 Welcome the next speaker with a nice round of post coffee applause, shall we? I know that's the image but I'm not used to the light so I'm going to take a little while to settle in. So good afternoon guys. My name is Matthew. I run a company called Duraflex. We design, make and market mattresses. We're the third largest brand in India. It's interesting we're the third largest by some distance. Our biggest two competitors are three or four times our size. So I was really curious to know why I was invited to speak today. I hope at the end you will know why I was invited to speak here but I do think our story is interesting. We've learned a lot in the last two years and I'm really hopeful that sharing the story with you will actually help us to improve our story going forward. So a little bit about myself. I grew up in Bangalore. I'm an old Bangalorean but I left Bangalore 15 years ago. I worked abroad for a few years and then when I came back five years ago I was just joining Duraflex. I was slowly getting used to Bangalore again so I was meeting people, socializing, networking, going to parties and I would introduce myself and invariably people ask you what to do. So I said I work at Duraflex and I got three very different reactions. The first reaction was that oh okay just a cold glazed look. We all know those kind of people. They didn't know what Duraflex was and they would slowly move away. The second kind of reaction was from people who would say oh very interesting what do you do? What does Duraflex do? And I would explain. I say we make mattresses, we sell and market mattresses and then the same look would come up again. People would glaze over and then slowly slip away again. Because let's face it, the mattress category is pretty boring. It's been boring for a while and really what we're trying to do is try to spice it up. But I want to tell you about the third reaction and this was a small minority but some people would look at me and say oh that's so interesting. Duraflex, you make condoms. How do you do your product testing? But really that is our category. It's not a well-known category. It's not a category that people engage with and what I want to talk to you about is how we're trying to make our category more purposeful. So my party line hasn't changed. I still introduce myself as Matthew from Duraflex but it's really nice to be invited to this party where we're talking about brands which are becoming or trying to be more purposeful. So our product, you all sleep on our product 7 or 8 hours a day. I know some of you sleep a little less but at least 7 or 8 hours a day you sleep on our product, you touch our product, you come in contact with our product but most of you will not actually engage with our product. We've seen your birth, we've seen your life, we've seen your death. We experience your sex. Yeah, we do. We do. We're actually privy to a lot and yet most of you and most of our consumers will not engage with our product. So how do we make this high-touch product a high-engagement product? Problem number two, we're always undercover. I actually hope we're undercover. I hope everybody uses a bedsheet but that is our biggest problem. Because we're undercover we cannot really flaunt all of our beautiful features. It doesn't matter if you've upgraded from a 4-inch mattress to a plus 10-inch mattress. It doesn't matter if you're using, I don't know, body contouring, memory foam. It doesn't matter if you're using cool gel technology. It doesn't matter because you're under the cover. Nobody's going to talk about it. Nobody's going to be able to show it off to your friends. So how do we make this product sexy? Yeah, that's the problem. In the dark all cats are gray. So we're under covers. It doesn't matter how comfortable our product is. It does matter and I'll get to that but because we're under cover all cats are gray. Yeah, problem number three. I'm sure everybody in this room identifies with this. All of y'all are, I don't know, high-performance marketing executives. You've stayed up many nights getting your latest ad campaign launched, your latest product campaign launched, partied all night, stayed up all night to study for exams, caught 5 AM flights to Bombay. Sleep does not matter. Sleep is for whims. That's what they tell us in college. That's what they tell us at work. That's what they tell us when we party. Sleep is for whims. And we're a product where we're trying to say invest in good sleep, invest in a product which gives you better sleep. So how do we do that? To give you a small statistic, most of our consumers, I'm sure most of you in this room would have spent two or three times on your bed, on your cot, vis-a-vis your mattress. And that's an example of where we're really not taking sleep seriously. We're investing in externally beautiful products, but not products which actually make a difference to how you live and how you perform. The fourth problem we have is that, so we're selling sleep. We're not really selling mattresses. And the mattress is only one of probably 10 factors which contribute towards really good sleep. What really matters? How much noise you've got in the room? How much light you've got in the room? How much noise you've got in the room? Who you're sleeping with? How much they snore? How much they toss and turn? Whether your kids are on the bed with you? Whether you've left your work at work? How long you've been playing with your iPhone before you went to sleep? The list actually just doesn't