 Good morning, everyone. And a warm welcome to all the esteemed panelists. And thank you for joining and agreeing to share your insights and learnings on this very important topic. And just to start, I was a few weeks back, I was in a B school. And I conducted a live quick online survey among the students and asked them to respond from the perspective of a consumer. And what I asked them, I asked them three questions, that how many of you are in favor of rising consumer privacy? Over 90% of the students voted in favor. The next question was, how many of you will be willing to share your data to a brand? And 74% said they won't. The third question was, how many of you would be willing or want brands to talk to you in a personalized manner? And 85% were in favor. So there you see, while consumers want privacy and personalization at the same time, they're not willing to share data. And that's the challenge that the marketeers today are facing at good phase, increasingly going forward. Happy to have a wide representation of various sectors here today and would like to see how they approach personalization and the challenges that face and what has been their winning strategies all the way. Vidya, thank you for joining. And may I start with you? When I came across, I was looking at monoliths and researching. I came across this statement, which says, we are a house of incredible brands providing people with the right snack or the right moment made the right way. So I see there is an element of personalization inherent in the statement itself. So can you please help us know, like, how do you approach personalization? Because the category that you are in, most of the buying happens offline. And if you can say this from the point of view from both existing as well as prospecting customers that you reach out to. Thanks for that question, Anil. And I think the reference that you made to the survey right at the beginning is pretty much my answer, right? So consumers today are looking at hyper-personalized experiences. They are always on. They're looking for content all the time when they're traveling. There is no prime time anymore. And there are multiple screens, multiple forums that are looking for information. And as a brand, if I am not relevant to the consumer at the moment where he's seeking out a proposition that I can offer best, then I'm not doing justice to either his needs or what I can offer to him. And that's where our personalization philosophy comes as well, right? So internally, we call it empathy at scale, which is to say that how do we identify moments in a consumer's life, which is contextual to him. So we're not starting from us. We're really starting from the point of view of what is he looking for? And how can I present myself to him in the most meaningful manner at that point? And therefore, personalization is not about only buying and what can drive sale. It automatically then becomes, how do I impact the entire consumer journey? Right from the time that I can impact awareness to, how do I make him consider or her consider my brand over a set of things that he's looking for in that moment? And that's really how we are looking at personalization and that's pretty much what we've demonstrated over the years as well. So would you have any case study of personalization which is very close to your heart for your brands? I think the work that we've done during Diwali over the last couple of years truly stands out as something that is university acknowledged as a great example of personalization. It's close to my heart as an employee of Mondleys because it makes me feel very proud that here is an occasion where you want to bring a happiness in everyone's lives that you are a part of because Diwali is a festival like that. And here's a brand Cadbury celebrations which is about invoking that moment of generosity. And given the COVID context, given that people are looking for that spark of inspiration or joy in their lives given how they've suffered, I think the fact that we were able to play the role of a catalyst by bringing a star like Shah Rukh Khan to a piece of comms that they can truly call their own. I don't think anything that we've done really surpassed that from the point of view of saying that how could we do really intimate personalization but do it at a scale which is not something that obviously we anticipated initially but then it took a life of its own. That was iconic, I must say. Sangeet, right? So housing.com when I read about it, of course it's one of the most innovative real estate portal, right? At the same time, you handle multiple stakeholders. You have builders, you have brokers, you have property owners, people talking to your site and apps for rent, buying a plot of land. Also, for a lot of allied services that you have on your site, how do you make sure that you keep the aspect of personalization alive and kicking with all these different kinds of stakeholders at your end? Got it, sure. Anil, I think that's definitely a challenge for us because there's just so many stakeholders. There's buyers, renters, on the other side, there's sellers, agents, homeowners, directly now interacting on the platform. So for us, and then again, another complexity that gets added is