 Ladies and gentlemen, now moving forward, it's time for our panel discussion. Our esteemed panelists will be exploring the art and science of listening. I would now like to call on stage our session chair, Mr. Jagdish Mitra, Chief Strategy and Marketing Officer, Tech Mahindra. He heads the strategy for Tech Mahindra and is responsible for new growth business at Tech Mahindra. Prior to this role, he served as the CEO of Canvas M, the Mobility Unit of Tech Mahindra and a joint venture with Motorola that was founded in 2006 and also headed the large deals business of Tech Mahindra before taking up this role. Now I would request Mr. Jagdish Mitra to please come and join me on stage. Ladies and gentlemen, let's give a big round of applause. Good evening and a very warm welcome to you. Ladies and gentlemen, our panelists for this session are going to be Shilpa Dureja Puri, Director of Marketing Microsoft. Ma'am, I request you to please come and join us on stage. Sanjay Bhudani, MD, Borshan Law, India. Naseep Puri, Director of Marketing, Mountain Dew, PepsiCo. Anshuman Goenka, Marketing Head, Bakati, India Private Limited and Category Head, Whiskey, AMA Region. Prashant Sinha, Co-Founder and COO, Mom's Presso. And this is going to be a panel, ladies and gentlemen. Over to you, Mr. Mitra. Thank you. Good evening, I guess. Thank you for, I guess, Sudeep kind of made our job a little easier. And I can tell you we were all very well coordinated because we knew exactly what he's going to finish with his last slide. And so did the organizers because he did say that one of the most important things that the brand did to move was listening. And that was so well coordinated. So thank you guys for participating in the discussion with Sudeep. You know, reality, I guess you all know. The point I think we will do today in terms of our discussion is really about trying to figure out this whole important activity that, you know, marketers like me, who are probably from my hairstyle, you can tell, is a little more senior than some of my co-panelists, are always in the art and science of listening. So whether it was digital or physical, it's the most important activity as you start to build more and more credibility, especially true in today's world. So I'm going to take a little bit of your advertising dollars and tell you that Microsoft Research, it seems, says that, you know, we have about eight seconds of attention span. And some other research says that we get about 40,000 messages almost that we need to go through and we remember probably 100. And then there are some more research which says that, you know, we go through approximately on an exponential curve considering I have two phones and I'm sure my friends here have enough of them on a constant mode of these ability to look at our phones and devices 300, 400 times a day. And that's gone up exponentially over the last few years. So what does this mean? What does this mean to fellow marketers like yourselves? And what does this mean to people who are consuming or using our products? I think to a large extent it means that there is huge amount of distraction. So there's too much happening in terms of the buzz through the multiple screens that we are talking about. And there is a lack of trust, which means that you don't know what to trust and what information to make sense out of. So what we'll do today is really try and make sense of the art and science as they say, the love of the brand and the art and science of listening. We've got a great, great panel here. And actually it's interesting and this was also, by the way, we were talking about curating and it was curated, I think, starting from, you know, where we have people who are helping moms, which is the early part of the journey, to people who are helping people get into their first range of drinks and soft drinks or whatever you want to call them, and healthy and then being into a technology job and finally partying in the evening, which is why I brought him closer to me because that's what we want to do as soon as we finish. And you guys must be all wondering what the hell is the B2B company's marketing guy doing here. I'm here to just listen because this is what the topic is about and that's what I'm going to do listening in. The way we've sort of curated the format today is I'm going to ask each of my panelists to talk on a topic related to listening and each one of them will give their opening remarks and try and bring it to life by talking about real life examples. And then we are actually going to make sure that not me is the burden, but everyone is listening here on the panel and so are you. So you have a Twitter contest there, but you also have a listening contest here. So each of us listen to the other panelists and we'll make it a discussion rather than me asking, being the quiz master here and asking questions to all of us. So I'm going to be more the, you know, orchestrator rather than being the question mark here. So Sanjay, if I can start off with you and if you want to just give some opening remarks and then we'll follow through. Thank you, Jadish. And a very good evening to all the audience here and my co-panelists. So just for the purposes of the background, Baushan Lam is solely dedicated to gift of eyesight to a million of people across the world. And we do that through right from the birth in like every phase of life. And our mission is very simple and powerful. To help people to see better, to live better. Baushan Lam is also like one of the best known and very respected healthcare brand. And our sole priority is to like improve people's life. Through like customer listening and with the technology innovation that we are doing, we execute with excellence. And that's the way like we are respected by our customers or our stakeholders and other partners for over 165 years now. So let me start with social monitoring first, Jadish. So social media platform, which is now available, give consumers opportunity to maybe talk about the products, the services or about the brands on a real time basis now. Unlike in the past, when these social media platforms were not available. In the past like consumers used to have maybe toll free numbers or email IDs at best like snail mail due to maybe voice their feedback about a particular brand. And that was also not on a real time basis. And also like we did very cumbersome for the companies to understand and hear like what the people are saying about their brand. So with the advent of the social media and the increasing penetration of social media and in the mobile phones, the consumers can now on a real time basis talk about the brand and they talk to the companies. In fact, that has brought the distance between the consumer and the companies like reduced. At the same time, it makes it exciting for the consumers but makes it more complex for the companies and brands because they need to cut the clutter out of the lot of information which is getting generated on the social media. And very, very important for the companies to understand what the consumers are saying, what are their expectations. So it makes it very complex. And in simple words, like social monitoring is a very powerful tool to understand consumer sentiment, get like information about competition, influences, behavior and use all that powerful information to understand how the consumers are like perceiving the brand. At Bosch and Lawn, we've got a very robust system of monitoring like the social media. So we answer every feedback on any social media in seven minutes. Also, we've employed social media tools which help us to target and quickly reply to any social media feedback which is coming for the product. Also, our industry requires certain kind of expertise to answer to the technical queries raised by the consumers of the patients. So we've also wired in our professional services team. So this is a group of optometrists which are employed by the company to answer any technical query raised by a customer, one in a professional manner and secondly on a personalized basis. So that like brings the brand very closer to the consumer. And social listening is primarily you get like insights from social monitoring and then use that information to do what you can maybe make it like strong deliverables for the company. So in case of Bosch and Lawn, a very good example is like our contact lens