stop. So while we are selling good sleep and we provide you good support, we provide you good spinal alignment, we provide you mattresses with half cooling features, but we are only two out of 10 factors which contribute to your great sleep. So if we don't have control over our brand promise, which is a great night's sleep, what can we actually promise you? Problem five, we're actually too good for our own good. We make mattresses which are so durable that we're almost till death do us part. I spoke to some of you in the room before speaking. Most of you haven't changed your mattresses for 20 years, longer than most marriages, right? And that's a problem we have. We make good mattresses, we make comfortable mattresses, but we also make mattresses which are built to last. I wish we could make them as fleeting and flimsy as an iPhone so that we could change them every year. But we don't. We make good products which do last. And if they do last, and the last time you bought a mattress was 10 years ago, are you really going to remember this brand that you bought 10 years ago? I'm sure most of you can't remember your friends' children's names. I'm sure most of you can't remember some of your friends' names. Are you really going to remember that brand that you interacted with 10 years ago? Sometimes people remember the brand and then they say, but 10 years ago I've paid 1,500 rupees for my mattress. Why you ask me to pay 20,000 rupees now? So that's a problem we have. The engagement and the interaction with our product is limited. Okay, the final problem. I'm going to stop talking about problems. Although in marketing I think we all know we're here to solve problems. But the sixth problem we have is, okay, we've convinced someone that I've got to invest and sleep. I need a good mattress. But what do I do with my old mattress? And I'm really glad that everybody today talked about sustainability, talked about the environment, because that is a serious problem. Today we sell 5 million branded mattresses in India. That number is going to become 20 million or 30 million or 100 million once we start selling to everybody who should be sleeping on a good mattress. What happens to the old mattresses and where do we dispose of them? Especially now where we're moving away from natural mattresses, we're moving away from coir, we're moving into more synthetic products. If we don't find a way to dispose of them in environmentally friendly manner, we are going to be creating a very big environmental problem as well. This is actually something that I don't have a solution to yet, but I did want to bring it up as something that we all have to work towards solving. Okay, six problems. What are we really trying to do to solve some of these? This is going to look really boring. This is going to look like an MBA class where you talk about the... I don't know, I forget, are there four pieces or five pieces? I think there's seven pieces now or something. Four, just four. I don't know which one I made up one of them then. But we did go back to the drawing board and say, you know, marketing is not about a media campaign, it's not about... I actually don't know those words, GPRP, CPRP. I don't know those words very well. We did go back to the drawing board and say, can we look at this business from first principles from basics and see what we need to fix to make ourselves more interesting? So the obvious ones, product, price, people. The one I want to spend the most time on is actually people, not the others. Because I think everybody else today is talking a lot about the others. I want to talk more about people. Placement and promotion. What did we do with our product? We had really dirty looking mattresses, to be honest. There were products that I was not proud of. We used colors which were unattractive. We used branding which looked like it was from the 1980s. You still see them everywhere on the street, but there were products which didn't look good. They might have felt good, but they didn't look good. So we went to the basics of product design. We hired international product designers. We actually created the first designer mattresses in India. We hired Folly Designs to help redesign our mattresses, so they looked better. We added features that mattered. We talked to consumers and we asked consumers what they cared about. They said, we want a mattress which supports us. We want a mattress which is comfortable. We want a mattress which lasts. And a mattress which makes us feel really good. So we introduced airflow technology, cool gel technology. Lots of stuff. I really don't want to go into the product as much as to say, we did go back to the basics, talk to our consumers, understand what they wanted, and redesign those features back into our mattresses. The third one is the most interesting one. It's not one that we have done yet, but we want to move away from selling a product to selling a service and ultimately selling an experience. So rather than say we make and market mattresses, we now want to sell your product that we can upgrade every year without asking you to change like an iPhone. But we want to be able to come back every year and upgrade it to service it. So I don't know if any of you will know, but in three years your mattress weighs 50% more than it used to weigh when you bought it because it's full of dust and mites and skin and a lot of stuff that you probably don't want to hear about. But we do want to come in and clean your mattresses, dry clean your