if you look at housing.com, real estate, you maybe buy a house once in your lifetime, right? Most of us rentals every two, three years on average. So it's a very short time period where we have to personalize within those three to six months for the user. Exactly. So this multi-stakeholder arrangement, we have started looking at this as an opportunity now because what's happened is instead of, in addition to I would say, one side browsing pattern, let's say, from the consumers, we also have started looking at the interactions now. So let's say if a buyer is connecting with a seller, we also have started taking feedback, learning what's going on, and then using that to improve the experience going forward. So having multiple stakeholders on the same platform is actually an opportunity because we know exactly what the user is thinking through the interaction that they had on the platform. Nice. So anything that, any case study or any personalization project that you are very fond of that you can speak about? Sure. So our approach to personalization, I mean, so we look at multiple touchpoints suddenly. So our idea is to keep making those incremental improvements across the journey, which eventually adds up to an overall delight factor for the user. So one of the recent things that our team worked on was around, so when you're looking for home, right, it's a complex journey. So you're looking at multiple neighborhoods, you're looking at multiple societies. So there are always multiple intents that's going on, right, in your mind. As a platform, a lot of personalization you would see is always based on the recent search. You always do, right? You start off from where you left off. For us, it's, as I mentioned, it's multiple intent. So one interesting experiment we did was using the explicit data that the user was sharing with us. In addition to the implicit data, right, as I mentioned through interactions and everything, we were able to classify multiple intents and then the user is coming back, right? We saw a lot of people dropping off because they, because what happens is what you were searching on Monday and by the time you come back to us on Thursday, a lot of things have happened offline. So what you were looking, it's not maybe what you're looking today, right? It evolves as you move forward. So what we started doing was we started showcasing multiple searches that you can do in parallel, right? So that fundamentally was able to change the way the person is looking rather than just one intent at a time. And in terms of results also, we saw about 15 to 17% uptick in our engagement numbers on the platforms. That would be a normal approach that you must be following even today, right? I mean, that's something nice. So Sachin, Pesha Bazaar, right? It's the number one consumer credit marketplace we're just discussing offstage, right? And it's also a category or a sector where data security and privacy, I mean, the restrictions are a lot more than what we have in other sectors, right? How do you make sure that you are able to look into the aspect of personalization, right? For all your existing customers as well as new customers who are talking to your site and app, right? Sure, so it's true that BFSI is imposed with a lot of restrictions, which are not there in other industries, right? Because money matters are very delicate. And these restrictions are critical to safeguard the interest of consumers, especially the naive ones. So I can't complain about that, but whatever data we have, we try to work with that. As far as personalization is concerned, they are obviously they are regular ones like personalizing communication, personalizing content, personalizing journeys. But one thing which I would like to comment on here, and I'm really proud of, people come to us when they are in need, right? People want a loan, nobody wants a loan. Some people need loans, right? Unfortunately, if 100 people apply for a loan, more than 60 got rejected because of one or the other factor, right? So when they come to us, they need that loan urgently. And if we can personalize that offering and improve their chances of approval, improve their chances of getting that product, that would be the biggest customer delight for us. And that's what we do. So we have various data points available to us. We, it are existing customers or the new customers. We have credit score data. We have their journeys on a website whatever products they have consumed, the channels, et cetera, et cetera. There are some third party data as well. Basis that data, we try to give him the best product while the best might not be with the lowest interest rate. Like I was mentioning, because people have, people tend to have this tendency when they come to a lending platform. They often choose the product where the interest rate is the lowest because they don't want to pay a higher EMI. But that might not be the right product for you because that bank may reject you. Basis is Sible score and all that. And if you get rejected once, your chances, suppose you had a better chance in Bank B of getting that product, but because Bank K rejected you, your chance will become bleaker even on the Bank B. So it's very crucial. It's, and we do it on the fly. When