 Good evening ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Mark Tech India Bridge the first in a series of events where marketing technology and digital media professionals will congregate on a single platform to discuss the latest developments in modern marketing in the new normal post COVID world. The Corona pandemic has changed lives all over the world nearly overnight. Thanks to everybody staying indoors, traffic hasverted whether it's people posting their pictures of Dalgona coffee on Instagram or making TikTok videos or even playing Ludo online. But has that increased traffic meant more conversions? The consumer's survivalist mentality during this time may not immediately give way to the growth mindset. It is likely that even after opening up a capital consumption could show muted growth in the next three to five years as people learn to live within their means and start valuing a less wasteful lifestyle. Mark Tech India Bridge will offer an opportunity to identify, evaluate and implement time saving profit generating marketing strategy. Welcome, I'm Anishana Yadavand. Thank you, Anisha. This is Rohail. I'm your co-host today. I'll just briefly give you an overview of what is expected today. So we have the inaugural keynote by Dr. Anurag Patra, Chairman and Editor-in-Chief for Media Group and Business World. We have a keynote by Dr. Apurva Durga, Analyst and Founder Alt-Viewed Advisory. We have a final discussion on marketing technology that India needs. We have a success story by Aparna Mahesh of Bank Bazaar. It's a discussion, very insightful discussion. And finally, a keynote by Jarod Jengras on the state-of-the-art market stack, what it looks like. So very exciting lineup today. We can start with a keynote. Yes. So let's get started and set the bold rolling up. Please welcome the legend who's a serial entrepreneur, media mogul, a journalist and eternal optimist, all rolled into one. Dr. Anurag Patra, the chairperson and Editor-in-Chief of X-Stage for Media. Thank you, Anisha. You've been a journalist. You're not somebody who's just an anchor. You understand what is happening. And so on and so forth. So, you know, first of all, I want to start by saying that we at X-Stage for Media have a great team and they're practitioners. I look around what's happening around us. So I have a bird's-eye view. And even in our business, we want to integrate technology more and more as we go along. As every business needs to be tech. It has to be tech. Even in education, it has to be tech. Without calling it medicine, it's health tech. So every business is tech. But X-Stage for Media's core is the CMOs, the market brands. I've been saying that the role of the CMO, the CIO, the CTO and the CDO, the Chief Digital Officer, is kind of coming into one. So while we have excellent speakers, I'll keep to my time of five minutes and let me give you my seven trends of market tech in India. Also, as more and more money will go in performance marketing, you know, marketing through digital will get a higher share because marketers are focused on making sure that the money they spend also produces revenue and also enhances the relationship. The first trend is that if you talk to any market here, anybody who's selling products, good services, they will talk to you about Omni-Channel. The experience is Omni-Channel. So getting the Omni-Channel experience right will happen through market tech. You'll write notes of buzzword, we talk about it. So Omni-Channel is the biggest trend that marketers need to get right as we move to a contactless economy. And it's been forced on us, but it may lead to a change in consumer behavior. So one is getting the Omni-Channel experience right. Then second is data unification. Now you may have multiple, so Omni-Channel and data unification go hand in hand. The rapid proliferation of data will lead to need for data unification and consolidation. So all the tools you have, the CRM tools, so you'll need one single tool to unify data. Second, the third is 100% mobile device experience making will make EA commerce thing of the past. So everything will happen through a mobile device. Now digital media like Tokopedia, Lazada are excelling in the space by developing in-app games. So gamification, so how do you enhance the mobile experience during market tech? For this video, we are doing this over Zoom, there are other video platforms. So how do you enhance this video experience? So the tech surrounding it will also develop. Fifth is the rise in voice search. We'll see VSO overtake STO. So voice searches will possibly grow more than STO. And we've been talking of artificial intelligence for 65 years, not much, 65 years. That's when artificial intelligence, the term was coined. And you know, currently, artificial and machine learning had become important in every business, but I think you will see the growth of artificial intelligence and machine learning and its integration in how a marketer takes his or her decisions. Last but not the best. For the last five years, we've been talking of AR VR. Finally, marketer will make more investments in AR VR as the virtual digital experience needs to be enhanced, the AR VR will become really, you know, experience and answers. So these are my opening comments. I look forward to learning from other speakers, other stalwarts, practitioner leaders, tech evangelists, and I'm sure our ecosystem of marketeers on exchangeformedia.com, impactonnet.com, pitchonnet.com and other associated sites will also learn. Thank you, sir. Thank you for this wonderful address. Up next, we have Dr. Apulva Durga, who's the analyst and founder, Altview Advisory. Welcome, Mr. Durga, to this amazing lineup of speakers that we have today at the right martech stack that will go on the series every day for the next four days that we'll be continuing. And Mr. Durga will be speaking about, I'm just, just a minute. Okay, you can go on, please, sorry. Okay, your start is blue. Okay, thank you, Rohan. I'm just sharing my screen. So is my screen visible? Yes, yes. Okay, so thank you, thank you for having me here. Hello everyone. My name is Apul Durga and I am founder of Altview Advisory, a research and advisory firm based in Delhi. As an analyst and consultant, I cover several marketing technology marketplaces. So thank you to everyone for joining this session today. There are a lot of great sessions lined up in this event and I am looking forward to learning from the practitioners and gurus. For this session, though, I hope to give you an overview of emerging technologies or in other words, what should a tech marketers toolbox consist of as we move into 2020s. Oh, by the way, if you are on Twitter and you want to feel like tweeting, please use the hashtag that will be helpful for other people who are following this on Twitter. So a brief introduction of what Altview does. It is essentially a vendor agnostic firm that helps customers sort out their martech choices. This includes helping you build your own stack, picking up the right tools, benchmarking your readiness with competition and so on. I also run a martech masterclass that covers a variety of aspects ranging from basics of martech to building a martech business case to product selection and so on and so forth. So with that out of the way, let us just jump in. This is what we will broadly cover. Martech is essentially marketing plus technology, right? So we will talk a bit about the challenges that today's marketers face. We will then look at the state of marketing technology and technologies that can help sort out some of those challenges or mitigate some of those challenges. And then we will have a look at the landscape maps that are becoming popular and plans for our own India specific martech map. So that's really what we will look at. So let's look at the challenges that marketers face and Dr. Batra touched upon this about the fact that omnichannel is important. It is a major issue that marketers face. But we know that omnichannel experience is completely broken, especially in India. No matter where, when, or where the interaction is happening, I as a customer should always feel as if I am talking to the same brand. Consistency is very important, but that rarely happens. Even in 2020, many brands deliver an experience that is completely fragmented and disjointed and different across different touch points. There are several examples. The other day I booked a demand draft on a bank's website to be picked up from an IRS branch. But when I read the branch, they had absolutely no clue. They didn't know why I was there. And then there are other examples. So I got this email with a brilliant offer for a specific handset. But when I actually went to the website, this is what I see. So completely different prices. Now you could argue that this happened because by the time I clicked on the offer, that offer was gone. But that's not the case. So here's another example. This one from their competitor. Now, first, I don't know why they send me this email because I have never looked at these kind of products. But to address my point, you will see that on the email, here's the product details. It is exactly the same product that is there on the website. But now with a different MRP. Now you could argue that the offer price has changed, but MRP changing? That really doesn't