 Thank you everyone for joining us. It's a pleasure and You know, I was just thinking when we are often sitting, you know on these discussions around marketing We often end up talking about trends mostly And these trends are all around the way technology has changed and you know how it's impacting marketing and what are their advancements and In marketing also there are lots of shiny new toys if I can call them, you know There's of course data. There's social marketing and so on and so forth, you know, which keep coming in different waves and bursts which we all end up using and obviously, you know as Businesses are transforming with themselves with this advancement in technology the marketing functions also have to transform themselves and No wonder why I see a lot of marketers spend a lot of time Understanding these technologies and seeing how they can harness them best to build Customer preference and loyalty, you know with these technologies and all is right there But having said that this often, you know, ends up being a distraction in our efforts to if I may say build marketing campaigns and strategies with a purpose And you know, it's good to remind all of us as marketers I would say from time to time that the fundamental reason that marketing exists is to add value To all its partners whether it's employees other partners and of course customers and on that note I really want to kick off this discussion and I'm going to start off with Girish first Girish, of course, you know, it's all about creating value for the customers, etc And to do that to be able to build your strategy first part comes with Understanding the customer and so much is changing. So how do you keep a tab on the customer needs preferences in this ever-changing world? Thanks, Rubina. So, yeah, of course I always believe that marketing is the growth engine of any business of sales responsibilities primarily You know Include putting the products in the counter, but it's marketing and you know getting a marketing elements, right? That actually helps in driving business and to get your marketing piece, right? The first building block is to understand what the customer wants Understand where the customer's aspirations lie what the customer is Motivated by and you know things like that and honestly, it's not a very easy answer To keep keep tab on the consumer preferences because they're changing drastically But of course we have a lot of tools, but as a marketer, I still go with a lot of gut and as a marketer I would always believe in meeting people personally. There's a lot of data There's data overload and you can get a lot of information on you know E-commerce trends and you know on digital trends and you can see, you know Who's buying what who was likely to buy your brand finally bought some other brand? Are they preferring this over that? But I think the best way to keep a tab is to meet people meet your consumers or personally And I make it a mandate for all my team members to go and at least you know I have a mandate of 100 visits a quarter right where you go and meet channel partners meet consumers Understand what ticks them are you you get a whole lot of information by those chats like chai over church From that perspective, so I think as marketers. We've got to keep our eyes to the our ears to the ground We've got to understand what's changing. We owe it to our company To you know be that because we're gonna drive business growth eventually It's not the sales team is a marketing team that's gonna you know finally drive that so that's the way I would Think so of course love data overload. You can look at all those filters cuts, but meet people personally There's nothing to beat that Absolutely, Girish Data is all there to support but you need the insight which you get through I think the personal touch That's the point you're driving home, which is true and the Pali moving on to you next I Know you've been in various industries through your career and I'd love to understand from you that You know, how do you create value for customers does content play a big part? Especially, you know, it's great to meet customers in person. But today if you ought to do it in scale Digital offers a medium. So do you do a lot of content and want to be you know? Sharing your experience as a brand as a Knowledge provider does that help create some sort of value? Absolutely Rubina I think if I look back in a technology brands life, of course where I am at IBM And especially with the kind of complex technologies that we deal with I think Educating the customer is a key part of the brand agent up Hi, Ajay So I think and it starts from absolutely right about You know looking at what we're doing in the R&D space Taking the new ideas to them Making them aware of what the new world of future is going to be like, you know to doing Let's say white papers to doing use cases to you know Working with our clients over a long period of time to see transformation happening in their businesses Which in turn transform the lives of the end customer, you know So that's a whole cycle that technology companies will you know follow through depending on wherever they are and you know Whatever is the job that they're doing and this could be B2B or this could be B2C So I see some of the B2C technology companies, you know actually opening out the minds of the You know end customer too. Let's look back at financial services where I worked. I think there again a Huge task has been done over the last two decades by financial services to educate the customer I remember 10 years ago when we started out in health insurance and auto insurance Auto in this country has never required education because it's mandatory But health insurance was such an uphill task and you've been there with me, right? Today 10 years later when I really look at understanding of you know, what term life insurances what health insurances Things have changed for the betterment of the customer and brands collectively Industries collectively have played that role look at the campaign that Amfi does on the mutual fund side, right? So education has been part of you know, what the brands ought to do even when I was at Mahindra holidays And you know while you may think that in on the tourism side, you