 Let's begin with our first keynote session of the day talking about the future marketing redefined. We have with us Mr. Hemant Malik, Divisional Chief Executive Food Business, ITC. Mr. Malik is currently the Divisional Chief Executive of ITC's food business and is also a member of the Corporate Management Committee of ITC Limited. He is also one of India's foremost multi-business enterprises with interests in consumer products, hotels, paper, agribusiness and IT. ITC Foods is the third largest packaged food company in India and also the fastest growing with strong play in staples, snacks, biscuits, noodles, spices, juices, dairy, chocolates, etc. all that we consume. So please ladies and gentlemen put your hands together, even the worst ones with me as I invite and welcome Mr. Hemant Malik, a very warm welcome and sir over to you. Thank you. Thank you very much. It indeed is a pleasure to be here today. And you know, I think the world is moving very fast. I thought my session was at four o'clock, but the session is at three fifty. So I'm glad I connected in time. Thank you for the introduction about ITC and ITC Foods. And yes, I have been a lifer here at ITC and have been lucky to be playing a role in development of many of our brands as well as businesses. In fact, as I was thinking about this session and, you know, I'm more of a practitioner than a theorist. And when we talk about marketing redefined, I have to put it in my language. This is about 20 years back and, you know, I spent many years now when I look at my young colleagues in my office, you know, I might have started work before I was still being born. The I remember my first. Marketing campaign, we were launching our share of the ITC Foods, I just got into the art of business and we had developed a new communication. Thanks to Prasoon Joshi, who was who's been with us for the last so many years. And this ad campaign is going on air is the first time you're putting it on air and my CEO, who actually for the first time, I was working with somebody who was not from the marketing function, so to say. And he asked me a simple question and he says, you know, Aiman, you're doing this session, you're doing this campaign. What is going to be the sales lift because of this? And here I'm wondering what answer to give. I said, no, no, it's going to make brand awareness. It'll make a difference to how people look at my brand. But he said, you know, auntie is spending the money so that we can get some sales. I said, yeah, of course, and you will get it. But it was so difficult to actually answer such a simple question in terms of what part of my mix is going to make a difference to what the sales happens. But I think over the years, you know, this is an answer that I think as marketers, we may be able to give to a better degree than you than the entire 5050 rule where you don't know which 50% works. And I think that is what is this whole modern marketing all about. And I heard, I will talk a lot about digital and, you know, your entire tech munch is about technology. And as we see the consumer, you know, the adoption of digitization by the consumer is all pervasive. And when you look at the consumer journey of discovering, engaging with and buying brands are becoming increasingly fluid and driven by micro moments, which actually forms a web of footprints across channels and leaving behind trails of rich data in the bargain. And it's put in into marketers to wake up to this reality of drying out strategies that are connected and in real time. This whole change is also making a difference in the in the evolution as far as consumer insighting process is concerned. Consumers are more available to you. You can not only speak with them, you can also follow the behavior and understand more in terms of what they're talking, what they're communicating about. This has a this has an impact in terms of new product development. Fast, you can get into the market. You are lucky, you get fairly quick feedback from the consumer as well. And it also gives us an opportunity to learn to learn fast and to adopt. At the same time, when we look at digital communication and we look at now performance marketing, which is supporting a significant opportunity for planning as well as for analytics. And this COVID has actually brought the coming of age of e-commerce where you have a much more amount of information data analytics that is that is possible and many platforms share the reports and you can actually understand much more about how the consumer is actually purchasing your purchasing your brands. At the same time in FMCG space, the lot of new channels of distribution coming up and for legacy companies, as I will mention, where the strength has been about distribution and reach today. That particular strength is getting democratized because of e-commerce as well as players like Iran. But when you look at all these changes that I briefly talked about, technology is at the cornerstone of everything. And therefore, when I was thinking about the session here today and I said that, you know, what is it that I can share today? And I wanted to share my experience, which is what is a role that leadership can play in towards creating a modern marketing way of life, a modern marketing team of players who actually look at data, who look at technology, you know, and I felt that the most important role that leaders can play is in terms of being evangelists for this. They have to be the chief sponsor for this change. And this same thing, you know, and the times change so fast because just about maybe four years back. To change the mindset towards even investing in digital was a big deal because people