make sense. The only plausible reason for that to happen would be if the underlying data sources for different channels are not in sync with each other. And we see this very, very often. Here's another example. LinkedIn sends me this email with $1.50 coupon code for their LinkedIn marketing campaigns. So I go to the website and apply this coupon. And the message that I get is that this coupon is already gone. Now if that coupon is already gone or if the coupon is already used, why send me an email in the first place? You often get SMSs presenting you to pay bills when you already paid them. I'm sure almost everybody gets them. And then they have a disclaimer saying, please ignore it paid. But why do they have to have a disclaimer if your underlying systems are consistent across all the channels? We see a number of such examples across different verticals, different retailers, different type of service providers. Here's another example why this happens. So here I'm trying to explain why that kind of thing happens. So this is an egressive retailer. And on their website, I use one identity. And on their Facebook page, I use another identity. And the two identities are completely different. And they have separate email IDs. And it is not really a trivial exercise to map these two separate identities to one common user, which is me in this case. And here there are only two channels, right? For big brands, there could be 40 channels, 50 channels, multiple websites, email, mobile, social, all of those. And if customers have so many identities, it is going to be a very challenging exercise to map them to one single identity. And there are more and more challenges and goals that today's marketers are struggling to achieve. Now there are several things. So some of these challenges we have covered, but there are others like content recommendation, personalized user experience, predictive analytics. How do you provide next best kind of actions, recommend something to people, do analytics, create a single unified view of users. So several of these things are what today's marketers are facing. Can technology address them? Is there enough technology to address them? Well, it turns out there is and lots of it, right? So this is a famous Martek 5000 technology landscape by Scott Brinker. Scott is doing a keynote later. But for now I will give a quick background of this. This is a humongous graphic and it has logos of 8000 Martek vendors. You see these different different colored continents. These are the categories of these vendors and Scott helpfully lists them. List these categories on the left. There are six categories that he mentioned. These are all different types of software. And over time this graphic has grown at a crazy rate as you can see on the part here, right? From about 1000 solutions in 2014 to 8000 now. Huge, right? That's a huge growth. Now here's the thing. It still does not contain all the vendors. And there are several more including several regional as well as vertically specialized vendors. So vendors who target specific verticals like financial or retail. Or vendors that are popular in specific geographies like India. Not a lot of them find space here. Essentially, even though this contains 8000 vendors, there are several more. And this marketplace is full of thousands of products, vendors and projects that claim to do what you need. Essentially, everyone calls them a Martek vendor even if all they have is a rich text editor or a simple page builder. So essentially there's a lot in this marketplace and it is important to structure this marketplace for your own understanding. So let's make an attempt to structure the marketplace a bit in next few slides. Here are some of the ways that I have used to categorize different vendors. The most common way to categorize these vendors is based on the functionality they provide. So we will talk about that a bit later in these slides. You can also categorize these vendors based on tiers. So a vendor could be a suede vendor like Oracle, IBM, etc. They could be best of breed vendors and this question keeps coming up very often. We will talk about this also later in some detail. Then you can categorize vendors based on their support for specific industry verticals or domains. So there are solutions that target specific verticals. So there is Bangalore-based company called Manthan that targets only retail. So there are several of those and there's one example here, the screenshot that shows you CDPs by their industry focus. So that's another way. Then you can also categorize these vendors based on their support for specific use cases. Not all vendors cover all the use cases. So that's an important criteria. And finally you can categorize these vendors by their deployment approaches. So whether they allow in-house, do they allow on-premise deployment, do they allow SaaS-based deployment and so on and so forth. Essentially by doing these kind of categorization, you can actually bring down those 8,000 or 80,000 or whatever number of vendors. There are too much more manageable vendors that are relevant to you. So we will not go through all these categorization, but let's look at the first two in slightly more detail. So based on these functional categories, here are some of the key categories. There's content and experience. So essentially this category includes products and tools that help you manage content for your website. So web content management system or digital asset management and media asset management system that help you create digital and audio and video content for your digital media campaigns, ad campaigns, etc. Then you have social and relationships. So these are the tools that help you manage your social media presence. So social media marketing would be an example. Monitoring social media for let's say doing a sentiment analysis of tweets about your product or about your brand. Then you have the products in the e-commerce category. So products that let you do sales automation or products that let you build your own e-commerce website, product information management, catalog management and so on. And then there are products for advertising and promotion. So products that let you do advertising campaigns on social media, on mobile, on print, doing PR type of activities and those kind of functionality. And then you have the marketing category. So this really contains technology that lets you do marketing campaigns, email campaigns, marketing automation, CRM and so on and so forth. Now these are some of the categories that we have traditionally seen and they are not really new ones. Several of them have existed for a long time. The problem with this kind of categorization model is that there is always going to be an overlap and overlap that results in a styloid model. So you might have a social media marketing product that works on the same user base that let's say a marketing automation tool needs to work on. And hence you need to be able to tie these five categories together to make up for a better only channel experience. And that's where these two new categories come in. These are data and planning. So these are categories that have really emerged as very popular in past couple of years and growing at a very, very fast pace. In particular data category is one where we are seeing a lot of interest in marketers and it consists of several categories but we will look at some of the key subcategories within data. These are data platforms. So platforms that allow you to build a unified profile of your users. So if your users come to you through different 10 or 15 channels, you are able to map them to a single user. So that's what CDPs do and CDPs do this with help of platforms like data management platform, DMTs, and essentially you get a single user profile. There are other functionality also that data platforms do but this is really the key functionality. Now once you have a unified profile, you want to be able to manage your users journey across all these channels. So you need platforms for managing their journeys, for doing personalization, sort of an ATC for your customers, air traffic control for your customers. So manage their journey so you have these decisioning platforms. Then you want to be able to analyze what your customers are doing. So you have analytics platforms, so dashboards, journey analytics, and those kind of tools. And since you're collecting so much of your information from your customers, your users, you need to have tools that let you do things like consent management, data governance, privacy. And with the new data privacy rule coming up in India, I think this is going to be a big area for you, especially in India. And then for planning, you have the tools for campaign planning. So you don't want to be going to a marketing automation and creating a plan or a calendar there and then going to a social media campaign tool and creating another calendar there. So you need tools that can work across channels. And finally you have the management subcategories there that lets you do administration and monitoring of the health of your tools and so on and so forth. These are not all the subcategories but I think these are the key categories that you need to look at when you are building your stack. Jared has a good session on building market stack and I recommend that