called iConnect. For people entering this category is like when kids move from school to college. So that's the time when they start using contact lenses and through various social media monitoring we got to understand that at that age affordability for the contact lenses is an issue. So we started promoting, once you understood that so we started promoting a contact lens called iConnect which is like available at 200 rupees a month. Also a similar example in our color lens category like where we were getting a lot of questions in terms of what color lenses suit my profile, my skin color, my lifestyle. So we have now engaged a dedicated influencer who would answer to the queries by the people for what occasion, what color, what festival you can use like various color lenses. That's about like monitoring and listening. So Shilpa, one of the things that we are constantly talking about is the impact of AI and the impact of AI in terms of not just jobs but the ability to probably have a positive impact in the whole area of marketing and probably specific to the discussion related to listening. We all have huge amount of challenges with clutter, we have various challenges with making sure that it makes sense of what we are hearing from various sources. Will you comment on that as to how does that impact, how does technology enable this? Sure, thanks so much. Thank you for having us here. It's a subject very close to all of us, the hearts. I think there's a lot of AI conversation, there's a lot of confusion today around just the words and how we use between deep learning, machine intelligence, neural networks and artificial intelligence. And just the way Jigdi said, there are two nuances that I could probably reflect on today. One is overall marketing. And I would easily take that example of how today at Microsoft we're doing a lot of our B2B marketing which is infused with digital while it's driven with content at its core and it's got driven by artificial intelligence, it's also optimized by analytics. So that's one core. And the other is the social listening piece which is where a lot of AI gets infused and what are the pilots we're putting together. Let's dive into the first one first. We all, you know, our marketeers here appreciate the fact that marketing today is expected to create exceptional brand moments at every customer touch point. And digital becomes the core of that conversation because that literally holds the key to customer connection. Now in doing that in the world of B2B where the sales cycles are larger, the ticket value is much higher, the conversations are much longer as you go along, now how does B2B market here get into the world of doing that listening and really coming back and offering that exceptional moments. Now about a two-year window that we've been into that journey, Microsoft on boarded itself into a transformation marketing. Now we decided to change the way we did marketing for a giant like us to really throw back what we were doing to really embrace something new was largely dependent on the fact that the customers bombarded with messages today. Your customers full, right? A stat tells you about 2,900 marketing and sales messages per day. There's no appetite to listen to more. So what are you going to give him that? Are you going to give him what he's asking for? Or what you're going to give him what you want to tell? So if you were to go to the former, you really want to be listening to the customer and picking up his demand signals. And that's what we've been doing as part of the transformation to say we've got people, processes, and technologies coming together in building a predictable revenue model that puts together sales and marketing into an automation. And if I was to say onto a steroids of AI to tell us when to talk to a customer and how. It's essentially an engagement program that you get into rather than a one-off campaign, a one-off marketing activity to a connected customer conversation that you know first touch points got to be a tactic and then the second one and the third. And then what sequence does that deliver you a predictable revenue and a higher optimized environment? Is the ability that we've been able to do that into our system it's new, it's something that we're building on it on a day-to-day basis, but the amount of data that the tools bring out to you, there's a rationalization of that that puts you into the effort of putting our marketing on top of it. And we're excited to say that today we're doing that globally. There's a lot of conversations about how AI is infusing our day-to-day marketing and we see good results. I'm hoping that a lot of you are also bringing that on board and seeing how marketing automation combined with analytics and visual representation of that brings to life the entire story. And if I was to flip on the social listening part of it, there's a lot of exciting work that we're doing as part of our deep neural as well as machine learning is really predicting content themes. It's about optimizing our content delivery and even defining which audiences to go target. It's something that we do very beautifully in putting together not just about what's the input, what, who, where, and then you build on to that intelligence to pick up what should be delivered, but it's also to say go beyond the input value of saying I want to listen to. Because typically your queries start with I want to listen to about this. Just like a search string you will have, you will create keywords, you will need a practitioner and you will need tools to put that together. Similarly for social listening, you want to go beyond just the tool to say how do I curate that content. And I know the panel has a lot of exciting ideas to tell you how they are using, but only I was a parting note. I would say tech is an enabler. Tech as an AI is an enabler to do a whole lot more. It's not going to take away everything because you do need that creative juices to flow on top of that data that the tools spit out on all of us. Thanks a lot. I think one of the key messages that we are trying to drive here is technology which we'll probably hear across the panel is going to be at the core of every decision-making that we are doing today. However, how to use that technology and make meaning out of it is probably something that we marketeers need to be completely cognizant about and that's where the ability for using the right tools but also engaging in terms of what meaning to make out of it and that's where AI plays a critical role in holding the helping hand there. Anshuman, you have a very interesting sort of clientele, I presume, in the sense that it probably transgresses not just from an age group perspective, variety of people who are probably engaging with you on digital and you talked about your campaign when we were discussing it but also the physical part of it in the sense the non-digital part of it. I think a lot of our brands which are probably some of the people sitting here have two sets of customers who are very familiar with the digital world with smartphones and so on and so forth but they're also those customers who are not that familiar. So can you bring that to life in terms of how does your brand bring together both the digital and the physical aspects of listening? Sure, so let me touch upon that. I think of the outset and I was reading this very interesting quote this morning which was brands are no longer what you're telling the consumer it is but brands are what consumers are telling each other what it is. So I think the whole question of the importance of listening is clearly demonstrated. It's really a question of how well you're doing it and back to what you said how you're using both physical and digital forms and mediums to make sure that you're listening actively to your consumers. I think I would probably break that down into starting with digital first and taking a leaf from what Shilpa said. There is obviously a lot of information that's thrown at all of us in various forms and means and I think what's really important is to be able to use tools to be able to filter that down into what can be actionable intelligence and then keep the rest as chatter. So that's really important when it comes to social or digital listening. We at Bacardi use a tool called Synthesio that helps us sort of mine information from all sources and as