 And with that, ladies and gentlemen, it's now time for the first session of the evening. May I now invite Mr. Kartik Sharma, CEO of South Asia WaveMaker to talk about the economics of CX. Kartik Sharma is the managing director of India and South Asia WaveMaker. Prior to WaveMaker, he was the managing director of Maxis, South Asia. Having completed his MBA from the Nancy Monge Institute of Management Studies in 1995, Kartik began his career with HTA as a media planner on the Unilever business. He moved on to Lintas as channel planning director from 1997, where he continued to work on Unilever, Bajaj Auto, Raymans, etc. In 2000, Kartik joined Mindshare, where he was a planning director from 2000 to 2003. He was in Madison from 2003 to 2007, heading the Madison Media Research Center. Kartik has been a part of Maxis since 2007 and has looked after the West region from Mumbai. He is an extremely result-oriented achiever with an excellent track record of handling key client relationships for prestigious brands including Photophone, Laurier, Tata Sky, and Shoppers Top to name a few. Ladies and gentlemen, put your hands together. Welcome on stage, Kartik Sharma. You all did not tell me about the powerpoint. I've already started the session with a small mistake. Sorry, Anurag. Before I move on, I'm just going to give you a sense of what I'm trying to share with you, the learnings that I have, which is called economics of the consumer experience. I think I want to take a slightly different view on loyalty, a different view on where the growth for brands are going to come in. Lot has been spoken in the early 90s about loyalty programs, how the ultimate consumer experience. While that's true, but it may not be sufficient in a world which is so competitive where brands are vying for growth. So moving on, economics of consumer experience. There are two parts to the entire experience. There's one side which is a consumer where he or she wants brands at a certain price value equation which is sitting in their mind. And from the brand owner's side, it is all about how do I deliver certain experiences both pre, during and post, once a brand sale is happening. And it's the tug-of-war and how do you actually bring that balance in? So coming from media, let me start with some statistic. There's an interesting report by Frostin's Eleven which says that by 2020, consumer experience will overtake price and product as a key differentiator. In fact, 86% of the consumers will pay all the attention to the consumer experience. That's one side of the equation. This will, without any other context, if you were to just read this, then all marketers should be really refocusing only on consumer experience. And that made me think that is that so simple? Is it easy to do on a sustainable basis? And at what cost? Will the cost of retaining the consumer 5x more or less? And how do you actually really manage that? And the later part of my presentation is all about how from a media agency lens, how can you bring this alive for some of the brands that you work? I must admit that there is a lot of myth in marketing which is happening around us, not just in India but even globally. While some of you may agree to this, but a lot of it implicitly, the first myth is the consumer is a monogamous. That means that I have to at any shot win that consumer. There's a lot of loyalty. They're going to keep running to my brand and keep buying it and more purchase. So today they bought for 100 rupees. Tomorrow they'll buy 200, 300, 400. It keeps on going. Why is this kind of a thing? I believe it's a myth. The myth is also propagated by a lot of conventional wisdom, which is that if I have more loyalty, more loyal consumers, actually cost of doing business will come down. So I really don't need to worry and I just have to manage those consumers and have experiences which are meaningful to that. At a very intuitive level, sounds fantastic. Sounds somewhere right. But when you look at, start looking at hard data, this is not the reality, unfortunately. If this were happening, I would love it. I would love all my clients to actually go in this path and do that. The reality is something different. The reality is the consumer is a polygamist. Unfortunate, but true. Think of each one of us here, the brands that you buy, take a category, basic category like a shampoo or any such very basic needs that one will have. Are you only buying one brand? Hardly. Of course for everything that I say, there will be exception to the rule. Let me admit it. Let's not go by outlier. In general, if you are to look at society around us, brands around us, build this whole crew. And I think the sad tourist, the consumer is a polygamist. The consumer is very smart. We do respect the consumer, but he or she is not loyal to any one brand. And this theory of loyalty and how to actually build while it's true in parts in certain categories. The Pareto's law, I hope everybody here knows the Pareto's law. Top 20% of the business contributes to 80% of the volumes. I think everybody who's done MBA or heard about this kind of nod. Let me give you the second shocker. Go back to your own data. This is not true. In most categories, top 20% will give you anywhere between 40 to 50% only. Hard data, marketing data. Top 20% of consumers, top 20% of transactions, whatever your metric is. So Pareto's law is just a mythical law in that sense. It doesn't