you attend that session for some very good inputs on how to go about building your only channel marketing stack. So we have seen there are 8000 products in that landscape and I said that there are many more. So this question keeps coming up. I have already licensed Salesforce or IBM. Do I still need to look at these 8000 products? So replace Salesforce with IBM or Oracle or any digital experience platform or marketing cloud or Sweets or what have you. So this question keeps coming up. And there are essentially two approaches to building your market stack. So on the right is a screenshot of how USPS has built their marketing stack. So it shows you their key requirements on this frame and then you see the products that they have used for each of those requirements. This is about visualization. The other approach would have obviously been to use just one product Salesforce for all the requirements instead of using individual tools. Now the point here is that these sweet vendors, some of them at least can provide multiple solutions across different categories. So it can be an easy thing to actually go with one of those sweet vendors, license one of those sweet vendors or cloud providers or DHPs as a solution for all your requirements, marketing requirements. That seems like a good deal. Often customers believe that such a solution solves their problem. Analysts and vendors push that notion too. But we have seen that that doesn't really happen in real life. So it is not necessary that a solution that provides or a vendor that provides many different solutions using the same product is a better fit. In fact, a lot of times it actually turns out to be a bad fit, a really bad one at that. And the reason for that is that most of these sweet vendors have cobbled together their sweets based on several acquisitions. As a result, their offering is not really a single tool in terms of user experience and architecture, but often a very badly cobbled together package of multiple tools, multiple products with varying provenance. So essentially, there is no such thing as an end to end solution or out of the box platform. You really need to build your own martech stack, even if you were using a sweet. So in case you do license a sweet, keep these two things in mind. First, consider individual products in the sweet based on its own merit and not because it is part of the sweet. So for example, if you were going with, let's say, Adobe CDP, don't just go with Adobe CDP because you have already licensed Adobe's broader offerings. So compare Adobe CDP offering with other standalone CDP offerings and see if it meets your requirements or not. And second point to keep in mind is that don't assume all the components of your sweet or cloud are well integrated because they are not. So plan for additional effort and resources there. So now back to landscapes, how much time we've got. So let's get back to landscape, right? So we looked at Scott's landscape of 8000 vendors. There are several more landscapes like that. So there are regional landscapes like this one from UK. We also have several others. So there is a Swedish landscape. There's a German martech landscape. There's a Canadian there. There is a European there. I think there are a couple of more there. There's even a Chinese one, right? China has a martech landscape map and here's the Indian one. No, it doesn't exist, right? So we want to create a India specific martech map. There are two reasons for that one. Obviously that it doesn't exist. And second is essentially this, right? So why do we need an Indian one when there are so many global products? Do we need a separate one? And I think there are three aspects there. The first one is that we want to have a local innovation ecosystem. We want to encourage that, right? And having a catalog of Indian martech companies would help that. So a local presence of a company is very important because as an end user, if I have somebody in my time zone, my geography to help me when my site is down or my implementation is down, that's very useful. The global landscape also miss several regional vendors, so that's another reason. We also want to be able to encourage local vendors, so vendors who don't have a lot of marketing budgets to get published in large global landscapes. This will also create opportunities for talents so people would know what are the other possibilities for career progression and so on. And finally, this will help us collaborate on local issues. So let's say talking to government bodies for some concessions or working on a martech standard or something like that. The second key aspect here is that having such a map will help us address the need of Indian marketers. So there are several India-specific capabilities, right? So for example, cash on delivery is a very Indian phenomenon and capturing real-time cash on delivery data when a customer is picking up a package, I think that would be very relevant in an Indian scenario whereas it may not be relevant in other geographies. In India, we also have different activation channels that are not really popular elsewhere, right? So for example, WhatsApp is a big activation channel here. Also Indian companies find agency models very helpful. So a lot of times it is the agency who is doing marketing for a brand and hence that makes it really different here. And finally, we want to be able to address the needs of Indian IT industry, right? So CIO, CTOs and a lot of Indian IT people prefer DIY rather than packaged of the shell solutions. There's also different focus here, right? So instead of marketers making decisions, I think a lot of companies' decision is still taken by data science and engineering teams which may or may not be correct but that's a different issue but that has been reported here. Then there are issues of localization. So Hindi is a big market. Other vernacular languages are a big market and they are really untapped right now because global products are not looking at them. India-specific pricing, compliance, I think those are self-explanatory. Finally, scale, right? The kind of population we have and once we start using these tools for regional languages, I think that scale is going to be unprecedented and we really need tools that understand the local context to be able to address that kind of scale. So here's the plan for releasing the map. We will release this India Martech map by September. These are the initial collaborators, all view advisory, AI props and exchange for media but we will welcome all contributions and we will give obviously due credits. Here's the link to the form and I will post it also somewhere so that you can easily access it. So you can click on the form and submit your recommendations for the companies or vendors that should be included in India Martech map. Okay, so that's really it. So this is really the summary of my presentation today. There's a lot of tech out there but you don't really need to look at everything. You need to be able to simplify it using different categorizations. Second point is that if anybody claims that they have a DXP or CXP or a Martech or some other XY stack that provides an end-to-end solution, be wary of those claims. You have to build such a solution, it does not exist. Even if you license a suite or a marketing cloud, you will need to build it. And finally look out for the Indian Martech landscape, better still contribute to it. Thank you Dr. Durga. Such a lovely discussion and you have given us the global perspectives on the Martech landscape and how India has this unique positioning in all of that mix. What do you think, Anisha? I mean, your initial thoughts on this discussion? Well, after listening to a poor word, it feels to me that the job of a CMO is an exacting one. You have to build your own stack once which is not going to work for you. Apurva, if you're still here, there are a few questions that are coming now from some of our participants. Apurva, are you there? Sure, I'm here. I've also got some questions here that people have sent. Let me ask you, there is a question that is coming from Shakti at Grofus. Shakti is asking, how does one track the new solutions that get launched on a daily basis? More than that, how do I know if it's going to work for me, my brand, my company? And should you try something new just because something new, something improved has come? How much time should you give for your own system and your stacks to work? Well, there are several questions there in that one question. So first thing is, how do you keep track of this? I think there are some really good resources out there you can go through, let's say, Scott Brinkels, chiefmartech.com website, he blogs regularly about that. You can follow the real story group blog. You can also follow other analysts from that regularly track this space. So there are several resources on the web that you might want to follow in order to be able to keep up with the... Of course, there is my blog as well, but I'm not going to put that here right now. So there are several resources out there that track new emerging technologies, new emerging vendors. They write about those technologies in detail and you can follow them. But how do you know it's going to work for you? Whether it's yours or outdated? Can you just turn on your screen so that we can see