far as social media is concerned we typically look at sort of three information sources there's the influencer channel, there's the brand channel and then there's the website. And through the use of Synthesio you were able to sort of distill that all down into actionable intelligence for us. An example here is a couple of years ago we were looking at how Bacardi is popping up across social media and one of the things we hit onto was not just tech search but graphic search as well which is another sort of growing medium right now. And when we started to put that together almost in the form of a collage we started to see Bacardi being present in settings that were around house parties. And that for us was such a spark or literally like it was the light bulb moment saying hey, is that an occasion that we then want to go after and reward our consumers and through that was born today our largest platform or a campaign is called Bacardi House Party where we're trying to create content and curate experiences around driving Bacardi's consumption within house parties and that's really helped us result in incremental volume across the last couple of years that we've been at it. And to your point Jagdish bringing in the whole physical sort of listening angle to it. I think physical interventions with consumers happens at lesser frequency but they're definitely higher on impact because you are in a face to face conversation with somebody who can make a difference to your business. So at Bacardi last year we actually initiated a program called Back to the Bar and I tell you guys drinking is a tough job and it's not that easy as you guys think it is. But through the program what we did was we encouraged all our employees to sort of go out and spend some time behind the bar. So we obviously have contracts with bars. So we sort of pre-aligned them and we obviously trained them on making a really great tasting Bacardi cocktail. And they actually went out, they went behind the bar, they made those drinks to consumers, they spoke to them, they understood why is it that you're choosing one brand versus another, what's the new trending flavor or drink choice that you have, right? And I think that for us was a really great program that sort of led listening into very, very actionable intelligence and actually then had an impact on business. So I think both, as you said, both sources, whether it's digital or it's physical, have different forms and mediums of listening but if you're able to sort of look at those closely create actionable intelligence using tools that we have now at our disposal and through that really start to, and then have the courage to do some action against it, right? I think that's important and you've got to take a risk, right? And you've got to believe in the conviction that, hey, this is a consumer who's telling me something and let me do something with it. And through that we've actually seen how it can actually help in commercial impact on the business. I think that's brilliant. I think because the ability to connect the dots across the board and ultimately, like you said, and I think we firmly believe across the broad as a technology company when we work with our customers, it's about the experience. So what people are talking to other people and talking about your brand is about the experience they're driving. So it's no longer about the large, I don't want to sound wrong about our billboard companies here but it's not about longer about the billboards or the advertisements in huge, humongous base, but it's about what each consumer is driving as an experience. So thanks, Sanjuman, for that insight. Naseeb, if I may ask you on some of the things that you would want to talk about, one of the things that we wanted to catch up with on this is what is Coke doing wrong? Sandeepan? No, not really. I think that probably needs about three days of a session from you. But you know, all of us are using these mechanisms to drive an experience. What would be that one or two case studies that you could share with the audience here? That's been a great example of building almost like similar to the house party but probably from your experience on how you leverage listening. Yeah, sure. Honestly, I think what I want to do here today is hopefully inspire you guys to go back and listen a lot more and realize that it's not going to happen individually. We have to build a lot of ecosystem partnerships and ecosystem capability as we get into the marketing of, you know, this new age and new consumer. And so a couple of things I'll speak to. One of the platforms that we built on you which came completely from listening and something that I was referring to the team earlier is. You know, Sanjay referred to monitoring and listening. And typically what we do as brands when we do monitoring is we track conversations around our brand, our category, our competition. It's like a hygiene health checkup, right? That you know daily what the world is talking about you. And then there's listening, where you put aside your brand maybe and you're listening to what your audience is saying. I don't care what they're talking about you. I want to know what that 18-year-old boy is actually interested in. What is his life about? What are his aspirations about? What are his dreams? What are his drivers? And therefore you monitor brands and issues, but you listen to people, right? And that's where listening evolves. And this is something we did a couple of years ago. We have this command center I guess as I realize many organizations do. And we've been listening to what our consumers, what is our audience talking about, what are their interests. Unless we were tracking this, youth, TG is what we have. Obviously there was movies and there's music and there's sports and there's like a billion brands doing those platforms. All is well. And then suddenly we realize that there's this relatively small but very fast growing conversation around gaming. And gaming doesn't necessarily mean, you know, the console blaming and they're playing Counter-Strike, etc. It's also the candy crush on your telephone, right? And there's a lot of conversation around all of this. And that gives us conviction that this is a space that is ready to explode. And fast forward three years later, we've got this big eSport platform on Mountain Dew, which is our single largest engagement platform with youth. We call it the Mountain Dew Dew Arena. Today, sitting in 2018, if you check Affinity for Gaming on Facebook, it's about 3X of all adventure sports put together. So biking, kayaking, skateboarding. Gaming is about 3X of that. Today gaming is officially a sport in the Asian Games for this year. And it has been built in as a sport in the Olympics as well. In 2020 it's going to be an exhibition sport and in the subsequent year it's going to be a medal sport. So it's actually a formal sport. By the way, the government is also potentially creating a body sports in its piece. And Mountain Dew Dew Arena is today India's largest gaming championship. We had about 5 lakh participants last year. And the last championship, which was by another organization, had about 22,000 participants over a 22 month period. So the power of it is really that this came, this completely came out of us sitting in a room and seeing what are these kids talking about, what are they interested in. And today we are sitting at the cusp of a trend which is about to explode and we've embedded ourselves so deeply into it that, you know, it has the potential to become a scale platform. Therefore the power of really listening to the consumer versus just listening to them speak about your brands. Absolutely important. I think what probably you're saying is that as marketeers don't narrow your scope of listening and it probably connects back to what you talked about which is really about, it will result in humongous amount of data. How do you make sure that what do you want to listen to and to your point as well, where you had to pick up that image because you're probably listening to a million things and how do you pick that out and make sure you make sense out of that piece which will help you build a career. You wanted to say something? Yeah, I just wanted to make a point and say, you know, it's such an interesting example of what today you see as trend of the social listening 3.0 which is literally what