don't require You know education the customer will go and find content on their own not true I still remember when we were doing the content strategy You know back in those days in 2015 Food was not a leg that had been discovered by the brands in terms of the content strategy And I distinctly remember that trend was just taking off right and food has now Just look at the food experiences that today various brands offer even holiday companies offer and tourist destinations offer So those are the changes that are happening. Yes when it comes to let's say detergents or you know Some of the other commonplace commoditized kind of errors. We may not have education thought leadership as a role to play but I think There again if you start looking at the D2C brands today that are coming up beat skincare beat organic food You know beat healthy living and eating you will find that some of those brands are taking You know the edge of the traditional brands on account of them driving thought leadership and education Yeah, so that's my two-piece on this that's true I completely agree with you But you think doing this kind of content also gets some kind of Customer preference You know do brands do customers start preferring those brands who do this content better than the others. Does that happen as well? I think over a long period of time and you know, I joined IBM three and a half years ago And that's what I mean by long long period of time. You may not see results in a year And I know a lot of us are driven by annual budgets and brand relevance core moving You know last year versus this year But if you have if the organization has the patience to be committed to a certain idea Then you will see that change happening over 24 to 36 months You will see the needle moving in the direction that you want consumers to think so for example Responsible AI as a concept, you know four or five years ago People were just talking about utilization of AI and application of AI, right? But today when you go and speak to CXOs inside organizations CEOs and boards, they all understand the context and concept of responsible AI, right? And that has happened only because technology companies have taken the Responsibility of educating them if we hadn't done it that conversation would not have started in the boards and in the CEO's You know rooms so it's a long road and you have to be consistent at it get the message Pali I'm moving on to you How are you? You know, you're you've got a group of companies under you with different kind of portfolios So how are you creating value for different sets of customers and how you bring it together as a group? So, you know, I I just want to wear the hat of a customer and say that what brings me to a brand What brings me to a category and I think the simple answer is WIFM what's in it for me? If a brand can communicate to you in a few words, what's in it for me? You will win the business and you will retain the business to use the agency speak and let me give our health insurance example since That's what we heard heard just a minute before the Pali talked about health insurance I think the COVID taught us that a category which was insurance life or health which was perceived to be a push category We were always told from day one. It's a push category. It's not a pull category suddenly became a pull category What made it a pull? Because the customer realize the what's in it for me and He said I am interested in knowing more now. Tell me what do you have to offer? And at that time if a brand decides to go with the right product at the right time To the right channel. I Think he has an edge Keeping the analogy going that if you look at financial service or health insurance, unfortunately, we feel that sale over. We can't back here idea Insurance premium is only due after one year You have to find ways to engage with your customer. And therefore I feel today every category Including financial services categories Including the subcategories of financial services have to think of themselves as an experience category Give me an experience that I can remember And I will stay with you. Otherwise promise QT is the order of the day Very very well said. I dare going to agree more with you. Keep it simple Show the brand promise to the customer keep the customer first and then you create that pull absolutely agree So I could coming to you Next and I read your lovely blog which was so insightful. So thanks for sharing it with me and You know the interesting A thing that I was wondering while reading that was that especially new age customers, right, which are shot on Patience these days. They're also very discerning and sort of Critical, right? They can tell about between Advertising and what goes behind the brand and you know, they're not as trusting if I can just put it simply How do you know bring forward the brand purpose and you know kind of convince them on the brand purpose? I think The the new age customer or the millennial or the Gen Z that that we speak about I believe that they are more gravitating towards the purposeful brands than say our generation was right people were born pre 1990 There are a couple of reasons. I think our generation was all about struggling doing better in life I think this is an entire generation now What happens like say you say master's hierarchy of need right when all your needs are satisfied you move to the next level, right? And I think that's the reason why why I think the consumers really want to take stance for the brand which stands for hire thing Now there are multiple example I mean it could be a higher stance it could be differentiating product It could be reflection of what the customer is like every time an apple iphone new version is released look at the queue Right, you know that you know you get a similar looking similar feature product at one-third of the cost But look at the queue right people are people are there through the night You go to people are paying four times the price for a Starbucks coffee, right? You I mean you know that you know same coffee layer hundred bucks for the 400 rupees because I think somewhere people are buying into the philosophy of your brand and Puppets definitely goes far beyond I would say Proposition right so you you say