you? We've seen your presentation now. Can we see you on screen? My screen should be on. I don't know why it keeps going off. Oh, now we see you. Yes, now we see you. Thank you. Okay, so how does it work for you? I think there is only one way to do that and that is to actually try it out. Most of these solutions provide some sort of a demo or a lot of solutions provide a 14-day evaluation version, a demo version. If they don't, they will be more than happy to give you a demo at your convenience. So feel free to ask those vendors for a demo and that is really the only way to get your hands dirty and find out if it works for you or not. There is nothing else that will convince you whether it will work for you or not. The point here is that every customer has completely different requirements and what works for me may not work for you. So the only way for you to find out is by actually trying it out. Dr. Durga, during your presentation you also spoke about that India has a unique agency model that works here, unlike other markets. It's pretty prominent here in India. So I have a question from one of the agency representatives. He's asking Mr. Venkat from Densu is asking are there enough homegrown solutions as far as Maatek is concerned? I think yes, there are and we will find out more about it when we actually release this map but I think we know a lot of vendors, small vendors where a lot of innovation is happening so especially in the areas of AI and application of AI to Maatek. So there are vendors but maybe not as much as in the US but there are certainly good amount of vendors in India who are not usually covered in the analysis reports and so on. So in the end it's never going to be 100% made in India's pack. That's not going to happen. I'm not even saying that. But the idea is that if there are Indian vendors and they are good, they should get visibility and that's really the objective. Thank you Dr. Durga, we have a lot of questions but we are out of time and thank you so much for this insightful keynote. Lots to learn. Over to you Anisha. In fact, you know, building your stack is not easy and there are a lot of solutions there so Apurah has given us broad guidelines on how to go about it. But let's move on. Next we have a panel discussion on the marketing technologies India needs. Now a country as diverse and large as India with many states, different cultures and languages, it requires marketers to think out of the box. Now post the corona pandemic outbreak most people are, you know, stocking up on essentials rather than splurging on luxurious or discretionary items. Naturally, if I am, you know, searching on the latest study on how the virus spreads or the numbers in my city, the likelihood of me spending on a lipstick or a luxury holiday is very low. So what should marketers of discretionary products do? Should they go off the radar for some time, lie low? Does that mean when you come back and you want to build a relationship or a brand recall for your customers, that is going to be counterproductive. What marketing is going to look like in the post corona virus world? This is what we are going to discuss in the next panel discussion. And we also will try to understand what are the marketing technologies that work more effectively in India than some of the others do. And we try to get a bit of comparison between India and some of the other markets as well. So I am happy to introduce the panelists who will be speaking on this panel. We have Mr. Anil Sridhamas Chila. He is chief digital and data manager of the Floreal. He is a growth oriented business leader with 20 years of experience with 11 plus years of digital transformation across multiple growth markets. We also have Mr. Prabhakar Tiwari, the CMO of Angel Broking. He has been spearheading brand performance and PR initiators for Angel Broking. And the firm has seen rapid improvements in its digital maturity metrics. So we are going to speak to him about his journey and what he foresees in the post pandemic era. We also have Anika Agarwal, the CMO of Max Gupta who will be with us in this panel discussion. She is a seasoned marketing professional and she joined Max Gupta in 2011 as the head of the marketing function. She is responsible for the overall brand strategy and marketing communications of the brand. I would like to welcome all three of you on this discussion. Hello everyone. Hi everyone. Hi everyone. Let me start with Anil. The brand L'Oreal has a wide record. Now at a time when people perhaps are not focusing too much on spending on non-essentials what should L'Oreal do? We know you have a brand ambassador. We know you have awesome products. I'm just not thinking about this. So what will you do? Will you save your pennies on your marketing? Would you then re-envisage your marketing to somehow connect with the emotions your prospective customers feeling? Maybe it's anxiety, maybe it's stress. But you want to somehow connect with them so that your brand stays there without trying to push them towards a purchase which they may not be ready for now. The short answer to that is all of the above. But you know what? We are thought of as a makeup company but we are the largest hair color company in the world in India. We've got a great portfolio of hair color products. We've got hair care, shampoo, conditioner, serums etc. We've obviously got skincare products and then we've got the luxury part of the business which focuses on the premium makeup, skincare etc. So and then of course a big salon business etc. The point essentially being that the makeup part is what probably is not at the top of mind at this point in time but people are certainly focused on their own personal care, well-being, health wellness etc. Which falls pretty much squarely in the areas that we work on especially in the hair color etc. categories. So for us we've sort of pivoted our focus so we are obviously a beauty company a beauty tech company as we like to call ourselves and we have sort of pivoted our focus on the categories which we all now know as essential and sort of going into whether it's in terms of a go-to market, whether it's in terms of digital marketing, whether it's in terms of commercial excellence etc. and e-commerce obviously we've sort of focused on the categories which are at this point what we call essential and then once consumers are in the state of mind to look at broader things they start going out etc. is when we start focusing on categories such as makeup etc. Part one of your question. Part two is I think as a part of this overall I'd say unfortunate situation around COVID-19 and I think it's impacting pretty much everyone across the world whether it's people, companies, countries, you name it etc. The point essentially being there that we've also sort of undergone a transformation internally and how we approach it so whether it's global or whether it's in the market in India we've obviously looked at what works within this market, what kind of messaging etc. and we're trying to resonate, understand basically from a consumer's perspective what's really important and make sure we are sort of addressing that rather than being a push push push rather it should be from consumer perspective what's important at this point in time therefore sort of look at it. Alright, Prabhakar I want to come to you. Now at this time people are stuck at home and companies like yours who are in the fintech space have already been a little ahead of the curve I can say that when it comes to product you already have your apps, you already are doing a lot you've integrated your payments everything and you have an app that is really making it easier for people to come to your platform to invest to trade or whatever but at this point of time when there is some panic and there is some uncertainty is this a time for you to say that you can get great results or is this a time for you to build a brand association for the long term and how are you doing it as opposed to your competitors. Okay, first of all thanks a lot for exchange for media team for this panel discussion and thanks Anisha for your question see I think very very interestingly put of course as a BFSI business we were ahead of curves in case of angel broken we have 30 years of history behind us and particularly last 4 years we have done a lot of work for digital transformation and it paid off beautifully you know since March the lockdown started so let me tell you that since March for 3 months we had average customer acquisition of around 1 lakh per month 1 lakh plus that's very very high number what do you attribute that to Prabhakar why? Anisha I would love to do that but I must say that this has happened because of of course change in customer behavior and second of course our readiness and of course our advertising and marketing campaigns so a lot of interest we saw in terms of organic like people are spending more time reading about your brand or trying to go through your website pages and once they become interested there is a customer DIY journey which doesn't have any physical interface so they can go through the entire journey and open a DMAT account theoretically speaking that is possible within 5 minutes but there is hard verification and all of other steps that may come in the way otherwise within 5 minutes it's possible for people