wouldn't, you know, the marketing teams weren't convinced about it, you know, we were barely spending 2%, 3% of our monies on digital. And the whole debate was, you know, does it really work? How do we measure? How do we go about knowing whether this because I still believe that my traditional media of reach is way superior than what it is. And I realized that if you have to change mindset, I think probably it was also coming in from lack of knowledge, right? And therefore, the first task was in terms of how do we go about capability building, how do we give exposure to our people? How do we look at skill development? And what are the processes that you set in place for continuous knowledge enhancement? We had evangelists in the form of Facebook and Google. We created joint business plan partnerships. We learned from them in terms of how to develop digitally optimized creatives. I sent a team of my marketing people to Singapore to spend time with Google, who actually showed in terms of which kind of how the advertising needs to be crafted and customized for this medium. Then we moved towards in terms of creating a digital day where we could expose our team to the larger ecosystem that is available. And we had a lot of partners who came, who presented in terms of what is a new thinking that is going in. We also felt that it is important for the organization digital language to evolve and we crafted a full program. And when we were crafting the program, we realized that if everybody does not start speaking the new language, then only if the young brand managers has learned about it, it is not going to make a difference. So each of us went through this program. It was sponsored from head office in Calc from ITC. And therefore, it was not only limited to food business. It was across all our businesses to be able to develop one common language when somebody talks about top of the funnel and the bottom of the funnel, it becomes a language that all of us can kind of relate to and understand. At the same time, I believe that continued learning comes from new solution providers. And now there's so many of them and you have to see whether are you an organization that they want to come and show their new development? Are you the one which is going to be open to trying something new and something different? Sometimes things will work. Sometimes things will not work. But can we be at that cutting edge to actually experiment continually? We also realized at this point that all the skills were not available in house and we went, we got a new talent, a talent which had sufficient experience in terms of digital who came and crafted this the digital journey for us. We got also in-house creative development and that was something that we also had to decide whether we should only outsource. But when you started talking about moment marketing, you realize that you needed something in-house. But for everything to happen, if you have to be the evangelist, sometimes you have to be a little tough. And actually, I recall setting up, I said, OK, very simply this year, 9% of your marketing budgets on whatever goes on ATL has to be spent on digital. And today it sounds very funny that you had to sell this, but it was just not too long back. I think the last one has completely changed it. But before that, and it was important to do that because once people start spending, they start realizing that there is some clear advantage that comes in. I recall that we have about 13 brands at that time active and we had 13 digital agencies. So we kind of said, no, we can't have more than two. So we're going to work only with two because then they can see a larger pie of business with us and they will be able to give the best quality support. And that was something that we did. At the same time, personally, I believe that it has been my role to continually challenge the team to be contemporary because this world is changing so fast. There was a TikTok which came and it went when Instagram started and today it's part of everybody's lives. But how do you make sure that you are going to be one of those first to participate in the new ideas that are coming up? Normally, we've been very shy in terms of participating in awards, but I think when it came to digital, I said, no, I want all of us to participate as much and win as many awards as you can, because that will change the way that you're going to participate. Further increase confidence in what you're doing and you learn a lot from all the other participants. The other thing I found, and that is when you deal with very set of very smart youngsters, is that there are times when you have to also highlight that you may not be as smart as you think, right? And that itself can be a big motivator. I recall that, you know, I asked for once some information in terms of this is about what is happening on e-commerce and I'm talking about three years back or maybe four years back. And I realized to my surprise that in a city like Delhi, for Ashirba data, about 20% of my business was coming from e-commerce. And I knew that my marketing team was not aware that this is already happening, because if they were aware, they would have actually found reasons how to actually build it even more. So I asked them this question, the marketing manager and said, do you know how much sale in Delhi is happening? And Delhi was one of our biggest market. But I think that was a turning point, because the moment people realize the potential, I think today needless to say it's, you know, for, I think it's true for every company and so is it for us that the business has grown rapidly. But it was just not only looking at the sale, then it