people come onto our platform, they give us some details and we publish those quotes, those options. We try to give him the best offer. That's a good insight for all of us, maybe. We shouldn't be checking our Sible scores or just going for the banks. It's very important. Lowest interest rate, right? Yeah, great. So, such in what kind of tools or platforms do you use currently or maybe from a future perspective, right? The way personalization is evolving. You have a focus on certain tools or platforms that you use. See, it's not how good your bat is. It's how well you have practiced your shot, right? Obviously, the bat will help, but you know, so similarly here, the tool is not important. There are multiple tools in the market and all, I would say most of them are equally competent. You would have plus and minuses everywhere, but it's within your own organization, right? How you treat the data. Before you're going for a tool, there is a lot of work needs to be done at your end. Before you even go out and start looking for a tool, there has to be a data unification exercise. Exactly. The moment of truth should be the same for every department, be it the product or marketing or service, right? If it's not happening, whether you take the best tool in the world or you take the worst one, the result would be the same. Having said that, so my advice is to first, you know, do your exercise back at home. Try to sanitize your data, get everything at one place, make it usable, and then go out and search for a tool. As long as tool is concerned, what we are using, we have been using an in-house tool for quite some time now for personalization, for automation, everything. Now, since our scale is bigger, we have recently signed up with Salesforce, Marketing Cloud and CDP, and we are in process of implementing that. So, great. I hope it's not the same situation. So, Ashish, coming to you, I think you represent the youngest organization on the stage now, right? It started in 2018, Bharat Pei, right? And you gave us our first UPI interoperable QR code. You have 80 lakh plus merchants on board, and you're processing 18 crores UPI transactions per month. Maybe that might have gone up from my last analysis, but you are in a different domain altogether where you are having to deal with merchants more, that is more on the B2B side, right? You have an element of consumers as well on the book now, yeah, postpaid. But how do you then look at the aspect of personalization? It's more from a B2B perspective, right? And then B2C perspective here. C-Personalization for FinTech or a BFSI kind of clients, right? Like Sachin rightly pointed out, there are rules and regulations around it, right? So, it becomes tricky for two reasons. One is obviously you are handling with money, right? Money is very dear to people, right? So, you can't be goofing around that. The second reason is basically, so if you think about any company, let's say a normal consumer company, right? The extent to which they will do personalization will depend upon how much capability they have or what is their internal thesis around personalization, right? But in case of a FinTech company, right? It's also governed with the rules and regulations of the regulator, right? So, just to give you an example, FinTech companies are not allowed to store their data with servers outside of India, right? So, that's an important critical piece when you select your partners, right? So, personalization becomes slightly difficult for us. One of the other reasons it becomes slightly tricky for a company like Bharatpe is because a lot of things don't happen actually inside your digital environment, right? So, once you, let's say, when you transact on any merchant using the Bharatpe QR, that transaction is actually happening offline, right? So, stitching that offline transaction to the online journey is something which needs to be done. So, we as a company use extensively what is called in technical parlance, server to server integrations, right? So, basically pulling your offline data in real time to your online world so that you can use that to, basically, cater experiences on the app, right? It's also true for experiences, it's also true for what communications you send to the merchants or consumers for that matter. Automation kind of businesses and emails. Yeah, okay. So, on that, so, is there any specific Martik tools that, what are the tools that you are using or proposed to use maybe? So, with respect to tools, again, I would say I agree with what Sachin was saying earlier. So, tool is just an implementation, right? The larger bind needs to come from your organization, right? So, whenever you, let's say, take up anything, let's say, personalization, right? You should not take it up just because you heard in an event, right? So, you'll have to think about it whether it's really important for your customers, right? And second, what kind of business impact are you able to create out of it, right? So, maybe you do a smaller experiment and try to see what kind of impact it has. If it has a real impact, let's say on the bottom line of the company or the top line of the company, then obviously it becomes a lot easier to get sponsorship inside, right? Because otherwise what