to open DMAT account and within 15 minutes they can start doing trading because of this reason which is the customer interest they are locked up in the home they have plenty of time to explore they could actually they always have had interest in stock market but they never had time to explore now they could explore at home and in March there was sudden fall in the stock market in a matter of days the stocks were low 30% you are so right so these stocks were in multi-year lows you are sitting at home and you have opened the DMAT account so not only we saw a great rush in opening the account but we also saw a rush in starting trading for example usually what we call day 0 day 1 like post opening the DMAT account if day 0 day 1 only 10% people trade the number went to SIS 25% so 2.5% jump 2.5 times jump on that also coming back to your question is this time to lure customer or is it time to build a long trend now if you look at angel broking last year we went in a kind of flat brokerage so we are a full service brokerage house with a research and advisory team best in class and now we are available at brokerage prices as low as any discount broker out there and what we call it Aage Burneka Smart Soda so somewhere ideas not to lure them but to offer them value offer them value and why is it long term because I mean you just opening a DMAT account doesn't give me any revenue and neither you buying stock for the first time doesn't give me revenue what gives me revenue is that whatever investment you are making you are able to see growth in that and that makes you keep investing again and again and that's where we make money as a brokerage house so somewhere I think we have tried to balance both in terms of educating them and also keeping them engaged with us so that's my two bits on what you asked right so Anika I want to ask you when everybody is panicked and oh there is a pandemic let's buy insurance that's the first thing that's going to come to anybody's mind but when the doubt settles and people go back to doing other things how are you going to keep them to call when there is panic pushing things on their social media on the Facebook it's not that tough right but how much in road have you made during this time that even later people will come back to you when things seem normal and they will still value your product what strategies have you applied now what are the channels you think that work most effectively for you sure thanks Anisha and Prabhakar I love your background takes us back to the original June so thank you for that coming back to us Anisha I think what we've done is that we've broken this into three parts the first is that you know what do we do really within this pandemic period and we have a very different problem or a good I shouldn't say good problem but a different situation ours is a category where people usually don't have time to spend on they will come and say oh insurance is something that I have to buy and it's always at the back it's a cost nobody wants to make correct so you have a situation where customers are coming to you and saying that you know I need to buy insurance but you also have two other phases after that one is the first phase when you know immediately when they come out of this pandemic phase what will they do and from a medium to long term view what can you do for the brand and the business so first when we speak about the pandemic I think yes there is a big rush to buy insurance right now what we've got advantage of is that what we were getting ready in terms of customer revolution and customers coming in buying digitally access to data that's coming in handy what we are also doing is that we are also trying to utilize the trust that the customers had on the brand right so this is the real time when customers really value what you've built as a brand and you milk it and you say that you know hey I'm a brand that you've trusted for a period of time and in these times of pandemic you buy me but beyond that what you're also doing in this period is to actually create brand trust for future so while there is a part of marketing which is focusing on selling and helping customers buy the right insurance products we're also saying that at this point in time we will do three things as a brand we will provide them access to healthcare and when we say access to healthcare it is the right healthcare whether it is hospitals or whether it is healthcare at home also so a lot of play around adjacent categories you know insurance is typically bought to pay for hospital coverage but today many people cannot go to a hospital right I need a doctor on a video call for example so we are enabling adjacent categories for that customer trust to build for future so we are providing access we are providing information right now because you know in this world that's a big premium everybody is saying this drug has come it will do this hospitals are cheating you know rates have grown many a lot of information that you provided this time will help seed you as a brand which takes care of the customer beyond just paying for the policy and the third is that with the martyx tag that we have already built we are finding new ways of engagement so when we talk about customer engagement and communication it is more about what did I experience at this time when I was with you to spread word of mouth so when you look at our martyx tags and we have spoken about it and in the last presentation I heard the fact that you know it's so tough to build your own data stack but how important and critical it is so I think at max boopa at least for us we were on that journey for the last two years so the fact that you have your own data which is transactional you also have a lot of you know digital identity data of the customer that we get but you know we also encourage a lot of zero party data coming in customers actually giving us their own information so we spoke about the role of IOT in categories like ours we use IOT to encourage the customer to actually give us their health information and access which helps us to personalize and customize so analytics is working for you now I have one question for all of you and I'll give you examples now I can always buy a lipstick online Anil but I like to walk into a store and try it out I don't want to risk the shade in the texture and everything so Bhakar I like my broker to call me and tell me what is coming up with the rights issue or something like that and Anika when I buy an insurance I feel more safe more relief if I'm talking to an agent if I have a problem I will call him if I have a claim I will call him now in this pandemic this one-on-one health has disappeared so what is your strategy now you will divert to a strategy where you will have a points person or do you think habits will change so much that you might as well work in a model where there is a connect but not a physical one there is trust without a person what is your strategy one by one if Prabhakar you can go first okay so as I shared with you that we started the digital transformation journey 4 years back last year apart from changing our pricing we changed our business model so rather than having full force during acquisition phase we started with a telecollar so face to face interaction we moved to a telecollar and while we had a DIY journey available we upgraded the DIY journey today I can tell you for at least for the online the DIY journey is as high as 32 to 35 percentage that's a high percentage so customer come they follow the 6 7 steps of filling the forms and all and they kind of open their DMAT account right so that's on the acquisition phase now coming to the service and revenue side where once you become a customer you need to be educated you need to be told you know that these are various segments future options intraday you need to buy that stock this stock platinum advisory and all of that there also we are encouraging more and more that our app should be so intuitive the experience should be so interesting and the knowledge point should be so available that customer can choose things on their own because while some people still like to call broker but many a time some miss selling may happen right because you are not observing that interface while our APIs are more towards customer doing their own kind of trading but maybe because of human element something can happen right so the point I want to make is that irrespective of the COVID-19 our focus was to become a very mass retail player today we are in top 2 in terms of market share of new DMAT account opening and in terms of active client we are number 5 where we want to be number 3 so we believe we will make a very sizable business model where our entire focus would be that customer can do their own journey on our platform not just doing acquisition phase but also doing revenue phase so somewhere you know we are not too bothered about giving a human face or making a human kind of right so for angel that journey is already started Anil how about you yeah so for us we have been in this digital transmission journey for the last few years right so as a part of the overall transformation again you know we are referring to the point earlier where I said we are a beauty tech company 2 years back we acquired a company which is called modi phase modi phase is into