work in real life. For our own business, many of the business, the media business, top 20% gives maybe about 40 to 45% of revenue or billing or whatever. That's not true. Again, there will be outliers. I'm not talking of outliers. I'm talking of in general category after category. And the reason is that there's only so much, only so many cups of tea I can drink in a day. So this concept of I will increase the frequency of consumption in any category, not just tea. Replace tea with any other goods or services is very, very difficult. That's why whether it's a mature category or an upcoming category or a mature country or a developing country, increasing frequency of consumption is not an easy task. Not at all. And therefore, this loyalty dimension alone has to be re-looked at very differently. And therefore, what really is in this context, what really is loyalty? Just a dimension. One of the dimensions and not the only dimension from a consumer lens. Because are consumers not loyal? Cancer is partially true. They are loyal, but within a set of brands. They're not loyal to only one brand. Whether you take a toothpaste or a soap or a gadget or a car, even a high-cost item, take a car. This changes. I bought a car, let's say, brand X today after three years and a replacement comes in. I may choose another car. Just as a timeframe may just keep changing. So today I think there is enough good data to actually back this loyalty dimension alone. What is important for most categories is increasing penetration. People who are buying a brand or trying a brand at least once. And reaching out as many people as possible. Which means get more new consumers. Think of it this way. There are a lot of light users for many categories. Take a brand light or any cola brand. I don't want to name the cola brand. Any cola brand has tons of light users of that category. Let's define for today's session a light user is anybody who buys the brand or the category twice a year. Two times only I will buy a cola brand. There are say 50 million people in that category. Isn't it worth going after that 50 million because they're only going to buy it twice. Rather than worry about a small proportion of people who are drinking maybe three times in a week. Anyway, going to drink it. So there are enough people who are typically in any category. Whichever dimensions you look at a medium and light user will always have more. So therefore acquisition new customers and therefore the kind of experiences that we took in. The experience that you will give to convert is very different than the experience that you want to give to somebody who is in the market. That's my key point. While experience are important it's how you treat these two consumers. Now is this all mumbo jumbo is somebody coming is just putting up something nice looking chart. No, it's all again I believe I'm a little data driven guy. I believe because when we are handling so much money on clients. We can't just go by wins and fancies there has to be enough data backed decisions. So there are while there are many many studies. This is a fascinating study. It's available on the net anyone can go and see it. It's called the long and short of it. More than 800 studies in the UK and US markets published by a independent body called IPA every year they publish. And what the sum and total of what they are saying is that to increase loyalty is there are X number of cases only 9% of them are successful. Well, there are 46% of the times acquisitions are far more successful. That means getting new users is of more value and therefore potential gains by acquisition time and again it has been proven by the study is always greater than increased loyalty. So I'm not saying that loyalty you don't take your eye off but don't be obsessed about it because the funnel is such that it's a kind of a mickey bucket. It will become loyal for some period. They'll go away and you need a new set of consumers and that's IP kind of continues. And that's really why is this happening? Why are people not just being loyal to the brand? Why can't they just if I am a brand owner today? Why can't I just assume that people come? And that is another sad reality of life is that there are more sameness in category after category. If you were to rip off the brand name in any service or physically good category, trust me, most of us will fail to know the brand. I'm not talking of the cola blind test. Category after category. If you did not know the brand name or some form of distinctive asset, you will not be able to there's so much of sameness. Everything looks the same. It's almost behaving as if it's a commodity and that's where the role of advertising comes in to make that difference. And it's therefore even more important in a in a situation where most brands categories are all looking same to me. How do you build experiences throughout the cycle, not that after the consumer has come and given their money? And that's where we have to start thinking of a framework of a never ending loop, what we call the purchase journey. Most of you know about it, but this is a very simple schematic of how a purchase journey happens. There is a certain priming stage. There's a trigger which happens. The priming stage actually is where people are already developed a bias for your brand in most categories. Unless the category is totally new, which has never seen ever those exceptions. If