happens is all these kind of projects, they fall apart. If you don't have internal sponsorship from your, let's say, top management. So, I think setting up requires use of, as in you should set up what's the real business impact you are trying to bring in once you do something, right? So, we, for example, use a tool called Clevert App which helps us personalize a lot of communications, a lot of app experiences for us. And website product as such, we don't have a website presence. It's an app-only product, both for Bharatpe as well as Postpe, yeah. So, I think one thing is coming out from both Sachin and you is that get your house in order with respect to your data before you start looking out for various tools and platforms, right? So, one more thing Ashish rightly mentioned. You know, most of the time what happens, these tools and these use cases are usually pushed by one department. So, either marketing who is pushing the management for an automation tool or a personalized tool, while service has no idea, product has no idea. And when they implemented, marketing implements one tool, you know, service comes up with a different tool that, okay, we have these use cases, these use cases can't be solved by this tool, we need another tool, that product comes up, okay, these tools do not have this capability. So, you know, before we go out in hunting of a tool, first we need to get every department on the same page, write down all use cases, why do we need it and what are the use cases we would be using that tool for. And just evaluate the importance and criticality of all those use cases, we do not have to go out and solve every use case another side. We just need to figure out what all cases are important for your organization, for your consumers, find those use cases are, if we are able to, you know, solve five or six use cases within the organization, that will be a good success. But it has to be at one group. So, a lot of these tools actually require as in taken product bandwidth, right? So, if you don't get that, it is a good, right? Yeah, yeah. So, on that use case, it's fine segue coming to you Vidya, right? Professor Byron in his book, How Brands Grow, he is little against, say, using hyper-targeting, especially with respect to CPG use case or CPG category. How do you, do you think personalization is only a lower funnel metric and needs to be looked differently? I think fundamentally, all of us are, you know, all of us in the CPG industry are still trying to drive penetration because most of the categories that we operate in, India would be, you know, vastly under penetrated and there's headroom to grow and stuff. So, our objective continues to be penetration and to that extent, I think most of us are aligned to the laws of growth philosophy that Byron Sharpe speaks about. And I think personalization is not about, at least in our case, which is very different from some of my fellow panelists here, is that we are still going to go to a very large audience and a lot of them are going to be light users or in some cases, you know, non-users. What we're trying to do through personalization is to really, you know, personalize the communication in a way that still speaks to our brand idea and our proposition. But in a manner that's fit to the platform, so, you know, if I'm looking at content on Google versus YouTube versus Facebook, the sheer diversity of the platforms means that I can't be speaking the same language. And the way we segment our cohorts is very different now, right? I mean, let's say 15 years back, we would have done simple demographics and you probably air the same ad at prime time on your favorite serial or program. That's changing now. So, that's what personalization means to us. We still are going to the largest cohort, I mean, largest universe of audience that's possible. So, we're not doing repeated targeting to one guy or going after one person because in our case, you know, while it's different in the sense that our consumers probably buy us far more frequently than let's say a housing consumer or an automobile, but the lifetime value, et cetera, is very small. I mean, it's a five rupees or a 10 rupees or a 20 rupee product at the end of the day. But we still want to be relevant to that moment. So, if it's four o'clock and if a consumer is looking for a snack, I want to be present among the plethora of options that he or she is searching for. And which means I have to communicate in a manner that's relevant to that moment purely because that opportunity is available right now. Technology is enabling that. And I'm going to use it. So, technology is not ahead of the fundamental philosophy of wanting to drive category penetration. It's an enabler to that extent and that's how we are looking at personalization. As long as you are able to do mass customization and take it at scale, I think it makes sense. Sangeet, so going to you, do you also think that personalization and scale are like antithetical to each other and you cannot have personalization at scale, I mean. Antithetical, not sure. I would rather put it in a different fashion. I think it's a big synergy between both of them. Personalization, scale, and this topic has been, I mean, discussed enough in the market. But