mattresses, service it, upgrade it, add features, but continue with the original product. So from being a product, we want to move much more into being a service and finally move into converting the service into an experience where we also tell you how you slept and what you could do to be sleeping better. Earlier I talked about the 10 or 12 things that disturb your sleep. We want to tell you which of those are going wrong and what you need to do to correct them. So that's the first P. Oh, sorry. This was what our mattresses used to look like. We still have some of those out there. Pretty ugly, pretty 1980s. The dark fabric is actually because people don't want the dirt to be seen, but there's a lot of dirt in it. And this is not so long ago. This was just three years ago. Our products do look much better now. This is Folly Designs. We've changed the fabrics. It's anti-stress, very high thread counts, lots of beautiful stuff, but they look beautiful apart from just being very functionally beautiful. What did we do on price? I don't want to talk about it much because it's really simple. We didn't change the prices. So we added a lot of features. We added a lot of benefits. We added great product design, but we didn't change the prices because we all know we live and work in India and India is price sensitive. So we did bring in international standards, but we kept it at Indian prices. And I think that's important, especially over the last one year where, like we heard earlier on, money supply is short. People are conscious of what they spend money on. So we kept the prices. I won't say we kept the prices low, but we added a lot more and kept the prices the same. Promotions. I know lots of fuel are from big brands. You'll have big marketing spends. You'll have big endorsements. For you, some of the stuff that we did is pretty basic. I'd like to think that for our industry, these were giant leaps, giant leaps for mattress kind as we keep saying. We were really proud to associate ourselves with RCB this year. My friend's formation at today was saying we would never have imagined that a mattress brand would associate with RCB and associate with Virat Kohli. They're big. They're big names. They're sexy. They're expensive. It was a leap of faith, to be honest. We didn't know we could afford it, but we said we'd do it anyway because we do know that marketing is an investment. Marketing is not an expense. So we did associate with RCB. We did associate with Virat Kohli. We got, I don't know, something like 15x return on our investment. I thought it was really good. We're now associating with Masterchef, a very sort of aspirational program it's being aired in jurisdictions where we don't even sell mattresses, but we do want to build a brand. We do want to be associated as a lifestyle brand, not a very functional brand. And we built a campaign that I think was really interesting. It was called Energize. The range of mattresses was called Energize. It was all about preparing today for tomorrow. So we kept saying tomorrow begins tonight. And it was all about being ready for tomorrow. It was a very consistent campaign. I thought it did really well. The first results showed that our disposition increased from 50% to 80%. I'm told that's really good. It's telling in our sales. But I think I'm telling you all this because for our industry, these were things which were not really done before and they were yielding results just by going back to basics and having an interesting campaign with a very consistent but new theme. Again, just to give you an indication of how the kind of advertising or communication changed, that's what we looked like five years ago. And we look slightly better and slightly more interesting this year. And I think that did pay off. On the promotions, what I would want to say is that while we've done some decent work, I think really it's only the first step and we've got lots more to do. All our speakers so far talked about it. The fact that we shouldn't be promoting anymore, we need to be communicating, we need to be engaging. What I can say with utmost conviction is that when I sleep better, I can run a little longer. I think much more clearly. I can work much faster. I genuinely feel much younger and that really is the purpose for which our brand exists, that is the purpose for which we sell our product or service. What we need to do is to find a way to communicate that, to convince people of that and if we do that, I think we'll be building a brand which has real purpose. It's quite difficult because we are actually competing with all of you all in the room who are spending thousands of crores on title sponsorships and unfortunately we've got smaller spends. We're a smaller industry, we've got smaller spends but we're still trying to reach the same consumer. We've got less time, we've got less money. We've probably got to be much more creative about getting this message out using digital, using evangelists. We're doing something quite interesting now. We're actually going into workplaces. If any of you are working in a big company, we'd like to come in and talk about sleep and the importance of sleep and how you can sleep better taking your sleep more seriously will help you perform much better. So we're taking this campaign to the streets rather than just to the media. Placement is something I don't want to spend time on because I don't think we've done a good job. We operate and sell through 3,500 outlets. They are highly unorganized, they