf life? Very interesting question there. So I'll give 30 seconds. I think digital is about taking a compass in your hand and you start walking in the right direction rather than trying to create a blueprint. So when you have a compass in your hand, you start walking, then you automatically keep on revisiting it. So you fire bullets through the can ball, the classic Jim Collins theory. So digital is about making a move, right? A lot of people waste a lot of time in trying to create a blueprint and then keep revisiting the blueprint, which is a dietic. So digital is about taking a compass in your hand and you start walking. That's my druids. Yes. Anyone else would like to add briefly and then we'll wrap up. I'll just say one thing. I feel like we, I mean, just to just build off what Vivek said. I think for you digital and tech to not transcend the human experience, which is find a way to kind of support it. So the more we can do around those lines, the more it's going to be sustainable. Then you're in touch with the consumer. You're using digital as a support strategy to the consumer experience, not as a strategy in itself, which is where perhaps the problem sometimes lies. So that's what I summarize. Thank you all for joining us at day two of tech month show. Of course, we have time. We'd have to move forward. Otherwise, this is just the most fantastic panel I've heard over the last few months. Thank you very much, all of you. And thank you to make honorable moderator. Thank you very much, guys. Have a good day ahead. Thank you for having us. Thanks for having us. Bye bye. Thank you for the whole hour. Thank you. Thank you, everyone.