I said, you know, you don't do the input article as saying, listen to this. It's about picking up trends that may be coming that brand can potentially engage and that's exactly what you've done ahead of the curve. So the point that we are very conscious of and I think every marketer has to be very conscious of that you cannot move away from your brand story. Your brand has a story that it needs to tell. You have to listen to what the consumers are talking about that overlaps with stories that you can authentically speak to, right? Sure, sure, Sajju. I have a point to make. So it's not only about the digital thing. Also, the physical works quite a lot. So for example, we sell our products to distributors who then in turn sell to the optical stores and where the consumers would buy and also it's available online. So I ask each of my team member, specifically the marketing people to be in the market maybe at least once in a month in different areas. So there where we picked up last year that are TORIC shares. So TORIC are lenses where you've got both horizontal and vertical power and the SKUs are like almost like 20,000. So people don't, the optical stores don't like buy and then store. So they would order as a consumer would come in. So we figured out visiting market that our TORIC share was dropping, right? And that was through a physical connect. So and then they said the other companies have started like delivering twice in a day and if we order your product, we don't know like when it is coming and we can't like commit to the consumer what time we'll deliver and then they walk away, go to the other optical store. So now we started with a project called Customer Delight which was like last year. So where we've created NAP and in fact the inauguration is happening tomorrow. So where now the retailers can put a specific order online. So which would go to the distributor and they would get an answer back like Amazon that when it would be delivered. So if they don't have that in a stock, it would shake our inventory at the company level. So if we don't have it there also then it would tell maybe you get it in 30 days. So it's not only about like just digital, it's also still about maybe going to the market understand where you have a big channel to sell to what the, and everybody's a consumer at a different state. Absolutely. I think touch and feel and I think his example of the bar behind the bar is an exact example of capturing it. Sorry Prashant, I just wanted to add something. I couldn't agree more with what Naseeb said which is if you want your brands to be relevant today and tomorrow, I think the starting point as he said is to take your brand out of the equation and look at what the consumer is saying and doing. And for us, we call it popular culture and that's something which has been extremely critical in driving not just how do you express your brand because your brand DNA still remains the same but your expression changes over time. And that manifestation of that expression should be based on what's popular culture today. And if you're able to crack that code and I agree with you Sanjay, it can also be through physical observation, not just listening. Another example is, we host the largest music festival in the Apocardian at Seven Weekend of Music Festival. So at the last festival, I'm standing there with a bunch of guys from my team and the crowd is fairly subdued. So we're in front of a stage and suddenly we see this hip-hop artist called Divine walk up on stage and the crowd has a different level of energy than if you've not seen in the last three hours. And we're wondering what the hell is happening here. And that was an observation where we said, hey, there is this whole cultural movement towards hip-hop and what they call as Desi rap music in this country. And through that, we've actually created a program for Breezer, which is one of our brands, and then the brand filter comes in. So if that's all about dance and movement, and that's what Breezer is all about, which is movement and vibrancy, we actually went out and created a platform called Breezer Shuffle, which is now becoming potentially India's largest hip-hop dance and music program. So I think it's exactly what you guys are saying, but again, you've got to do something with it. And it can come through culture, come through physical form, whatever the case may be. Absolutely. Prashant, I think before we let you speak, we had six commentaries on this. This is how we wanted the panel to work. It was not going to be a monologue, but it's going to be a discussion. And I think the guys got a sense of it. You have a very interesting platform. You are dealing with a very sort of trust-based conversation, and it has an impact. How does listening work there? What do you do if there are any experiences where you can bring to life saying how you listened and probably monitored? You talked a few things about linguistic bits and language and so on and so forth. You want to bring that to life? Sure. Am I audible? So just for everyone, I run one of the largest platforms for moms in the country, which is called Mom's Pressor. For mothers in the room, they would be... It was known as My City for Kids earlier, which has just got rebranded to Mom's Pressor. So just to give you a background, we get 10 million mothers on the site. And the interesting part is mothers come not only from Delhi, Bombay, Bangalore. It's a language platform. So there are mothers who write in English, Hindi, Bangla, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu. So I'll just talk about the journey of listening through the whole process, and I will possibly not talk about the tools of listening because we run a tech platform that is in the heart of the platform. But I'll talk about the art of learning because I think the other part we have to definitely touch upon. So just to give you a background, My City for Kids was a listings platform for kids' services. Like Zomato was for restaurants, we were for kids' services. So if you're looking for play school, dance classes, hobby classes, you can find it in Golgawa, in Bandra, in Colaba, anywhere. That's how it started, but after four years of running that business, which was a very decent brand, we realized we are not playing a large role in the life of a mother. She gets a play school or dance class, and she was not coming back. So then we did a lot of research and we asked mothers, what do you want on this platform? And mothers were writing and commenting, why don't you do something around parenting? So what we did was we opened a platform, a blogging platform within the platform, saying if mothers are here, homogenous set of mothers are here, why don't you come and write? So first few set of mothers started writing. Over a period of time, what became was mothers started commenting, and the mothers who were reading the blogs, they also started becoming contributors. So as we speak, we have 6,000 bloggers. They get anywhere between 150 to 200 stories a day. But the larger part of it was we thought the messaging would all be around parenting, but mothers started talking about in-laws, post-partum depression, start adoption, IVF, beauty, health. So stuff was much more beyond we thought of parenting, and then we looked at some very nice magazines like Greshoba and all, and we spoke to a few editors out there, and they said parenting is possibly the seventh element out there. So mothers and mothers are sitting here. After a while, you get fed up of parenting, you want to be more about me. So that's when we decided that this platform can't be just restricted to kids. In January of this year, we branded it to mom's preso. And mom's preso is mom and coffee. So we had thought of mom's meeting over coffee, it's about mom's preso. Post that, again, we realized that the platform can't be restricted to parenting, therefore open it for everyone. So it's health, beauty, and other stuff. So as we speak, our beauty category has taken over baby categories in the span of three months. So what we are seeing is if you're continuously listening and you are changing the product as per the consumer, you can clearly make a platform which grows very fast. So for the last one year, we've gone 300% in terms of traffic. And for the contributors, we added 3,000 more contributors. And I'm retaining consumers as well. The second part of it