the way we look at it is there's a circular relationship between both of them. For example, personalization through scale. I can do predictive analytics to personalize, which I cannot do if there's no scale. So just to give an idea, more than one corona people visit us every month, right? And that scale enables us, and especially predictive analytics plays a big role when it's the first visit for the user, right? Because then at that point, you actually don't know much about them. And it's the other way around as well. Through, by doing such, as I mentioned, delightful personalized experiences on the personalized side, you also start getting more scale, right? The user comes back and sort of the virality kicks in. So I don't think antithesis, I think both of them are pretty linked to each other. Got it. So Ashish, like in the B2B space that you operate since you've already touched a little bit, but do you think personalization in a B2B space should be looked at a little differently? Or what are the guardrails that one should be be cognizant of while doing this in a B2B environment? So when we really design our marketing, we don't really think about it like a B2B landscape, right? So B2B for me is something, when you are, let's say, your targetable market is say 5,000, 10,000, right? Then I think it's more like a B2B, right? So even in case of Bharatpe, right, which is a merchant platform, we have more than 8 million active merchants, right? So 8 million as a number, you can actually work on all the consumer-oriented stuff, right? So you can actually personalize. So 8 million is a fairly big number, right? So we don't really think ourselves as a B2B offering, although it is a B2B offering, right? But all our marketing, all the tools which we use to personalize, all the other things, so everything we do in marketing slash product, right, is not geared towards B2B mindset, right? Right. And post-pay anyways is a consumer product. Yes, yes, yes. Right, so if I just come to all of you and like to, if I want you to define, say, personalization in two, three words, or rather, personalization leads to what? Sangeet, if you can... I would put it delightful experiences. That's the focus for us. Okay. Ashish, personalization leads to what if you want to...? So personalization will lead to better business outcomes, but I would say you should not take it as it is. You should test it yourself. Great. Sachin? So there's only one reason why we should do personalization is giving our consumer better experience, right? Just as an example, if you walk into any showroom, right? So in early days, when we used to go to small shops and the guy there, he used to greet us with a name, or if I used to go with my father, he used to greet my father, you know, Haji Jaal Hushna, et cetera, et cetera, and then used to go about regular business. That was a good experience. That was a delight. Just a small example. So the only genesis of personalization is customer experience. Very nice. I think that's the... Vidya? I think for me, it enables to build sustainable, long-term consumer relationships. I mean, the relationship that a brand like ours where... I mean, we are not even... We're a discrete category. We don't... A lot of people won't find the need to consume us. For us to be able to build a sustainable, long-term relationship, personalization is a great tool. It's not the only tool that somebody mentioned. But I think it's a great tool. No, I think as Sachin rightly said, so we have transitioned from a, say, a broadcasting era to a Web 2.0 to Web 3.0, right? But if one thing which has remained constant is the need for personalization. While you were giving an example of some... Yes, two years, but I think the tone, the nature, the manner in which you do personalization, that has undergone a change and it's still evolving. But I think the challenge that we, or all of us, marketers face is, of course, bridging that gap between personalization and privacy. I think if the day we are able to solve that we'll be able to, in fact, enter into a new era for responsible marketing. And I think all of us are gearing towards that. I think we have some time, we can have some questions from the audience if someone would like to ask to our panelists. Yeah, please. Hi, my name is Mridhu, and my question kind of relates to the survey insights you were talking about in the beginning. And so there are two entities here. One is the consumer, one is the marketeers or the brands, right? At one point you're right, like customers want it. But how are you dealing with the trade-offs? Not to be over-personalized for lack of a better word, like not to be over-personalized or over-embarking in their personal territory, specifically in terms of those DNDs that customers have the right to on the messages or the calls. So what is a trade-off, or what is a thin line that marketeers should keep in mind to not cross that line, you know? Can I give you an answer? You have this question specific to somebody or anybody in the panel. It's generally a question because we're talking about that topic. So any of the panelists... So she's asking, so what is the line which differentiates between privacy and personalization? How much do you want to enter into that