augmented reality virtual reality it basically allows for the use case that you were describing you can try it out at home and see yourself at home on an app on a website or at the POS counter at the counter if you don't want to touch anything you can have an iPad look at it and just apply various shapes of lipstick or compact mascara or whatever whatever beauty product that you are looking for in that sense even going to hair color shades of color so how long have you had this and what's been the response during this time it's been brilliant as a product it's been brilliant for our company we've sort of deployed it across the globe in India we now have it live across our websites where we are looking to go live talking to our e-commerce partners at the POS counters as well that's one part of the journey in terms of contact less fully digital interface as far as this is concerned the transaction or the one to one is concerned there's also a big part of the business that we are famous for this is part of the salons the hair salons hair salons for us is extremely important as well so again you know there we have an app called style my hair again powered to a modi phase where customers can check out different hairstyles, different shades of color etc and then what we just started with our as a response to covid because no one wants to go to a salon etc so we've started social commerce with our salons where your hairstylist you know knows what what you want, what kind of products you're looking for you can't obviously visit the salon but then the products can come to your home so the stylist will reach out to you yeah connects with you so after talking to Prabhakar Adel it seems that this is a strategy which is not to react to what has happened now but has been in play for some time do you feel the customer going ahead has enough trust to just go through your website and make a purchase and not get back to an advisor are you playing for that in the future absolutely I think the path to purchase will change fundamentally for our category and you will see more and more people getting the comfort but as some of my colleagues said we'll also build in solutions which give them that comfort so you know whether it's a video advisor or whether it's an advisor always available that will be there but also for our agent advisors they'll still play a fundamental part human touch will not go away and especially for us Indians what we're also using this period and time is for giving enough data and information about the customers to our agents so you know when I come to you I know more about you and there is a more personalized offering in place for you and once you have a touch going forward how do we really go forward and almost have no human touch with that customer once the first trust and first touch is established so there will be a play of both Anisha alright I would like to thank all of you for taking the time out and sharing with us your experiences and how you are adapting your marketing strategies to the post Covid world Anika Prabhakar Tranil thank you so much for being with us on the Marta India Bridge conference thank you so much for being with us thank you Anisha thank you Anisha for this we have up next a very interesting conversation coming up with Aparna Mahesh CMO Bang Bazar and the discussion that we will have with her we will be asking you and I will be asking those questions is how to build brand resilience to combat disruption and if you see right now we have faced the most disruptive phase ever I mean everyone is like coming to terms with this there is no strategy in place there was no thinking it was not expected so how do we deal with these sudden disruptions that is the discussion we will have so we could begin if you have a presentation in the beginning we can start with that or later on Aparna no I am just going to talk you through some of the points I don't have any presentation so Aparna a quick introduction about your company now yours is an online marketplace for instant customized rate quotes on loans and credit cards and you can shop for loans, cards or anything one once online it is like an Amazon for bank loan rates etc now the first question that pops to my mind is can you tell us what is the extent of change that you have seen during this period which is like March may as compared to a year ago you have been operating for some time and this marketplaces has been around how have things changed for you in the last one if you look at these three months sure I will just make a small correction it is not just about loan rates we are you can make a purchase also you can go ahead make your application you know and we match you with the right products and you can go right ahead and apply and so we work the entire time so I heard one of the speakers earlier talk about the fact that it is not like they opened up their digital strategy just post COVID I think it has been pretty much the same with us I think the company has been you know we are a 12 year old company and our vision has been to match people with the right financial products in a secure manner in a paperless manner when you have to open an account today be it for a credit card or for a personal loan still has a large number of offline processes right you have got to meeting with a bank representative signing off photopopied documents handing it over so while for the last 10 years or so we have been working with technology to try and make this as seamless and paperless as possible I think what we are seeing right now the writing is on the wall on contactless solutions right so that you can access within the comfort and the security of your own home be it your groceries be it any kind of service and definitely now when it comes to your own financial services they don't want to step out they don't want to meet anyone they definitely don't want to walk into a bank branch I think that even prior to COVID we were hitting very very high numbers digital finance demand right people want I mean the rest of your life you are getting everything that you want you are tapping your phone and everything is coming to you so why would you hold back when it comes to the financial products that you want so I think the demand was building up currently what we are saying is I don't want to meet a bank rep I don't want to do any of that can this product be delivered to my phone contactlessly so I think that huge shift that we have seen see eventually contactless for everything whether it is communication today or commerce and I think we are seeing the same when it comes to financial services as well but the question I had was can you give us some numbers because you know we were just discussing at this point of time this is a lot of uncertainty people are not sure about going ahead with the purchase even if I come and see rates are coming down has conversion increased has traffic increased do you have some numbers to tell us how businesses change in these three months for you so it's very early days with financial products it's a longer cycle eventually but what I can tell you is after the initial slow down what we are pushing now is a lot of video KYC based while earlier that was pretty much zero so what happened was in Jan 2020 made this really progressive move of allowing video KYC for onboarding partners and what earlier would have taken maybe a couple of quarters for it to become mainstream amongst many of our partners we are already seeing that a lot of banks I am sure you have been if you are tracing this space you know that Indus has talked about it various banks have been talking about video KYC so we are definitely seeing that there is a huge uptick in that particular space the point is also that today with extreme uncertainty around people there is a demand for liquidity so definitely a loan to fund a big ticket purchase or a wedding or any of those which is why these loans were taken earlier it definitely are liquidity whether these are salaried individuals or small businesses since this without actually going through the rigmarole of all the offline processes that we had in the past is what we are seeing building up the entire ecosystem I think I want to add that I think the entire ecosystem has had to sort of overhaul itself during the lock ready to service this entirely contactless demand that are some COVID so it is a little early for us to share numbers honestly because most of April sort of you know in a bit of a lull there has been the lockdown people are figuring out a lot of other uncertainties in their life it is only now that we are slowly seeing some of these friends in origin I think we will need to give it another 40 minutes right but I want to ask you a question that you know banking is a very sensitive sector finance I mean to say overall and now everything is online and building that trust you know those who were doing offline banking are still now going online but they are very new to it right now so how do you build that trust that you know it's safe environment they always had these concerns so as an evangelist of online marketplace in finance how are you ensuring to build that trust factor in new consumers I can tell you this bank bizarre has never been a very big media based brand I think when it comes to financial service building awareness is barely