 As national marketing head of Amul India, our next speaker is part of the core team which manages brand Amul and he's in charge of consistent and rapid growth in sales, market share and profitability of Amul's core business, dairy products. This includes managing the flagship portfolio of Amul as well. He also looks after new product innovations and the marketing innovations of Amul. Ladies and gentlemen, put your hands together as I welcome on stage the national marketing head Amul India, Mr. Pawan Singh. Good evening friends. Friday evening 7.45, last thing I want to do is inflict another presentation on you. So I guess I'll spare you the theory, I'll spare you the jargon. Just tell you a great story. A story about a brand which has received a lot of love, affection in this country. A story of a brand which no Indian needs an introduction to, right? It's a part of India's daily life. It's a 60-year-old brand. We are celebrating the 60th anniversary of brand Amul this year, 2016. Let's start with a bit of fun. We've been hearing in the earlier sessions about B2B spaces, B2C businesses. Have you ever heard of a C2C business? Anyone? That's a space in which we operate. C2C in our jargon stands for cow-to-consumer. So that's what Amul is all about. Cow-to-consumer. Although the brand is well known, the industry in which we operate is slightly unique and different from the space in which you work. I'll just take 30 seconds or maybe 60 seconds instead of context, so it'll be easier for you to understand the brand story and put it in the right perspective. Just a trivia, a bit of gyan. India, the country we live in, is the biggest market for milk and dairy products and the fastest growing market in the entire world. I'm sure some of you would know that for some it would be a revelation. Also, within the country, India accounts for 18.5% of global dairy market, 18.5%. Within India, the organized sector is again 18.5%. Within the organized sector, Amul is 24%. So that basically is where Amul stands in the global context today. Just 60 years ago, it was a completely different story and that is where Amul comes from. That's the genesis of the brand. 1940s just prior to independence, Amul was still, you know, India was a very heavily important country in milk. We were importing dairy commodities to fulfill the requirements of our citizens. This was just prior to independence. Very much like what is the situation in oil seas today. As, you know, the milk producers, the farmers of this country, they were relegated to one remote corner of the value chain, thoroughly exploited economically because of the inherent perishability of the commodity that they produce, milk, just two hours life and two hours it'll just go bad. So do you know who was the marketing genius who gave the original marketing inspiration for Amul? Any guesses at all? Dr. Corian came in later, like me, he was a professional. He came in much later after the organization was actually formed. The original marketing inspiration for Amul came from a person whom all of you will recognize the moment I show his photograph. He is the Iron Man of India. The person who created India, modern India as we know it, Sardar Vallabhai Patel. It was he who told the farmers of Central Gujarat. He was basically from a place called Karamsad which is located in Central Gujarat. He told the farmers there, look, if you ever want to get out of the situation that you are in currently, there's only one hope for you. You've got to have control over the entire value chain of your business and that includes marketing. Marketing is the solution which will take you out of the depths in which you find yourself in today. Marketing was the solution for economic upliftment, economic progress. That is the power of marketing. That's what marketing can do for society. We started in a very humble fashion, very, very humble fashion, very small beginning. It hardly seems, you know, looking at the scale in which you operate today, it was very, very small. This was a business initially. In those days, this was a business. Milk used to be collected, put in cans from Anand, 400 kilometers away, sent in a train to Bombay. There was only one single customer, government of Bombay. And the milk used to be distributed here among the citizens. Sure, the farmers were getting better realization. They had more control. But at the same time, I mean, they had very limited access to market. It was a very inherently perishable product they were handling. To access more markets, remote markets, spread their wings, they had to invest in technology to make products. And therefore, the product portfolio of Amol was designed. There's a very interesting story about how this entire portfolio architecture has been created. It's created in something what is known as human life cycle segmentation. You know, everybody, every human being, especially in the country like India, knows milk, right? From an infant to a senior citizen. It's just that in different phases of life, we consume milk in different forms. So what we've done is we've created for every phase of human life cycle, our entire portfolio of products. And that is how the entire portfolio of Amol has been created. Today is a very different scenario, like I said. Last financial, Amol was a group with a 30,000 pro-organization. Even every day, as we speak today, in the morning, we collected almost 22 million liters of milk. That, on a global scale, puts us at number 10, among the top dairy organizations in the world. We were number 15 when the official rankings were released two years back. We are still waiting for the latest rankings, but we are at number 10 in the entire world. What is more important is we know where we are heading. And that's right up the top of the list. What worked for us? It was converting a tiny acronym, A-M-U-L, into a brand. A brand that this country fell in love with. When was the brand born? Like I said, we are celebrating 60th anniversary, so it was exactly 1956 when this brand was born. Right since inception, we