that in marketing first is the future second is the proposition I think purpose sits on the top, right? And I think any organization which has a very strong grounding in the purpose will have an advantage and One of the reasons why purpose I would say as you had say shiny new toy And it has been a shiny new toy for the last seven eight years or so And there are still very few examples of brand which have been able to do it well And you know every single case study will talk about the same brand people will talk about dub People will talk about surf excel people will talk about tata people over Starbucks right there are very few brand I think one of the reasons is that the way we should look at purpose I think we haven't cracked the first and foremost thing which is very fundamental different about purpose than anything else in marketing Is that purpose is inside out everything else that you do in market is outside in that means you listen to the consumer You ask the consumer what would you like to you know for my project to be doing? I think in purpose is not that your consumer will never tell you say for example No one would have told steel jobs that you finally need a product which doesn't have a keypad Which can you which your next place or no one would have told how I should saying that you can sell a coffee at 400 rupees It's a third place where it is you're not selling coffee are selling an experience, right? So first thing is that if you are talking about something which is inside out, right? That's one fundamental thing second thing. I think is it has to be core to what you do If you are a say sugar drink and you start say that he I will I will You know we'll make peace and bring world peace. I think consumer can really see through it, right? So so it has to be very consistent with what as a brand you could do, right? What you know and being authentic and the third and most important thing is that you have to be committed to the purpose at a Very long time Because if you are standing for something the purpose will start giving you any results after nine years ten years Well, yes, right? So that means you had a very strong commitment. Hence you need a very strong not to do list So every purpose very polar purpose like you see look at say a brand like Nike There's so many campaign great so many controversies, but at the same time there are people who take stance So, you know and and that that that is true about brands like say when we build Tata Sampan as a brand five years back And you know it has I would say it has been reasonably successful There are two things that we said we want to make sure that every Indian should get the authentic nutrition To the everyday food that you can consume right now that meant two things first thing that I could never talk about non-Indian food I know worse is going to become big I will never talk about words because it doesn't stand for it right second thing I say nutrition That means I will not do something which is non-nuclear and non-authentic, right? So every time you are wanting to say something you also have to say what you are not going to do, right? So I think if you really get a heady mixture and I won't say that I would have got it right all the time But I think if you know the pathway, I think you know a purpose will give a strong Advantage which will very difficult for your competitors to copy Thanks for sharing that Sagar and I want to toss it over to Sadat and ask him in your category, which is highly competitive Do you think you know building a brand purpose over a long period of time is Viable and how do you do if so? How do you do it? I mean it's very interesting because you wouldn't Think that it is given the experience of what airlines have gone through in the last 10 or 15 years And I think that's almost what makes it essential and Prime first for a first move would take advantage of purpose if you look at what Sagar was talking about coffee And you see the prices of how coffee have moved from the 1960s to today when it was a commodity to when it's become an experience now Airlines have gone in exactly the opposite direction They used to be an experience and they've become commoditized now and it's I mean I blame airlines for having done that Yes, there's been a democratization of air travel Yes, there's been all of that but beyond the point when you start treating the consumer as an input in a process And you start looking at efficiency metrics versus creating value for the customer Then you become commoditized and if you become commoditized you're losing the opportunity to make a margin and It's like the e-commerce category or telecom or any of these other categories which have essentially become about Discounting and price-cutting and what happens over a period of time is you see that it's not sustainable and If you have a purpose then what you're able to do is actually Define a value proposition which the consumer over a long period of time is going to be willing to pay a premium for and That is what will keep you going over as you know, we've said it's it's not a short-term game Yes, if I do a sale today, obviously, we'll you know, we'll sell more Flights or we'll have more bookings But that erodes value for the consumer ultimately because you know everything Moves around that and so does competition and the whole market But ultimately the organization stops looking at creating value for the consumer whether that's in personalization of the experience In the service standards that you're offering or in all of that And I think it is there's a great opportunity actually in in airlines today in India to bring that sense of experience back into consumers Lives and and to be able to generate a premium for that and sustain over a long period of time So yeah, thanks for sharing that so that yeah, I mean Something to think for for the airline category definitely, but moving on to you Girish What do you think about it? How do you build a purposeful brand still kind of manage your Business numbers that you know, you you're bound by you're on your quarter on quarter month on month Hello. Yeah. So so basically, you know, there's what I'd like to differentiate is between brand promise and brand purpose, right? brand promise is typically a