started looking in terms of the quality of content, right? And then you started looking at in terms of review and ratings, because just to get that, and I'm very happy to say today that I think 90% of our brands are rated superior in terms of rating across a cross-platform, which are showing rating compared to our competition. And it also puts pressure personally on me to try to be contemporary, you know, and maybe in sessions like these and friends like Novel actually help out in terms of telling me what all is happening, so that one can always be be contemporary. But I think the largest onus is about investing in technology. It's about investing ahead of the curve. And I think as far as ITC is concerned, we have always, you know, believed that technology is going to be the way forward. And this is one area where you are, it's very difficult to actually show return on investment to start with, but the technology itself starts delivering return on investment in the long term. And we've done some significant interventions. We've set up a 24-7 social media listening that we did about two and a half years back, which we call the sixth sense. And that has become a significant source of trendspotting of inside generation. We've had new launches last year. We launched immunity juice when COVID happened first in the few days itself, you discovered what is happening as far as immunity is concerned. We tied up with the AMVEI and we naturally launched their immunity juices. All of you would have heard the Dalgona coffee craze, which had happened and we created a sun bean beaten cafe that we launched. We saw a lot of concerns in terms of quality of food and we launched our nature super food. So this sixth sense has become a real power source for us of information. And I think it also, you know, there's one more aspect that happens when social media becomes very, very, very big is the risk to your brands. Because there are times they can be fake news, they can be rumors. And I think you are able to pick it up, track it and actually be able to address it very, very quickly. You've also gone in the journey of building first party data, of building a customer data hub using the leverage of cross ITC's databases. And I think it's doing very well. Now it's got added with DMP. So we are able to do fair amount of, you know, targeting to where we want to. And we've been able to create our cohorts and actually purpose our communication depending upon the cohort that we are targeting. This was a time we also launched our own store, the ITC store. And that I think has been a fantastic job done by the team to pay almost more than 700 products that are available on ITC store. It's available in six metros. We, you know, promise delivery the next day. And today it's almost about 45% of my total e-com sale is coming from the store. And the reason was that we knew we're launching so many products. We've launched about 100 new products every year for the last three years as ITC. And it was important because by the time you can get listed in every platform. But this is one platform where we can make sure that we are listed and we can take this conversation with the consumer forward in terms of not only talking about the product, but in terms of how you can use it and how you can, you know, get more feedback from it. We have a customer care center that tells us about, so we use, you know, voice to text, NLP to mine data that comes in towards the same. So this is the piece where I'm talking about investment in technology. This is most critical. And I think this is, again, a space which is continuous to evolve. There is more that is happening. Of course, you need to have a very clear vision in terms of where you want to take it, how it is seamless so that information available is easy for people to look at, to analyze and to actually use. The next area I found very exciting was about building chain champions. And to me, the youngest people who've joined ITC fresh out of college, they became the reverse mentors for us. They are the people who drove the first journey for digital and that actually, you know, powered the system in a way because people got that empowerment as well as, you know, they were digital natives. So it was much easier for them to look at. And of course, the categories that are more reliant on digital, I think that D2C is a concept that, again, we are looking at quite, quite, quite seriously. Having said that, you know, the most important thing, of course, is about feeling proud about what you're doing, motivation through celebrating your best practices. And we launched a forum, what we call the Excellence in Marketing Awards. So there are awards by, you know, by many platforms, but this is the award that we have for our internal platform because we have a fairly large marketing team, large number of agencies where the agencies and brand managers together present the best, what they would have done in terms of creatives, in terms of insight generation, in terms of execution. And we completed our fifth EMMAs two weeks back. And, you know, over the years, newer categories have got added. And to my surprise, I found that eight out of the 13 categories this year were all around digital, around technology, around commerce, around insights, which were based on data. And that was a real pleasure to see that how we have evolved and, you know, how we are geared up to actually, you know, take on whatever is going to happen. And therefore, when I look at in terms of, when I see modern marketing in simple terms, for me, it is about plan to change. It's about manage change. It's about accept change. And it's about embracing change. Thank you.