is, you know, this whole part of listening, we are on the other side of listening. We are in the area of generating conversations. So we realize that over a period of time, India is only 10% English. A large part of it is the Hindi, Bangla, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu. So very interesting insight I'll talk about. So what happened was the platform was in English and people, while the overall quality of the platform was good, we were rejecting possibly 80% of the bloggers saying your language is not good. Therefore, we don't want to take you. And we were rejecting because we wanted to maintain the quality and all the chief content offices is from Columbia and TV. So these are the kind of background of people we had only. So one of the things, someone said that, okay, if people can contribute in their language, why don't you open a language platform? And the beautiful thing that came out of that is that after that, the overall quality of the platform has gone up. So people who were contributing in English, they were actually thinking in Hindi but writing in English. Now the moment you got that language platform, people today of the 200 stories that come in, 100 stories come out of a mobile app, people are typing 800 words of content and putting it on the platform. The third thing you have to figure out also is this thing on platform behavior versus consumer behavior. Now the platform in the last one year with Geo coming has changed significantly and with data coming into every household, possibly a lot of mothers have not seen desktops. So we had to build a platform where mothers could add content on the fly, add through voice, all of it from the phone. And therefore at the back end, we've been building products thinking of how the platform is changing. This is the third thing. And the fourth thing which is very important for brand managers which I obviously say is we were, we were three dads running the company. But we realized that when people spoke about stories like I carried the baby for nine months but I didn't even have the right to keep the name at one level to someone saying I don't even have a Sunday and someone also saying I wanted to throw the baby out of window in the first three months because I was so frustrated. So we didn't get it at all as dads. And we said that if we can't get it, how can we, we can go and comprehend and tell people. So the first mandate we made was we will only hire moms. So in the company with 100 people, we have 70% moms in the company. Thank you. The second thing what I wanted to, the moment the moms came in, we have, I'll give you two instances. There was one Brinks brand who had come and said that we wanted to do something. And there was a Berger brand who we wanted to do something on a platform. Now mothers were saying this is the part that I can do and this is the part we can't do on the platform. Today the way it goes is the mothers take a call whether this brand or this piece of content fly over here or doesn't come in over here. So essentially, you know, when we keep talking about, you know, you have to be in bed with your consumer, you have to leave people over within the team who can interpret and comprehend what the consumer is saying. So like postpartum depression when mothers are writing, you know, people are tagging their husbands. This is what I was going through. Do you know that? They're tagging their husbands out there, okay? People are writing about the in-laws and they are saying that when you do a social media post on a platform, and this is very interesting inside, we have built a toolkit on social. Whenever you put anything about chacha, dada, dadi, it gets very little response. Whenever you put anything on mama, mausie, nani, it gives a brilliant response. And so we had a laugh at it, but we realized that the woman when she leaves home and she comes to another house, this is the only memory left with her, but the other way beyond that, it's only this side of the family. Now what at the back end, what we have done, with these mothers, we have those brilliant toolkits we know that this what you, this you'll do, your traffic will go up, your engagement will do up. If you don't do this kind of stuff, possibly things will not work out. So this whole three things on, you know, generating right conversation, therefore creating right platforms at one level, to being in bed with your consumer and understanding what they want is comprehending. And third level is giving them the whole interpreting the expression, is the key of a platform as we speak. Absolutely brilliant. I think apart from the experiences that you're delivering, you're targeting a very large social issue and a conversation piece. And I think one of the big things that you talked about, which I think most of us gathered, was the ability for us to be agile. You know, as soon as you keep listening, it's all monitoring, it's not good enough. The ability for us to change and probably make sure that we are able to take that listening into our product or service, so that we can make a, you know, make a difference to what we are listening in. So just to add on to this, there's a book called the Lean Startup. And I think everyone should read that book, because I had come, you know, much earlier, we would have not taken eight years to build a platform. We would have possibly done it in two years. What this book talks about is a very nice theory of build, measure, learn. And the idea is build, measure, learn. You build something, quickly test it to the consumer and don't test it like a full marketer. So just check it out quick and then learn and then keep building it. It's like a lock. And one day the lock will fit cut. Now at mom's place, so we do it day in, day out. So we are not about saying that we are going to build one big product at the end of the year. It's about doing the small tweaks and one day the team gets, oh, this is working and therefore build measure and starts working. Absolutely. And I think in today's digital world, your ability to be able to do that is much more enhanced because of the technology that we're using. I want to look at the organizers and ask them how much time we have and then accordingly we'll do the panel questions and then have they all left the room? It's not that boring, right? Okay, okay, thanks. So I'm going to kick it off and then I'm hoping that each one of you have some questions of the other. So when you build one of the key points I thought you captured is this area of listening is important, but how do you create people to talk so that they can listen to? How do you create conversations? And you also talked about that. Could you dwell a little more on what could be the strategy that people would want to deploy when they start having engagement platforms so that your consumers come and talk there so that you've got something to listen to and hear about? So what are those engagement platforms you go to or how do you create conversation pieces for people to start talking about stuff? So for example, this 18-year-old talks about the whole life and therefore you pick up something like eSports. So I don't think that, at least in my thinking, I don't think that we need to create platforms as brands for consumers to talk about so we can listen to them. There's enough and more that they are speaking about. I think just we have to be agile enough to listen to them. And there's one aspect of listening which I feel is very critical for us to even decode that listening today and especially social listening today focuses a lot on the what. So you know what they're talking about. So it tells you the behavior. But I do think that as brand custodians we need to dig a little deeper and understand the why. And why are they talking about that? What is the trigger behind that behavior? Because otherwise, even as we churn out content, you will keep addressing that superficial what which will be relevant, but it won't build to levels of intimacy. There's this very simple illustration that we have on one of our brands, which is Gatorade, which builds this point out, when Gatorade was trying to build consumption, the whole conversation was around what are consumers consuming today, right? After the exercise, while they're exercising, what are they consuming today? And all the listening told us, Pani, Nimbu Pani, and glucose additive to