you had to keep aside in most categories, people have a general sense of which brand they want to buy even before they have thought about buying a brand. Then there's some trigger happens. The trigger could be maybe the brand which I bought last time, got over if it's FMCG or if it's something like a e-commerce. I bought some set of brands. Now I need to replenish or it's a fridge which has been there for five, seven years. Now I need to replace whatever be the trigger. You already made some kind of predisposition and then you actually go and purchase and then the cycle kind of continues. Now why is this important? Because the experiences that any brand is thinking has to not just come at the trigger straight, but even at the priming stage. When I'm not even actively thinking, there's a bias, what we call the priming bias which is happening. How do I really know what consumers are thinking? Obviously you need to do some bit of good research. We call it from our agency lens, the purchase journey behavior research. It's a large scale study that we have been running for over now five years called momentum. So we do it in about 40 countries. 476,000 journeys we have studied possibly the largest in the world. The second largest is about 245,000 done by McKinsey. So this year we will touch about 700,000 journeys. What this journey is by country, whichever categories you look, it tells us a few story in a very repeated manner. Almost like a rule you can predict. 49% in all the studies it says that people have already have a strong idea which brand they will buy. 49%. This is 40 countries, multiple journeys, multiple year. So this is not like one Tukka year, we did some survey and we got repeatable year on year, same measures. So think about what kind of experience you're going to give there in the priming stage, which means the consumers already thought about it. That's not enough. It varies by countries of course. And the levels of priming stages are different. For example in this chart, if you had to look at non-alcoholic drinks, these are we oral care? That is the highest priming bias in many of the non-Indian markets. Well in India, it is the lowest. So if you are a global CMO running this brand, we'll have to have different strategies if you're running for India, vis-à-vis other markets. Multiple categories, I think the point is made that priming bias is different. It will vary depending on the country and the market. And why is this priming bias so important? Because if you manage that well, again what it says is anywhere from a 5x to a 9x returns is what you can expect. Which means in some sense, if you're able to influence or seed in an ethical way about your brand, even before they thought about it, you have a much better chance to win in the marketplace. That you typically end up doing by building distinctive brand assets. Your logos, your colors, the way you do it, other experiential tools, all, it's a sum total of all of this. If you do that well, that's where, because if you remove otherwise all the logo everything, you're selling similar products, right? Plus very, very little differences. And that's where marketers need to also start thinking of packaging is a great experience. Even a logo is a great experience. The logo over a period of time creates a very distinctive pattern in the consumer's mind. Very easy to remember. The iconic Coke bottle, the iconic McDonald's logo. You don't need to even write the name. We'll say it for the iconic Apple logo. Why do brands sit and create those? Those are also well thought through experiences that one can create. Therefore, it's extremely important to focus now on the priming bias because loyalties are only so much. Your growth is going to come from medium and light buyers of category. With this construct, with this kind of a research, I'm going to show you about four examples of how you can create experiences. And these are all Indian examples, brands that we work with. So you have a very local context for it. How different categories, different challenges, how you can create those experiences. The first is creating consumer experiences for a launch of a brand. It's a category which you can't advertise. So how we went about doing this. The four small, very small videos I want to play. One after the other to give you a kind of flavor of how experiences can be created. It is the brand known the world over creativity and innovation. But this association had yet to be created strongly amongst the youth of India who love the brand but associated it more with concerts or parties. So when Absolute India was launching the limited edition bottle, we saw it as an opportunity to not just make people aware of the brand philosophy, but have them remember it for a long, long time and truly understand what the brand stands for. To do that, we thought, if we tell them, they'll forget. If we show them, they may remember. But if we involve them, they will understand. Our idea was to involve Absolute fans by letting them lead the limited edition bottle's launch. We launched a teaser ad to ask fans across the country to nominate the city in which Absolute India bottle should roll to first and asked them to get creative with their reasons. This through the media in a tizzy. Within minutes, thousands of fans responded with their desire to be the first to behold the masterpiece. The top performing cities were pitched