actually had a profession structure in place to take care of the brand. The core identity of brand moves stems from the basic operating philosophy of the organization. And that is a promise to India. A promise to the consumers of India that they always get the best quality at the most fair and reasonable price. The second part of the promise is also very important to us. We adhere to it. And this core brand identity has been an integral part of all our brand communication for over the last 60 years. I'll just show you some of the initial examples of brand communication stemming from 1950s, 60s. This was still the era of black and white advertising in print. This is one of the first few communications which came out of Branamul. You can see the core message still remains the same. Value for money. That is what every communication across 60 years really talks about. I probably belong to the fourth generation of brand custodians at Amos. And even when I look at the archive, I marvel at the great pioneering creative works that the predecessors had done, especially the first generation led by Dr. Berge's Korean himself. Some of the early campaigns which came out as 1970s, we went into the era of color advertising. See, today is a new wave thought that, you know, something like Butter is great for health. Time magazine had it on its cover just one year back. But way back, 1970s, you can see on the screen, we were actually saying, build butter bodies, build better bodies, build butter bodies. The health platform is something we are trying to acquire way back, what, another 50 years ago? Some of the early pieces of brand communication. This is what advertising looked like in 1970s. As we all aware, 70s, the only media available was the print and out of form. We tried to access the audio-visual medium way back in 1970s. We actually produced the first crowd-sourced film in India. I'm sure many of you would have heard of it if you haven't actually seen it. It was called Manthan. It was based, it was our attempt to take the Amos story to the masses. The spirit, the soul of the organisation, what we stand for, who we are, that is what the film was all about. It starred legends, legendary actors, Smita Patel, Naseer Shah, Girish Karnat, directed by Shyam Benegal. It was not a documentary, it was a full-length feature film. The year it was released, it was India's official entry into Oscars. It also won a bunch of film fair awards, especially the one for Preeti Sagar won it for the title track. As Move into the 80s advertising execution styles became a little more sharper, this is the 1980s ad of Amul. It features the real Braveheart Nirjabhanath, on whom this recent movie was released. She featured in the 1980s ad of Amul chocolates. And in 2016, we once again paid tribute to this brave lady. Thank you. We have always had a single umbrella and a whole portfolio under that umbrella. That is what Amul has been operating with. Lot of reasons for that. We'll probably spare you the theory. Just move ahead. When the economic landscape of this country changed, it was 1991 with liberalisation kicking in, we had to go for a sharper brand positioning. And that is when Research Inside told us that Amul probably when we talk to consumers in India, they think of Amul not just as milk or dairy, but as representing the unique taste of this country. So Amul's taste of India became the tagline. We've held on to it ever since. There have been many memorable campaigns which have highlighted and reinforced this positioning over the decades. We'll just show you one of them, the AV please. Another dimension of the same campaign which tried to connect the brand to its roots, tell, you know, communicate the spirit of Amul, basically the rural farmers connected to urban consumers, which is what Amul is all about, AV please. The whole idea was to tell people who we are, how the rural farmers connect to urban consumers. And I can also change with times, with changing times. This is what Amul was, you know, the way we depicted it. And then came the more popular brand manifestations, the symbols, the icons, which have become very popular today. The Amul Taste of India, the girl. What really worked for us is this little girl. She has kept us, she was born exactly 50 years ago, 1966. So for a 50-year-old, she looks quite young, right? And she has kept us young, vibrant, energetic through all these decades. The campaign based on her went on to achieve, you know, iconic status. It all started in 1966. The Stropel campaign started with a few Bilbois hearings in Bombay. And then it continued. 50 years nonstop. Week after week, sometimes even twice, sometimes even twice a week. It all depends on what you do. Sometimes even thrice a week. It all depends on what's happening in the country and the world around us. And we were commenting on whatever is happening, the most current events, top of mind events, in a most humorous and witty manner, and also trying to sync it with a brand. And that done over 50 years is quite a task. So we've, in the run-up to the Golden Jubilee, and this is the Golden Jubilee of this campaign, in the run-up to the Golden Jubilee of this campaign, we've published two books in the last four years. They're called Amul India and Amul India 2. And if you just flip through those books, you'll get a sense of the entire history of post-independence modern India and in a way, you know, humorous way. It's not been recorded anywhere, any book of recalls, but it widely acknowledges one of the largest or longest-running advertising campaigns in out-of-form. What works for it clearly is tropical, so is relevant. Is tropical, so is top of mind. The dimensions that we added to it were, you know, the smartness, that touch of humor, and of course, longevity. Done over a period of time, it works wonders. So it has really helped to keep the brand contemporary, fresh and relevant, and that too over a long period of time, five decades. We started with out-of-form, moved into other media. Today it appears in 28 dailies, national and