water, right? So very simple, very clear. And as a brand, we know that we are significantly superior functionally for that. And we have a very powerful functional story. So what was the obvious output? Let's create a powerful consumer story. Let's start telling them how, you know, Gatorade is so much superior than water, then Nimbu Pani, and replenishing all of that. Well, luckily the team said, let's understand why they drink Pani and Nimbu Pani, and why they don't choose Gatorade. We went back and spoke to all these guys, and it is not their belief of what hydrates and replenishes their salts better. It is the fact, that my gym instructor says, drink this, right? So had we done a basic response to what we saw, we would have obviously converted consumers, but instead we've created a powerful grassroots program where we are trying to solve the trigger for the behavior which is influencing the influencers and teaching them. So I think that we need to listen the enough platforms that we listen to. We need to spend a lot more time understanding why they are saying what they are saying, because that's when the response is more powerful. Very good. I may just jump into that. So, yeah, I think, you know, she's right. I mean, there is, as you said, there is enough and more platforms, data, information that's already available out there. It's really about how do you sort of use that and use that with a purpose, right? So when we start to look at all the relevant data that's out there, you can start to then, very easily you can start to then create some themes, right? And what you will then realize is that there are themes that can then dovetail into, you know, content creation. There are themes that will help you deliver your new product idea. There are themes that can help you even understand, you know, down to, say, what are the big macro trends? What are the new emergent micro trends? And then through that, you can then start to segment it, saying, okay, this is relevant for this part of my portfolio. This is the potential action I can take against it. So it can literally be like a canvas of opportunity. And then it's upon how you start to distill that into themes and then start to take some action against that. Okay, okay, very good. This is just to add to what Anshuman is saying. So at times like you make a deliberate attempt to start a conversation. So for example, we would do maybe do's and don'ts of using contact lenses or myths about contact lenses. So that's where you can start a conversation. You also done a college program where change your look. So each college we went to, like the university and the best boy and the girl in that town and then at the national level. And then where the conversation started, like how can you kind of change your looks by using contact lenses? One of the lenses that I would apply to this is at least it's a journey that we are learning on. I think as brand managers in this new world of content and consumers consuming more and more content on ad free platforms, right? On where traditional advertising doesn't go. I think the power is in being able to tell your brands. I guess all brands have their own little timeless truth and timeless story, right? To be able to tell that timeless story in a context that consumers choose to consume versus traditionally it's what brands want consumers to see, right? That's traditional advertising. That's not going away in a hurry, especially for brands like ours which are so deeply penetrated. But and therefore in that entire context, right, of when you tell those stories that consumers choose to see they'll automatically start having conversations around that and then it's in a relevant context to what you're speaking about what your brand philosophy is about. You know the stuff that engages around that and you know. And that's why listening is more important. That is why listening is so important. Because it's becoming more and more relevant for you to tell the story that people want to probably engage with rather than what you think you have a story to. Not about sorry. Not only about what they want to see but stuff that so let's take let's take you as an example, right? So Mountain Dew stands for the spirit of risk taking. It's about inspiring youth to push their boundaries, step outside boundaries. Our traditional advertising has always been about that, right? But then let's say the two truths of today. Consumers are more and more looking for authenticity goes without saying. Purpose in the brands that they interact with as well as they are moving to content which is ad free, right? So in that sort of context, what we did this year on Dew is of course we had our TV and we had all of that and we had this powerful biopic story that is going on our TVC. It's about this young lad called Arjan Vajpayee who's on a mission to be the youngest in the world he's 23 years old today and he wants to be the youngest in the world to climb 14 of the world's highest peaks. There are only 14 mountains in the world which are above 8000 meters. So we are telling his story on our TVC it's an ad. But at the same time we've created some content partnerships to be able to we've got an episodic series on Kanchenjanga. He's attempting Kanchenjanga this year and it's on Arjan's mission to summit Kanchenjanga and it's a web series it's a 16 bar episode we've it's pretty much, let's put it this way it comes to you from the mountain you handle it is as good as not branded right? We have got in 8 short weeks a billion and a half impressions on that we've got 50 million views we've got a 99% positive conversation and so much of that conversation is around mountain view when there is hardly any mountain view in that conversation and then they're also speaking about the spirit they're also speaking about stuff the values that they connect with on that and suddenly I know what in my content and what in my stories with them is clicking which I will build forward as I take it forward so just to add on to the see traditional marketing was built on 30 second USP and the whole filter was inside benefit reason to believe now with digital and more free content available there are 3 big trends that is coming so this whole thing on 30 seconder has possibly moved to whatever level you can do as long as you can engage the consumer the USP has moved to MSP saying that I can have multiple selling point of the same product and third level brands have to start from inside vis-a-vis coming to saying that I want to live the product window approach traditional marketing with 10 second product window so I think all these 3 things are getting challenged because everyone is now starting to think the consumer first when you think the last thing that I want to just when you said people have span of 7 seconds therefore the role of micro content suddenly grows up and therefore the weeks on air that you have to live possibly you have to live it every day so it's not about those 5 posts on facebook you have to do 500 posts on facebook Hindustan times is 200 a day so you have to start thinking marketing right from consumer to inside to MSP less of products and round the year and that's how the whole theory should change so there is to be engagement on a consistent basis one of the viral films that I want to make because I have never understood how people being viral I don't know how you make start with the target of making you a viral film I don't know I still haven't understood but it's all about if mountain view is pushing the boundaries I want to dimensionalize pushing the boundaries at every level and then I marry it with a platform behaviour for instagram it's a 1 minute for facebook it's a 2 minute for youtube it's a 5 minute at a ppm level nasif should start thinking at a pre production level that when I am making the film how can on facebook in the first 3 seconds push the boundaries there because the people will just bump it off all with instagram 1 minute that's how marketing has changed and traditional market is while the original theory doesn't change your platforms have changed traditionally now you would never do the same ad for tv and press you will think differently and technologies like we talked about here is drastically changing the way you can change the way you can communicate and relate to the conversation that the pg is having with you and the best part and I was telling