USP, which is a value proposition, which is why buy me and Brand purpose is much larger. It's something what you stand for now It's very clear that a brand promise would be easier to kind of communicate to the customer It can be short-term as well that this is my reason why you need to buy me today You know, for example in my category, which is air conditioners you buy me because of fast cooling What do I come up with a purpose? But I have an example there that you know some years ago when we launched our social media You know handles, which is about 2013 or so We just didn't want to be one more brand which is talking about the same thing right that by me because I give you energy efficiency I give you cooling. I give you fast cool and you know things like that I we realized that we'd have to go, you know, take a little higher ground because you're obviously engaging with Consumers who are far more savvy or in those days and therefore we came up with this proposition of cool my world Which is like a brand purpose. I cool you physically like, you know This this hotel is cooling you right now, but how do you cool yourself mentally, right? And and that particular Instagram, you know, a Facebook account, etc Spoke about tips on anger management, you know, stress management, travel trips How do you actually just get away and you know, get back to your normalcy yoga meditation so on and so forth, correct? So you could do that but but you know, so cool my world became, you know We still continuing with it. We persisting with it for the last eight years, but if you really ask me Yes, it's always a dilemma. How much do I invest in that versus my, you know, brand promise with Virat Kohli talking about fast cooling, right? That's a purpose. Our purpose is consistent. It requires a lot of effort. It requires like Sagar rightly mentioned You can't do it short term. You can't stand as a brand today for this purpose and move on next year It's not a one-night stand. You've got to stay invested in it and one of the main reasons I think as marketeers, you know, Sagar gave an example. There were a few brands Who have kind of stood for a purpose and been successful with it There is of course, you know, Dag Acha Hai, which is a classic example It's not about me, you know, why my detergent is better than yours Meri kameez, tumare kameez is sa fey kais hai. It's about stains are good And that was a purpose, right? They took at a higher ground. They didn't get into any societal Environmental route from that perspective. They didn't talk about CSR. All they took was a very simple emotion You know about kids playing and loving to play in the dirt They took that emotion very brilliantly and they stayed invested with it till date, right? Now that is the power or brand purpose and today for sure surf excel stands out because of that Purpose that they stood for so yes in the long term it can have huge impact Clearly when everything is getting commodities like he mentions, you know consumers There's a lot of research which says that consumers tend to prefer a brand Who has a purpose, you know whom they resonate with whom they inspire get inspired by as I may say, right? You had tada tea talking of Jagore. This took with it They stuck with it for a long period of time, right? Again, that was not about how good the flavor of the brand is It's about wake up, you know, and and they took it very powerfully So the fact is I think as marketeers were becoming very impatient as marketeers We are not really looking at the long-term. We we are looking at short-term gains I think we need to stay invested for the long term and believe you me if we were To invest for the long term it will build the brand powerfully. So, yeah I think that's the dilemma honestly between brand promise and brand purpose and where do you kind of draw that line? Can you just convert your entire brand promise into brand purpose and still get your, you know, annual targets met? That's a challenge. That's the reality of life, right? Yeah, and the other challenge that I feel and I'm going to talk to you about this is that what comes I think to my mind is when you want to build something which is core to your brand which is so intrinsic Which is something long-term it does doesn't become the responsibility of a few people in the marketing team to do it, right? Everybody should own that brand purpose. So how do you make sure that hundreds and thousands of people who work in large organizations? You know kind of Align themselves to that brand purpose So Raveena, I feel allow me to pull back first and talk about purpose and business I think purpose is not something that you decide on. It's not something you come upon. It's what you're born with So very often they ask can you be a born actor or can you become an actor? I'm saying you cannot Become a purpose-led company. You are either born with it or you're not Point one point two is if it is to support your product Directly and we are very good with surrogate advertising. So indirectly to me. It's not purpose It is surrogate advertising to sell and some of the brands you mentioned to me are surrogate advertising Three is if it is with the intent to attract customer attention Or to become closer to him for a higher calling. I think it's not a purpose So therefore if you ask me you run your Business the way you believe it's right for a customer and you have a purpose which is right for The world at large the society at large and my last comment is you have to make the two meet If the two do not meet you will not have a sustained business model So I'll give you an example if I decide I want to do everything Environmentally right and that means my cost of production goes up ten times But my cost of sale cannot go up ten times. I'll go past So therefore while it sounds wrong your purpose has to I'm saying it sounds sacrilege. It has to have an economic sense to it But it has to be what you have to be born with and not create round your product So I can give you a bit of a group example We believe in helping the underserved or the unserved and that's part of our generational values Irrespective of which business you are in. Yes, what we do is we adopt people and localities around our plans Because if we can do something for