are run by 3,500 entrepreneurs with a mind of their own and getting them to change and do justice to this new product that we have and to improve the customer experience has been incredibly hard. I'll come back next year and tell you if we've managed to do a better job of this. We will have done a better job but it's really hard. You can control a lot of things, you can't control your entire channel. So maybe we have to do it differently but our entire focus is on improving the quality of the retail experience. How can we make buying a mattress, choosing a mattress much more interesting, much more fun, much more energizing. This is the last thing I want to talk about and it's probably the most important thing. The topic today is about making brands more relevant, making brands more purposeful. For a company like us, we have only one brand. We're not an ITC which has, I don't know how many brands ITC has, it has a lot of brands. We have only one brand. So making the brand more purposeful and more relevant was actually about making the company more purposeful and making the company more relevant. We're a 53-year-old company. We've got people who are 53 years old and much more and people who've been around for much longer so it's not that easy to suddenly make your brand more purposeful and more relevant. That's the bit which a lot of people underestimate. So it's a little bit like, that's Justin Timberlake. I actually came from an era slightly before Justin Timberlake. So that's Justin Timberlake before and after. That's when he used to be with the boy band called NSYNC. I don't know any of their songs. I hope none of you all do as well. But that's what he used to look like and then he converted, he reinvented himself to that. Smart. He started selling, singing, hip-hop. He started making much better content and then he started acting in good films. And he's actually quite a good actor. But it's just an idea of some brands or some people who really did reinvent themselves. There's another interesting one. I see a lot of young women in the audience. You remember this guy? Yeah, Milan Soman. Very sexy brand. He couldn't cut it in film. So he reinvented himself and made himself a much more interesting brand, much more relevant to our audience today. He's a brand that everybody wants to associate with. So the reason I'm saying this is that I'm just giving you ideas of brands that really had to reinvent themselves. But it's really about reinventing the entire being. Not just the brand, but the entire company. And you can only do that by focusing on reinventing your people. So that's actually been the most exciting part of this. It's been the most challenging part of this. Changing people, changing their mindsets, bringing in new people, easing out old people is actually what makes a brand. So it's one thing to have a campaign and it's another thing to live and breathe your campaign. We had to go from being a manufacturing company. We talked about our factories. We talked about our cost. We talked about our supply chain, our on-time delivery. Yes, those are important things. But we never talked about our consumers earlier. What do they want? What do they like? What do they not like? So we had to really change it. I'm really glad we had new partners. Ramesh is in the audience. Equator really helped us on that journey. Ara has really helped us on that journey. We had to bring in people from Titan, from Max, from other real consumer brands to bring in that kind of thinking. Because it's about a way of thinking. It's not a way of advertising. We had to move from being production focused rather than say we make 2,000 mattresses a day. Did we hit our capacity? Fine, we did. But actually what's more interesting is did we create new products? Did we create more value without increasing cost? So these sound like simple things but actually changing people, changing mindsets, changing your company is really what changing a brand is all about. Making a brand more purposeful is all about. So the Energize campaign, the Ready for Tomorrow campaign, it really struck a note with me because for me it was actually not so much about an advertising campaign. It was really about energizing the company. It was about making the company Ready for Tomorrow which is probably what makes our product suitable for this generation of this new consumer. So that really was in a nutshell our story. It's been a very short story. It's been a 50-year-old story but actually it's been a story over the last two or three years. It's been a very interesting story for me, very challenging, but I think we're really only at the maybe starting point. It really starts now where we've started engaging much more with the consumers and we try to make sleep much more important. Really this brand would have succeeded if we can convince everyone that sleep is genuinely the elixir of life. Thanks a lot. Anyone who needs any more convincing, this is your Q&A time. I think we have about let's say three minutes so we can take the top three questions. Can one be from me? How much are you asleep? Am I on? Yeah, you are. Okay, I'll confess. I'll be completely honest. I didn't take sleep seriously. I really didn't. I didn't work at Ureflex for the longest time. I worked in law, I worked in banking. Pulling an all-nighter was the most... It's the thing you boasted about the most. Partying all night was the thing you boasted the most and you still wake up and go for a run in the morning. That's the lifestyle