the panel over here on the other side the best part is you don't need to build all tools there are enough available so there's a hub spot tool which I spoke about they have cracked 1024 words after using some 500 million conversations and they said if you put these words in any of your print ad also people are likely to react and read so now these tools are available someone should just process the tools and use it for right marketing so the title checker will possibly help you saying that if my tvc title is this when the moment you put a number 5 or you put a number super amazing or you say why did people do it there are certain words you put you know it's up for grabs and that's why for the market I have to start thinking now it becomes a doctor's and lawyer's job you have to learn every day and the platform will keep coming and in terms of facebook are changing every day we need to start thinking as publishers and content creators instead of as brand managers because even the way we push stuff down pipelines of consumer streams will change because we are used to traditionally buying a spot on a particular platform and building our brands out and this new model of content there will be ecosystem partnerships there will be publishing partnerships and you know that traditionally 5, 10, 15 years ago we used to say there's media and there's creative and today we brief our media and creative teams together in one room as one agency right then PR came into that being and that became common ecosystem and I think more and more we have to be conscious that those three are not going away but the content creator the publisher has to be a core part of that ecosystem otherwise we will not be able to have these conversations because we will not be able to afford to have these conversations even monetarily right? So if you look at the you know when we were traditional marketers we used to talk about reach reach and frequency then you know the new terminology came that it's not about reach it's about relevant reach so how many people use my audience but the third level is not even relevant reach it's a reaction reach how many people are likely to react to my content they are my core audience so essentially Facebook has a very nice algorithm so what it does they're trying to continuously build this platform based on what a traditional marketer thinks so they said if you want to reach out to a lot of people just do custom audience all then they said if you want to go to the consideration funnel from awareness funnel what you do people who have seen your ad you make a lookalike of them and just target them and the second round and third round if you want to push them to purchase funnel people who have reacted and engaged and push them to you know go and buy now understand publishers also like us we are building these kind of elements because we know that for mass you know 25 to 45 women no one is coming to my platform or nan wants to come to a platform because there's a mother with a premature baby and she's breastfeeding but she also wants to see formula that then it'll come to that so that kind of relevant reach is what if I can give them then only brand will come to me. If I would just pick on the two words that you said which is pipeline which is music to my ears as a B2B marketer and you talked about the bicycle at the event is what we do very interesting and I think it's important the element that we've probably not spoken for the moment is how do you make social listening work hard for business you know you've done campus you've done the reach but what about the performance and for a B2B marketer across the two chairs we'll relate to the fact that most of our conscious effort is about driving the pipeline it's about accelerating the pipeline it's about influencing the pipeline eventually end of the day right so as a social listening how do you use that tool now I'd urge for my fellow panelists to answer but I'll give you my two takes on how we handle it is essentially not just social listening on your own channels because that's where half the universe gets stopped right you've got your own branch channels you respond to them you react to them with a certain time frequency but what about those conversations that are happening at review sites or for that matter are platforms that your brand doesn't exist now at those places what we've started to do is spend an extra effort go out and pick up signals go out and pick up those conversations and say here's a person talking about an X product of Microsoft saying I have an angst it's not on my brand channel I'm not going to ignore that conversation because ignoring that conversation literally means it's like a call center right you've not picked up that call when a customer was trying to call irrespective he wasn't sort of dialing into you made sure that you would that put that guy back into your customer care circles and nurture cycles and make sure eventually that guy gets into your care and your nurture now what I'd love to hear is do any of you go across outside your brand channels to listen in and to respond to those conversations and effectively draw them back into making your advocates so very interesting point you made so what we do is and we realize that when people come to my platform even though I give the content for free that mother is investing five minutes of her time so we said what is the ROI that I need to give to her so essentially what came out that she comes and reads a lot of content but she also leaves but comments were like thousands of comments come in nothing happens with the comments we never used to react and then these butters also used to post these blogs which are written on a platform on other platforms so what we just did is we hired a comments manager the comments manager job is to take every comment and respond to that comment because the moment I personally respond to those thousand comments suddenly I'm start connecting with the brand the with the consumer and that is what everyone has to believe in terms of doing the second thing that we did was you know we had two hundred blogs coming every day we said you know let blogs come just put it in we said out of that every blog has to be read so what we did we have hired a five member team per language to read every blog so that when the mother knows that if she's contributing over here what is the kind of reaction you want to give or edit it's a great thought so you know the whole element of creation and curation is becoming very very important in these days it's not about making that one BBC or one film and leaving it on air for your district to say hundred million views it's all about relevant reaction comments engagement what did you do with that and then come out and saying that this is the number of people I engage with truly because that's how consumers can see it very well and then Prashant I think it finally boils down to where we started from that these kind of actions help build the trust yes help build the trust with your customer with the consumer that there is stuff being done about it and it's not going through a factory approach there's no replacement for trust in this industry now more now than ever because the appointment viewing is over the person is now you know possibly seeing hundreds of content and in three seconds you're bumping off how do I stay with that audience is the key so if Mountain Dew is doing push the boundaries with the film that we are talking about the summits essentially that's a real story so real story connects with me and therefore the brand is connecting with me if you're going and pushing me go by Mountain Dew and have a drink and just push boundaries possibly that is great on TV but may not be great on this I'm going to open this up for a couple of questions we probably have time for two yes and if you could just announce yourself and say whom you want to answer unless you don't have a particular preference any questions ladies and gentlemen okay there's a question can we get that I think we don't want to let it go okay so I'll post this question we'll come to you hello yeah I'm Sumanth I would like you know this is a great discussion happen here on the listening I'll just give you a very recent example of my interaction with a multinational consumer electronics brand you know I will mention the name Samson and I gave the feedback