zone of personalization? And primarily, do you keep that in? How do you keep that in mind if you can give some examples, if you intentionally keep that in mind? Yeah, yeah, please. In our case, you know, unlike some of the other industries where data is naturally volunteered by the consumer because they want to make use of the service. In our case, a lot of times, it's through promotions and activations where consumers would have volunteered to give that information. And a lot of times, they don't quite realize that they've actually consented to receiving communication from us. I think there is a constant tussle between saying that are we just being privacy compliant or are we building consumer trust? And we believe that brands which deliver on consumer trust are likely to succeed as far as the data journey is concerned. The idea is to not spook people. So I don't think there is a definite SOP around how many times should you communicate? What should you communicate on? But I think you get a fair sense of, you know, relevance and communication coming together. So for example, if there is a festive period that's coming in and I know that there are people who are making last minute gifting purchases, et cetera, a gifting comms or a gifting offer at that point of time makes sense if I'm reaching out to them directly through an email or a WhatsApp or whatever. But I think fundamentally, I don't think there is one way of doing it. We all need to be cognizant of the fact that we can't spook them. And that, you know, ultimately, if you want to be intimately engaged with your consumer, you've got to think of it as a relationship where he feels happy about placing his trust in versus just complying with the laws of the land which require you to do a certain set of actions. She's right. I just want to add one thing, give you an example. I am not sure how many of you have experienced it, but sometimes we are talking about something or we receive an SMS from an organization and suddenly we see a Google ad talking about the thing which was mentioned in that SMS or the thing which we were talking about. That is bad personalization, even though one of the largest organizations in this world is doing it, but that is something which will spook you because then you'll be worried suddenly that who is listening and why am I seeing this ad? I got an SMS about, let's say, something delivered to my house from Amazon, but someone is reading that SMS and the market here or the product guy decided that okay, let's use the intelligence from these SMSes which are not sent by us, which are not meant to be read by us. It is between two third parties. Let's try and personalize the ad experience for this consumer. So this is bad personalization. So I think we are all waiting for the India data protection law. I think a lot of these will be taken care of and will fall in place once that is out and enforced. Any other question that anybody has? I see a hand there. Thank you so much, everyone. Really insightful session. Before posing the question, my learning here is that personalization is always welcome, but the question is that does personalization have something to do with the industry that we are operating in? For instance, Mondeleys can do really well, but will people be more cynical about it when they are dealing with personalization coming from Bharat Piaw or Pasa Bazaar or housing.com because the nature is like, I come from a BFSI sector and in BFSI, the moment we want to do personalization at scale, things like regulatory, things like legal, things like finance, compliance all come up, and then when we want to do personalization at scale, internally the scale means that you get all the teams on board before actually making a mark to the consumer and we lose the bus. Like the topical marketing, the moment marketing, the personalized factor of it just doesn't come through. So is it more industry specific and how can we actually enable that, be it in BFSI or be it in sectors, which are slightly more, where people are very, very privacy centric or safety centric or how they're handling their data, where how can we do personalization there? Sachin or Ashish, if you want to take that. See, you are right. Up to an extent, personalization is industry specific. I'll give you an example. Nobody minds sharing their anniversary date or their birth date, right? And if a gifting companies or Mondays or FNP or anyone else, if they're personalizing their communication, their journey, the experience around these occasions, right? Around festivals, around your birthdays, nobody would mind that. But when it comes to the financial information, which I have shared with you, like my salary or my credit score for that matter, and if you're using that, I'll be, as a consumer, I'll just it'll just force me to think, have I shared my information to the right guys? Are they using it? Are they protecting it, et cetera, et cetera? So, right? It depends on what information the consumer is sharing with you and how are you using that information? Thank you. Thanks, Sachin. And thanks a lot. Thanks, audience for the questions. And thanks once again to all the esteemed panelists here for sharing their insights and learnings on this. Thank you so much.