against each other to decide the final winning city. And every time one city outperformed the other, we released a video of an unmarked Absolute bottle as the canvas traveling through that city, absorbing elements from that city, ultimately forming the mosaic design that is the highlight of the bottle design. For five days, the bottle roged from one city to another, making waves across social media. Well, trend soon. All five days. Vignettes, shop films and online ads were also released simultaneously across social and digital platforms and television to increase participation. So it was an on-ground event caused absolute jushing. And when the interactions finally snowballed into a massive campaign, we were sitting ready at our high tech proprietary social media monitoring platform called Mesh. Using the state-of-the-art technology that was available to us, we were able to keep a track of each interaction and respond to it in real time, fueling the campaign with every passing minute. And just when the campaign had reached its peak, we revealed the new Absolute India Limited Edition bottle. The creative show gets continued with daily engagement content, videos of cocktail recipes that complemented the mango pepper flavor, and more fun, like hashtag AbsoluteBottom. Despite dark-market restrictions, the campaign received 500 million impressions. 20 million unique people reached. 13,350 fans were added organically. And we got some really great engagement numbers. We had set out to cross the memorable launch of this creatively beautiful bottle by triggering creativity of the fans by involving them. With these colossal number of interactions, the campaign did just that. The restricted category is always difficult to, you know, put all any kind of campaigns. That was one interesting way in which you could engage with the consumers. This is all the creative that you saw was all done by our agency. There was no creative agency involved, all the digital creative everything that you saw. Moving on, my second example is around how you can create personalized experiences at moments of truth. The ultimate moments of truth in a brand's life and a purchase is happening. How to really create this very different case study. Once you see the video, you will understand. Everyone knows that sugar causes cavities, but not many realize the shocking amount of sugar hiding in everyday foods. After years of clinical research, Colgate developed its breakthrough technology that neutralizes sugar acids before they can cause cavities. But because sugar data is well-parried or hard to comprehend, people did not believe they needed our product. So how did we expose this data? The hidden sugar receipt. First, a master list was created compiling the precise sugar content for every food item found in supermarkets. A specially created inventory management software then syncs the master list to the supermarkets inventory system, automatically matching food items and tagging the hidden sugar data to the product information stored within every SKU's power code. The usual shopping receipt was transformed into the hidden sugar receipt. Upon checking the receipts, shoppers saw more than the usual dollars and cents. They saw the exact amount of sugar that was hiding in their grocery bags. Based on the total amount of hidden sugar in each transaction, the software generates a discount coupon for Colgate's new sugar acid neutralizer toothpaste. More sugar equals more discount. The shock of learning about the amount of sugar in their basket plus the incentive of a discount convinced many shoppers to make an immediate purchase. The hidden sugar receipt tapped on the data in every shopping basket to expose sugar in a way that's relatable and easily comprehended. Not only did we turn around misconceptions, we did so at the perfect time to convert shock into sales. This is another example of a day-to-day product which hopefully all of us are using. Small nudge to make them rethink even within that portfolio which SKU wanted to buy. The second last case study is how we use the power of data and insights to create kind of a seamless customer experience. Some of you might have seen this as one of the best in-class work award-winning various award categories. So if you've seen it, sorry, let's see it one more time. In 90% plus penetrated categories, telecom players are tapping into each other's subscriber base by offering better data, voice, and SMS packs. Mobile number portability has made it easier for consumers to switch telecom operators. Thus, the task helped Vodafone acquire new subscribers through MNP. Research showed network strength was a primary reason for consumers to change telecom operators. To build consumer confidence, Airtel launched Open Network which enables consumers to check tower maps, weak spots, strong signal zones, and high-speed internet areas. But we used their own website to convert Airtel users into Vodafone users through a classic ambush campaign. Our campaign had three phases. Phase one, we used Airtel's Open Network to map poor network areas and matched them with Vodafone's strong network areas. These were marked as Airtel weak Vodafone strong locations. Phase two, we selected platforms to target only Airtel users in Airtel weak Vodafone strong areas. So we applied targeting filters of Airtel network, pin codes of chosen locations, people interested in Airtel, and targeted