scratching the iceberg right because where the customers are at when it comes to financial services even the most confident of customers is usually a little uncertain and wants to do a lot of research and wants some sort of you know expert advice if you will on whether they are doing the right thing or not over the last decade that we've been around we've definitely seen that the Indian consumers are more self-reliant but at the end of the day if your brand has helped them in the past make the right decisions if you've helped them with the right tools with the right content for instance and that trust is something that has already probably been built with you and that is an average and get go from strength to strength from here on I'm not sure if this would be the right time for you to suddenly come in and start building trust it's a fairly long drawn out process especially when it comes to something as sensitive as people's money I can talk a little bit about the fact that you know marketing has been the backbone of pretty much everything we've done till now for the last 10 years we've invested a significant amount of time, energy and technology in just creating content because as I said every Indian customer currently you know is looking for information for validation about their decision making the right financial product and it based on that right we've seen that eventually they keep coming back because the stickiness needs to be what are the elements of trust that financial services brand need to sort of work on with your customers right so Aparna you said that content has been a big backbone for your success in your marketing stack your business work in your favor has it been analytics how have you been able to personalize the right content for the right audience how about data safety because these are sensitive things do you have a secure technology that brings in that confidence in doing that transaction on your site what has worked for you in your stack what would you rate is the top three things that has made it work for back basal so we are a fintech company you can't take the tech out of fintech what we've done over the last 10 or so years is essentially make sure that we are leveraging technology through the entire customer journey every part of it so when I talk about acquisition acquiring your content which has been the predominant strategy that we have we put in significant investment in terms of teams in terms of technology to just be able to disseminate the amount of content that we create to our own base as well as new customers what happens when you acquire customers on the back of very deep financial content is that they already come in with an element of trust towards this brand it's not they haven't just come in because this brand made an interesting they come in saying these guys had an interesting point of view on you know how much of my income in an SIP come in the journey begins now for a fintech as a category how do you build stickiness you're not like an e-commerce company where people can come back and you can keep you know feeding their impulses to keep coming back so what we have is essentially there are two pillars to build this sort of stickiness is our credit score program that we run with this is a huge success literacy has sort of grown in India we're seeing that the numbers of people we've seen 111% growth in the number of customers that come back and check the credit scores on bank reserve kind of numbers we're talking about we have 40 million registered customers today we do graphic of about 30 million a month these are so if there's 111% growth in the people coming to check their credits what we know is a large part of these people come every month to check their credit scores basically means that they want to stay top on top of their credit score and about a large chunk of these people are under the age of 14 so we've built a good sort of pipeline of customers as they make their way down their own financial journey the second part where we've leveraged technology really is via our mobile app where we essentially it's a sophisticated personal finance management tool which sort of helps you stay on top of not just your credits score but also keep up with your payments have a good sense of where your finances are at so these are what we have leveraged a significant amount of technology on towards building stickiness and of course helping customers in their financial journey let's now come to the marketplace itself that's the third point that I would talk about active long partnerships with the leading banks and NBFCs in the country products for pretty much every kind of customer what we've been able to do very successfully by leveraging machine learning is that we'll be able to match the right financial product with the right customer in a matter of minutes okay now when you're talking about customers you know who are extremely impatient even when it comes to financial services and they're dropping off the funding they're you know happy very quickly we are able to leverage this sort of intel that we have and hold them through the entire customer journey right because we have a single view of this customer with all the data over the years so that at every stage we're able to sort of nut them I would say these are some of the big big programs that have really worked for us get to where we are right I have a question tech has become the dominant conversation of course before even covid covid is not the beginning of tech as many people keep asking that it's an online push but it's been there for a long time but tell me when it comes to deciding what goes into a stack is it the CMO the CTO or the entire management how does it work who decides what just kind of curious democratic not very hierarchical at all but in this case given the intense amount of sensitivity around this there are a ton of regulations in place this would be something that would be taken the decisions on this would happen very closely between the product team and the technology team of course and the entire senior management signing off on it as well right now you spoke about video content for your customers see I think what's worked for you is good content and your brand resilience has been built by the fact that you use your machine learning to customize it to the to each of your customer according to the data you have now what is the next frontier you spoke about video what is next now if we have your traffic is so high what is the next thing you have to build on so that you keep your customer and get more as I said earlier I think the brave new frontier is contactless entirely contactless finance which basically end to end digital checkout without meeting a single person without handing over a single document this is already something that we are working very closely with video KYC as I said is a very very progressive move by the RBI and I think it was completely it just arrived prior to this COVID blow up that has happened and it couldn't have been more timely than it actually has been and we are already currently our short term focus definitely is going to be working with all our partners to get this enabled for all of their products because offline is going to be this is something that we are hearing from all of our partners we look at the situation of our big cities there are lockdowns we open up full of lockdowns happening again it's going to be very difficult for people to go collect documents at this point there is a lot of uncertainty looming large so at this point for growth is going to be digital KYC and that is where our focus will be from here on right so that brings me to the security point again you know it's really nice that RBI is allowing video but how do you sign digitally if you don't have a verified digital signature how do you know that a payment made on your site is absolutely secure in a world where cyber attacks are increasing so what are the security features that you have already and is that also a frontier that you are looking to reinforce going ahead I think video KYC the RBI requires that a bank essentially validate and sign off right so that is absolutely mandatory the second thing is that given that we are talking about loan applications credit card applications there isn't really a payment involved in terms of verifying identity verifying address and verification of the customer KYC so at all times we are sort of ensuring that we maintain all the security that has been prescribed by partners by the RBI and every customer currently it is mandated that this is verified by a bank representative so that is the process in place currently it's extremely safe I want to come in from a communication and mark mark communication point of view this is also a tough phase emotionally for consumers and brands it's not just the normal phase maintaining that connect with consumers during these times how have you been doing it enabling that same emotional connect with your brand despite a lot of things are happening in the back end would you take us through that a little bit of that story absolutely I can imagine the consumers have been going through different waves of extremely strong emotions when it all started that was the shock for a while with everyone trying to figure out a sense of it and now as we