vernacular, once a week. It took to digital almost seamlessly. It was almost as if 50 years back, the people who had created the campaign thought there would be digital media coming up 50 years hence. It just went to digital very seamlessly. Did we, the fourth generation of Brand Custodian, learn anything from the success of this campaign? Yes, we did. We learned that something has been working right for us. Don't tinker around with it. That was the first lesson we learned. Second thing we learned is that keep on doing the same thing if it's good. Over a long period of time, it definitely delivers. So consistency has been one of the keys to Amul's success as far as the marketing space goes. What has also helped the stability? I saw Mr. Shashi Sina somewhere in this audience some time back. I believe he is a veteran of the industry, of course, and Amul was the first assignment when he started his professional career way back as a trainee, and he's been with the brand ever since. There have been people who spent more than 30, 35 years working on this brand, nurturing it, reinforcing it. But that's not the only thing we do in out of form. We keep on looking for new touch points, new avenues which are different from what people have tried before. Railway locomotives, for example. I don't think anyone has tried that before, right? So the first generation of Brand Custodians, they had done such marvelous work. A lot of pioneering work in the era that, you know, not many of us are familiar with today. In the good old days of Durdarshan, there used to be Siddharth Basu's quest time. Anybody remembers that? So that was the first... This is this GK trivia. It was the first sponsored program on Indian television. Amul was a part of the... I mean, one of these sponsors. Surabhi, again. This was Durdarshan in the mid-early 90s. It was the first branded program in Indian television. And on the Star Network, Amul India, sure, on the same time, mid-early 90s, was the first branded program on the Star Network in India. Just look at how the advertising for Amul has evolved. In the early years, we used to advertise milk and print, mostly on purity, mostly on the natural aspect of milk. Then we found that, you know, if you're a 60-year-old brand, the biggest challenge we face is there's a new generation coming along every few years. Now, we need to ensure they also connect to the brand in the same way the grandparents had done. So that's quite a challenge, actually. And milk, oh, God, is boring white fluid, right? Who would think milk would be trendy? So to connect with every new generation, we had to really try and attempt an image makeover of milk. And we try and do that. Try and make it something which is a little more appealing, especially the younger generation. And our campaigns also evolved in that direction. Can we see this, Avi, please? So that actually started getting an anthem feel to it, right? And we worked on this campaign, we kept on doing versions of it. There's another dimension that we wanted to work on. We were talking about milk advertising, okay? And we found that India is, you know, different cultures, different parts of the country. Everybody has their own festivals. And all festivals, milk is something which becomes central. So we wanted to connect milk with the festivals of India. And this is how we did it, Avi, please. If the whole challenge was how to connect milk to the younger generation, we started focusing very heavily on sporting events. Events which brought, you know, national pride to the country. We are not talking about cricket here. We are talking about stuff like Olympics, Asian Games, Commonwealth, football, again. It was an untapped opportunity for us because everybody else was into cricket. So what we did was we tried to position milk also leveraging on our association with sports events as the world's original energy drink. Look at this, Avi, please. Original energy drink. Amul, official sponsor Indian Olympic team. So that was done during the 2012 London Olympics and that's one of the efforts that we've been trying to do, you know, reposition the entire imagery of milk. And then moving from a plain white fluid, a plain white voting fluid into a whole set of trendy beverages in contemporary packaging formats. So now you've got milk in so many different forms and there are options for youngsters to consume. As India's leading dairy brand, we took up the challenge of educating people, especially the youth, about including milk as a part of their diet. Including milk as a part of their daily or every meal. So this was a series of campaigns that we had. Eat milk with every meal. Communicating basically on the goodness of milk and the forms in which they can eat milk with just about every occasion throughout the day. And the whole challenge that we've been trying to address is how to keep on connecting with every new generation that comes along. We did one more thing, a big attempt to bring the brand physically closer to consumers. So we've made a creative entire chain of 8,100 exclusive Amul parlors on the franchise models. Okay, these are shops basically with Amul branding and they sell the entire range of Amul products exclusively. 