them That area sustains itself and those people prosper those people get a new lease of life And when employees to take your question when employees see you delivering on it because and Irrespective of they start following that in our CSR budget We have a separate quota only for employee-led causes if an employee believes in a cause He gives his time. He gives his own effort. He gives his own money. We will also back him So you have to walk the talk where the employees believe that this is not a catchphrase. It's not a tagline It's not a advertising slogan. It doesn't change with the times That's how you rally. I think employees Correct, correct, but you know coming back You know to what you said and I'm gonna throw this open to the Pali The real fact is that you know like he rightly said Ajay brand purpose cannot be an odds with what your marketing objectives are They have to be aligned and they have to somewhere coincide, you know over a period of time and the Pali then The challenge is always there, right? How do you measure effectiveness? I mean somebody's gonna question you at the end of the day, you know, I think You know taking forward what Ajay said a lot of the brands may not communicate The brand purpose or let's say you want to call it company mission or company values, right? They may not always communicate that but is the brand purpose the moral compass inside your organization? And that gets tested Sometimes in times of when you have to take a short-term decision to let go of Profits in the short term that may not seem like an economically viable decision But in the long term it is necessary for the company's survival and pharma companies display that right? They do product recalls when they go wrong right and we've heard of famous cases such as you know J&J doing that and that's in short that they win the trust of the medical community, you know in that sense, right? So one is look at the brand purpose whether it is the moral compass of your organization Of course it aligns with the brand, you know overall schema of things and they are not contrary to each other But some of the brands may not communicate it actively and I can tell you that at IBM we may not you know For example internally we talk about the brand's purpose being about being essential now That's a line that you will not hear outside, you know, we don't externally communicate that line, right? But whatever we externally communicate has to be in line with that now How do you measure it is the question that you asked, right? I think ultimately you're measuring the effectiveness of the brand in the context of of course you have those You know brand relevance scores and you know preference scores and stuff like that You also get measured by the stock market and the stakeholders in the way, you know, you're How you're doing on the stock market you get measured every day because you know your turnover your market share You know wallet share whichever way you look at it. The only thing is You may not be able to isolate the impact of each one of those elements Ultimately to a customer whether in the B2B space where you know we're doing deals worth You know, let's say 200 million dollars or whether you're doing in the B2, you know C space where it may be a $1, you know ticket item that you're talking about Ultimately, it's a bundle of benefit that you're offering, right? And over a long period of time if you stay close to the brand purpose that you've defined because That ensures that you provide a certain degree of quality that ensures that you stand for certain things and you will be a You know, you will ensure the CSR element for example that Ajay was talking about and we look forward to that that gets delivered You know to the end customer So to my mind the measurement will happen over a long period of time and of course you if you want to actually start looking at You know the qualitative aspect, you know, we can look at that and I just want to share one anecdote with you here I joined L&T insurance, you know 10 years ago and one of the things that we did in L&T has not been a B2C brand You know with insurance, we were going to do the B2C work for the first time and We went out to the consumer to think in the B2C consumers mind What does L&T stand for? It was interesting that the first word that it came back with was the first set of study that we did was trust Okay, and I said everybody's trusted Tata's are also trusted build as a trusted and I remember asking the taking these two names there You know, I said, what is this trust? How is the L&T trust different from the Tata trust different from you know, how the consumer trust the builders? And I think that's where marketers have a role to play You know to define what is the context of that trust and then deliver it consistently, you know over and over You know again to the customer, but to my mind I still think brand purpose is like the moral compass of you know, whatever we do inside the organization Not just the marketing team, but I think today for example the customer experience team the whole sales experience What's happening inside the organization the way you do pricing the way you do packaging the way you write Disclaimers, you know or the way you write the fine print on your packaging I think all those areas are the ones which eventually will impact, you know, what brand purpose is all about Yes, yes, we're extremely out of time and I'm gonna just do one one rapid fire with my two panellists And they will get just one one sentence to speak about that note. We'll close So Sagar one question to you like if the Bali Said, you know, it's the moral compass and sometimes, you know, they just keep it at IBM inside They don't communicate externally. Is it even needed to communicate externally brand purpose? Yes or no? Yeah, I think you must communicate. You must communicate you will end that on that note And so that for you the rapid fire question goes that if you were to choose between a large purpose driven campaign Visibly a sales driven campaign, which one would you choose? I don't think there's a dichotomy I think a purpose driven campaign will drive sales in the long term. Okay on that note Thank you very much. I think that was an interesting conversation. Thanks