keywords that only an Airtel user would use to target them on display, mobile, and search. Phase three, we made customized ads and targeted Airtel users when they were consuming content of their choice. Movie lovers saw communication, tidal buffering, switch to Vodafone and enjoy uninterrupted entertainment. MNB now, with a click-to-call button. Similarly, millions of Airtel consumers saw 21 different messages on multiple platforms, thus increasing their chances of converting to Vodafone. Through this campaign, we reached 13.7 million unhappy Airtel consumers across 18 cities. We received 530,000 responses from Airtel consumers for MNB, 36% of whom converted to Vodafone. We not only hijacked Airtel's advertising campaign using their own assets, but also targeted them where it hurts the most, the business. So even competitive activities and opportunities doesn't have to be a threat. The last one staying on with the Vodafone example, this is my last case study and then if there are any questions, I'm happy to take. Vodafone, as most of you know, has been a sponsor on IPL for many, many years. And how do you actually use a marquee event like IPL? It's good, okay, we created some advertising, we put it so what? Millions of other brands are going to do that. How do you stand out? How do you actually create the experience which stays long, long, long enough for consumers? And that's what this is about. Vodafone launched a unique contest called Vodafone Superfan where Vodafone customers were given once-in-a-lifetime opportunity of meeting IPL cricketers and get a match ball find from the winning captain. Objective was to drive participation for Vodafone Superfan and increase brand love. To achieve the brand objectives, we had to address two key tasks. Task one, we realized that while gratification for Superfan was lucrative, it was important to recognize the efforts of the participating fans as it gave them an opportunity to become many celebrities in their social circles. Task two, it was critical to optimize media investments on Superfan to ensure a higher ROI over a period of time. Accordingly, our idea was to turn cricket fans into celebrities where we recognize the achievement of the winning participants and make them feel like celebrities. This was done using the concept of converged media which emphasized on using paid media judiciously to feel owned and earned media. This would enable us to transform them into participative and amplifiable assets which would then inspire consumers to engage with the brand. The activity was executed in three steps. Step one, Superfan was promoted heavily in the first two years on IPL across TVN digital platforms to drive the owned and earned engine for the activity. Step two, we identified and created a set of cricket-related aspirational experiences that fans have always dreamt of. Superfans were covered live on TV during IPL matches. Their photos were published on top newspapers. They narrated their Superfan experiences in media. They participated in cricket shows as experts. They also gave live commentary on cricket matches. Over the last four years, we have consistently delivered these aspirational experiences to the Vodafone Superfans which made them feel like celebrities. Step three, we leveraged on the strength of Vodafone's social assets to amplify the Superfan experience and engage with a larger audience base. Superfan images with IPL cricketers were posted on Vodafone's social handles after the end of the match to sustain the publicity momentum created on TV. Video testimonials of all Superfan winners were posted on social media which inspired others to participate in the contest as well. While we relied heavily on paid media initially, our focus has now shifted primarily to own and earned media over the last three years. Results. Voting on the huge popularity of IPL on TV and digital, we have managed to reach out to at least 40 million people among the target audience for the last four IPL seasons. Participation has risen steadily despite no significant paid media push in the last two years. It has also helped us to increase the brand scores on key parameters. In this period, Vodafone Superfan has become the third most-recognized Vodafone property. Through converged media, we managed to create an effective template which can be successfully replicated for long-time consumer engagement program. That was my last example of how you can. At the end of, this is amongst, in some sense, your loyalist people are buying. How do you actually create? That's the other extreme. And the other examples of how you can influence the priming stage on a regular basis as simple like a toothpaste or a launch of a restricted category, the width and width of what consumer experience can. So essentially, to sum up, going up the new consumers' acquisition is more beneficial. Generally speaking, exceptions do exist. Priming stage is more important if you get that right anywhere between 5x, 9x chance to convert in favor of your brand. So, thank you very much. Thank you very much, Mr. Kartik. All right, ladies and gentlemen, we would like to hand over a token of appreciation to Mr. Kartik. To do the honors, put your hands together. Welcome on stage, Mr. Unikrishnan BK, Vice President of AsiaNet Networks. And also welcome on stage, Mr. Anup N, head of Digital Asia Networks. Can I hear a big round of applause for you? Thank you, sir.