about their product you know it's like I gave the very I work very hard to give them very you know concentrated feedback regarding the quality and they are not even ready to listen it you know they are negotiating on a deal with me you know you spend this much of money and then I'll replace these things you know I mean I thought I kind of spent my time to locate the fault and give you the quality defects and where the problem is and then you are again coming back to me and doing some negotiation you know so how you kind of address this kind of behavior coming from the big branch you know where we are directly giving the feedback to the CEO I mean through their social media platform and their web pages you know and then the listening they are doing in their own way you know they are not actually addressing for to rescue the consumer experience you know I mean how what you suggest to deal with such kind of branch which which are so distributed listening, consumer listening any of you want to take it or I guess I have a Samsung phone too so I can yeah so I am not a brand so therefore I answer I worked in brands for multiple years but just to give you the answer over here is and I'll give you an example within my industry so see this is a challenge with a lot of brands now because consumers can directly interact with Anand Mahindra and send him a tweet Sir, this is not a car they send it to a dealer here so understand that one-on-one with the consumer is happening but essentially the organizations have to go through a complete change so just to give you this a company called Momsco and this company called Mama Earth they build organic products for babies and they are challenging the hell out of all the big brands that you can think of the country what they have built in they have built a whole business around answering customer queries so what they did when Mama Earth launched in India they got 2,000 evangelists just talking about Mama Earth and they got these people immersed into the brand they took to the factory and now these people are standing up for them for any discussion that is happening saying hey I have this product I know it's good even if you are saying I am standing for you so that whole problem is there the only thing is as we heard also initially now brands are becoming C2C consumer to consumer so you have to build consumer evangelist you can't answer so many questions what I believe in it will be diamond desert questions consumer should be able to answer your question but I guess one of the most important part is respond that doesn't go away and today's technology allows you to respond I am going to you know Samsung is a big customer of ours so I am going to not tell what their CEO should do but at least from our perspective that's probably what tools allow you to do and if you want to like leverage of tools and technology that are there and if you don't have to have a whole call center trying to answer it you can actually respond today and there is no I mean it may not you may not like the answer and by the way thanks for bringing Anand Mahindra into the conversation the two things I think building on what Prashant has said is essentially crowd sourcing crowd sourcing happens today but if I was to say the two trends that are happening in social listening today as we speak in 3.0 are crowd sourcing and artificial intelligence I've spoken about AI so I won't talk anymore but crowd sourcing is essentially not the one that you've seen where people just there and talking to each other and you're creating that but literally in social listening is what you've heard Prashant speak is where you make advocates you have brands you have individuals who will talk in the face of the brand at that real time and actually trigger it back to the brand saying there's a conversation you're literally crawling the web with people of advocates and the brand lovers to do that conversation for you you will see that coming there's a business model that I'm hearing today which is great insight because I thought that was the trend and I see a real time example so that's in place Kudos answering on the second question of how Microsoft would potentially handle that is that we have something called a customer experience center it happens at a geo level and we've got 30 brands and we've got literally a 150 member team that works through all those brands in answering and responding to the queries now let's also say that it has to be a programmatic fashion because in a minute you get about 6000 tweets happening in social sphere every time you can't respond to each one of them so there's a format that brands would typically have at their back end of saying what gets responded and what doesn't get responded do you respond to spam do you respond to some customer or something that's just sort of a statement that's passed off on a brand so there are brand guidelines with larger brands to say how do you respond to what kind of content typically product queries get responded in six hours a complaint gets notified and passed on to a customer care center in two hours those are response times that you have as part of the team nuances I'm sure Samsung has its own I'm sure you just have to allow for a little more for them I think so if you look at and imagine the similar situations would have happened with Patanjali there would be 1000 people standing and saying hey I've used the product so there's a whole theory and content community commerce you build content you get a following of community and then you do commerce then there are so many people community standing for you what we tend to do traditional companies what we have done is we build the company first we build the products and then we are building a community later so whoever builds the community first they will get a lot of support from crowd vis-a-vis you know trying to respond to all there's one more question that we can take gentlemen here yeah yeah so we have heard about the artificial intelligence a lot of new things coming up in the world of marketing but I think we would like to know because I run a digital marketing company and I would like to know the future of blockchain in the world of marketing and how CMOs would be using the blockchain technology in the future I have to admit that this is a new one we work on blockchain but the blockchain and marketing haven't thought of it but blockchain is primarily being used as a technology which has ability to make sure that there is content and you know the record that you are talking about there is consistency in that data and there is access to policy related stuff so that you can access the data depending on who's been so you have got hyper ledger on blockchain so it allows two way and stuff like that so I don't know how you would use it probably more in terms of if I can think of just thinking on as you as I answer this is a lot of stuff that we talked about in the panel in social listening is going to be about ensuring that there are various teams so she talked about you know three of these guys coming together now is there a way by which blockchain can create a marketing platform which allows consistency of that data which is used by the PR which is used by media and they are using the same 1024 words or whatever that is coming out of our conversations on listening across these three people of creative of the copy and the PR and the brand people all coming out of the same piece of content that's one thing one use case I can think of otherwise I don't know if you have any I'll give you another which is in my sphere digital advertising there's a lot of conversations and there are prototypes and demos available now in mature markets especially US has begun to which is on digital ads serving so there's a lot of play on digital ads serving on how do you ensure that the ad fraudulence is taken care of so what we have something called digital not star guidelines essentially your brand metrics to define that ads are served at the right places right neutrality you've got the right visibility stuff like that blockchain is going to be more programmatic networks that your ad deliveries are very genuine the less number of fraudulence and install issues that you today I think those are use cases in play already right so I think blockchain we can wrap this up yes we are thank you so much to all our panelists for joining us