I led. It took its toll. It took its toll. I only started taking sleep seriously after I joined Ureflex. To be completely honest, now I sleep... I was going to say sleep well, but that's the name of our biggest competitor. Brand plugs are legit. I genuinely try to sleep seven hours a day. I pull off maybe six, six and a half. But I'm really focused. If I've got something important to do the next day, I genuinely try and sleep seven hours a day. I know if I don't, the next day I'll lose my temper with somebody. And that's not good. I don't take morning flights anymore. I know everybody wants to take that 5 a.m. flight because they have to be in Bombay in time for the 8.30 meeting, but it doesn't work. You're useless in the meeting. You're useless the rest of the day. So I have tried to change quite a bit to sleep much more. I'd say six and a half, seven hours is... I get consistent here. Right. A role model for sleep. I think we have one question coming up here. Can we have the mic? Yeah, quick introduction of yourself and a crisp question, please. My name is Girish. I run a company called On Purpose. What keeps you awake at night? So I'm the kind of... I think way too much. The most interesting question and maybe the most silly question is how well is sleep going to genuinely become irrelevant? I don't know, with digital technology and things, you just don't know what people are going to invent. They're going to invent a way where you don't need to sleep anymore. So you sit down and work and you plug something in and you've slept but you've not slept. So obviously we think about stuff like that, but maybe that's a little too far out. I think that's what keeps me awake the most, which is what is that big disruption coming which is going to change our industry so much, which is going to make sleep irrelevant and rather than wait for somebody else to do it or rather do it ourselves. Yeah, that's what keeps me awake. It's not something outsourceable for a change. How about the last question? Yeah, I think Ganga, if a mic can be reached to her. Hi, I'm Ganga. I'm from Epsilon. What you've spoken about is a more glamorous side of change management, right? And it's so interesting. How did you manage the internal pee for people? It's a long story. But yeah, it is genuinely really hard. I started off in all the wrong ways. So I came back from London where you had a different work culture and I came in and I started saying, after a year I found out that that doesn't work. You don't come in and say this is what you do. You have to win people's hearts and minds and you don't win people's hearts and minds by coming in hard. You actually go in quite soft. So you need a lot of patience and it doesn't work easily but you also have to be hard about some things. You still need to know why you need to change people and change their minds and I think if you convince yourself and you convince a few key linchpins or key evangelists then they start doing your work for you and then you find you hit some very hard rocks that you can't change and those hard rocks have to leave and that's very painful especially when those hard rocks you used to call uncle or they used to be your dad's best friends or something, I don't know. There's a lot of that. Change management is hard and it's very painful but it's also very rewarding. To be honest we've not managed to change. I talked about our retail network. We've not managed to change that. Anybody here who's managed to change our retail network please put your hand up and let me speak to you after this. I think changing people is really hard. You sometimes look for new people and you sometimes change some people and you ask them to change the rest and you hope for the best but you have to have a lot of patience and a lot of resilience and a lot of perseverance to change people. Looks like you're doing a great job of that. The most important change is changing our consumers. Forget about changing your internal team how do we change all of y'all and make you take sleep really seriously? That's much harder than changing everything within the company. Being a sleep evangelist and of course the company having grown so tremendously how about your employees and getting those figures how much sleep did they lose? Oof. I don't know. Yeah, I see this all the time. So when we have our biggest, hardest meetings all of our key employees are looking tired. They really are looking tired. A lot of them are up trying to figure out what Modi's going to do next and what GST means and why in some months we're not hitting our numbers. Yesterday was month-end closing. I know everybody's tired out today. So we did change a few things. We don't have meetings straight after month-end. I think it's a really fair question. I don't think everyone in our company lives the dream of sleeping seven or eight hours. What do you think? I think it's a really fair point. We need to take that far more seriously within our company itself before we start convincing everybody else. That's a candid confession and a very honest one of that. Thank you so much for giving us so many sleep takeaways. Lots of it to sleep over. But do say back a bit. I'm going to invite Mr. Manish Gupta, consultant Metro Varta and also Vaishali Verma. Ms. Vaishali Verma, if you're here, COO, IPG Media Brands do come and convey the organizers' gratitude to this fab speaker of ours. Matthew, maybe hear it for him once more. Giving us lots of stuff to sleep over. Wonderfully articulated too.