8,100 means it's actually the largest single brand retail chain in India today. And that actually helps to bring the brand physically closer, makes it more visible on the ground. So that's what we've been trying to do. At all major centres of excellence, transit points, high traffic points, railway stations, major academic campuses, centres of excellence like I said, office complexes, everywhere. And we're expanding. So there was a time when traditional marketing worked for us, as it worked for everybody else too. And then we found lifestyle is changing, more pressure and time. Everybody is staying out of home all the time. No time to basically watch TV, read newspapers, and the world started changing around us. You know, everybody was transfixed to the device in their hands. And that's the reality of today. We all do that, right? So when everybody carries their own media in their own hands, 24 by 7, we also had to evolve in sync with the changing times. We sensed that there was an opportunity for deeper two-way interaction to engage with our customers and that's what we did. How did we evolve? One else, immediately we took our current popular campaigns into the online space. So the topic became a big hit overnight. What we do is we first release it on digital first, you know, on all the social media channels owned by the brand, and then we take it to print and then out of home now. So the sequences changed completely. And we get a lot of feedback. Some of them become very popular, some of them give us a lot of traction. We use technology for consumer activations, you know, giving them a chance to express themselves with their interplay and the brand. So selfie contest, you know, express themselves creatively the way they use Amul as a part of their daily routine. We get customers to even vote for their favorite topical. So these are some of the activations we do. Try and, you know, have a better engagement, deeper engagement, two-way interaction. We use technology for trade activations and that is something that was probably something pioneering that we did. You know, which tool we used among all the digital social media tools available for trade activations, what we found to be the best? WhatsApp. Absolutely. So all our visibility drives, displays, everything in retail, and we deal with millions of retail shops across the country. That number can be managed only with this. So display schemes, display contests, you know, interacting with trade partners, channel partners across the country and huge numbers through WhatsApp. WhatsApp worked for us here. We get, we launch, we keep on coming with new products. We launch almost 40 in the last two and a half years. Every time we do that, we get instant feedback on Twitter, on Facebook, on the other channels. We get to know what is happening to our new launch, what is happening to our new offering, what are the reactions, and they come very quickly. Every time we have any new launch coming up, we do the announcements. Also, digital gives us that facility of sharp precision targeting. Other media we found, comparatively, have a lot of spillover. Digital allows for very sharp, high precision targeting. And that is where I think the efficiency definitely improves here. We get instant feedback on our advertising campaigns. There have been many a times when we release a new television campaign first on digital, we get the feedback. We evaluate the feedback. If there's a need for change, we do it. And then we go on to, you know, we put it in the offline conventional media like television or print. We have also created a few very specific campaigns only for web. Here's one of them. Just have a look. The AV, please. I can't believe it. From tomorrow, it will go into the first standard. From tomorrow, it will go into the early morning school. What fun. Thank you. So what these web films allow us to do is rather than a typical 30, 40-seconder on television, they allow us to tell a more complete story. Right? These are two minutes, three minutes videos. We do them exclusively for web. We've been doing series after series. Another series, very interesting. I know we are running out of time, but you should see this. This is the last AV. This campaign also evolved into a series of its own. So we did one, two, three, four, five. You know, we celebrate national pride on social media. You know, every time there's an event that we sponsor like the Olympics or Asian Games, and an athlete goes and brings glory to the country, wins a medal, gold, silver, bronze, whatever, is a family's back home who've made all these sacrifices. So on the day that victory happens, we go and meet the families, we felicitate them, and we celebrate their happiness and success on our social media channels. That's what we do. So that's what we've been doing. We have, like every other brand, we've faced viral attacks on social media. It's a two-edged sword. I think somebody already mentioned that. So while we look at a lot of feedback, we take that as an opportunity to correct ourselves and, you know, rectify any errors that we're making, we also faced deliberately orchestrated viral social media attacks. So what do we do? A typical response would be to let it die down. You don't really want to be in the negative space, right? We don't do that. If there's a... We find and establish beyond doubt that there's a deliberate dissemination of, you know, disinformation campaign happening, we take a stand. We use basically the same media and use the same media to give us the right information. And that's what we've done, and that's what we're known for. And, of course, so what? Just to summarize what has really worked for us all these years, what's really worked is, you know, we've never overpromised. The brand has always studied, stayed away from overpromising. We've promised reasonably, and we've then delivered on our promise, and then done that consistently over a long period of time, allowing trust to build up. That is what has worked for us. Second is, of course, consistency, and that is one takeaway from this. Consistency over a long period of time delivers, it works. Yes, we have made a deliberate attempt over generations to move in sync with the times, not only moving in sync, but sometimes anticipating changes that might happen a couple of years ahead, and try and stay a step ahead of times. And finally, keeping the brand fresh, relevant, contemporary, trying to connect with every new generation that comes along. Thank you so much. Thank you so much, Mr Singh. Please stay with me on stage. Thank you for refreshing memories of the Amoon story. Thank you very much. I'd like to invite on stage Mr. S. Yeh Sudhas, MD and co-founder, trigger bridge the un-agency to please come on stage and give away the memento. Ladies and gentlemen, let's put our hands together for Mr. Singh and the Amoon story. Thank you so much, sirs.