realize that this is the new reality I think the consumers sort of is moving through different stages as you rightly said I think emotional sucker is something that they are looking for but I think when it comes to their finances they are also looking for brands to help them make sense of this help them with the decisions that the future is going to depend upon so again I will come back to what we do in financial services at least initially putting out enough ensuring that we were communicating with all of our stakeholders whether it's the employees whether it's with the partners whether it's with our customers with the customers it's all about these are the things that you need to be worrying about your finances currently right so what is it that you need to do in terms of your savings what is it that you need to do in terms of savings what about insurance what do you do about loans the customer today is being hammered with all kinds of updates right we have the RBI updates so the first thing that customers need to know is how does the supply what happens when I do that so at least initially we put out a lot around some of these movements that were happening which were likely to impact them now we have even gone deeper it's much more than just saying hey focus on your cash focus on your investments it's about helping people with very tangible problems about do I continue with my what do I do I do an EMI these are real problems that people are facing today do I repay my EMI or do I repay my EMI do I take the moratorium what do I do so this is our content strategy right now we have been working over time the amount of content that we have put out currently just in terms of very specific bites in terms of this or that how do you manage your finances in this sort of a situation what do you do when it comes to insurance in this sort of a situation if you've been laid off and you don't have health insurance what do you do so I think it's all information as I said with finance it's always about even at the best of times about seeking information these are you could say the worst of times or definitely the most volatile of times even about sort of hand holding customers giving them the information for them to navigate these these parts as they take certain decisions about their finances in the near term as well as in the long term so I wanted to understand how do you do this I mean is it machine learning is it analytics what is the suite that is working for you because obviously you have data of a lot of customers but you are customizing it in real in real terms in real time you know the RBI has come up with a new with the moratorium this is something new you have 40 million customers with different data how have you customized you know the solutions that you're offering them what has worked for you here so over the years we have a fairly good sense of what are the broad solutions that customers are likely to have given certain movements in the market I think this is intelligence that has been built over time so and we also because we you know essentially we are specialists in the credit side of things so with credit cards, personal knowns etc so the first thing that we know the people I mean it's at the end of the day understanding customer behavior and psychology it is basically the RBI says there's a moratorium the starting point is put yourself in there shoes you know that this is the question that's coming to your mind so we always start at a high level saying moratorium this is what it means this is what you will be hit with you know and if you need to take the moratorium this is what you need to do so we sort of were among the first that started talking about a bounce back because there's no denying that you may need to take a moratorium but if you've taken it how do you bounce back and get back to the point that you were pre-COVID so these are all learnings that we've had over the years to sort of guide us to understand that this is the large profile of customers that we have these are likely to be their concerns the second thing is that when I talk about content we disseminate a lot of content through the leading publications in the country so we are in constant touch with the editors at all of these publications all the kind of queries that are coming their way we know what the pulse is and based on that we customize a lot of our content for that as well so it starts at a high level saying hey these are likely to be the deeper and deeper based on what we hear from the ground so that's pretty much how we go so when we talk about moratorium content about that for about 2 weeks 3 weeks when the second when the moratorium was extended further we continue to write a little bit more about that so that's essentially the life cycle of content around any of these events that happen right we have 5 minutes more so I have one question as a leader who is running bank bazaars marketing strategy tell me what are the key learnings from this the last 90 days if I may ask you this some key learning so always I think which is that digital is here to stay and I don't think anyone needs to question that I think sorry now it's proven I mean now everyone is absolutely so that's happened I think it's about I break this into two I think internally with the teams and you understand that this is the human side of it is essentially it's important for everyone to sort of stay calm and you know figure this out in a very rational insensible manner the end of the day we operate the space and one has to be it's about looking at the immediate short term and then looking at eventually the long term as I said I think you know it's it's clearer now than ever before that digital is the way forward and you know we are very excited about the journey that lies ahead for all of us in this space one last question from my side then Anisha if you I mean Bang Bazaar has this history of staying ahead of competitors you have created that kind of a brand when it was COVID or not COVID you still have that advantage how did you maintain how do you maintain this how do you make it work you know consistently that you stay ahead in this game so I think you know it's a little bit of everything that I've already covered it is essentially understand what your customers want and when it comes to financial services customers in India their requirements are very very different we've seen two different generations of people entering the workforce and they each come with their own set of so to guide them you know there's no need to sort of educate them give them enough information empower them I think that's super important is I think the product I mean unless the product is fantastic unless that experience for the customer when they come there and they're looking for a personal finance product and they're matched with the absolute you know the right and the most relevant products for them I think that that pretty much is something that we constantly work to stay on top of because there is really no substitute to that and eventually as I said through all of the technology that we've been able to leverage I think we're able to bring that our retain our repeat customers are extremely high so we're able to bring the hold and that's how we've been able to grow largely organically through the entire lifespan of the brand if I may say so right so Aparnaap going ahead you've told us video is important but what has helped with the resilience of the brand your content is really strong but what has endured you to your customer that you know even going ahead even if you know things change this is the thing he wants to do what how have you built the brand resilience see I think it's about how do you delight the customer at every touch point when the customer comes in right whether it's whether he's looking for information on personal loans and you've given him so much of information that he's simply delighted and he says hey I've got everything that I needed to know to make up my decision I think that is something we've continued to do the second is eventually quickly you know today's customer is going to hurry you know they want everything delivered to them very very quickly so once you know the customer have you been able to match him to the right product have you been able to sort of help him especially with COVID happening right now and they're stepping out and you know at the same time meeting easy contactless access you've been able to help them do that I think those are focus areas for us and those are where I think we've been able to do pretty well right right before you go I want to ask you this question that you know this we have seen a spike in online transactions now people going online but once the things start coming back to normal you know the vaccine comes in and everything else do you think what would remain you know what would be the advantage the takeaway for online players out of that do you think that spike will remain or will it go down to where it was are you prepared for that phase I mean how do you see that no I think you know the point that I mentioned earlier is on the demand side demand was touching all time highs even pre-COVID right look at the consumer that we're talking about you know there's been a complete Amazonification if you will service that we want why would we want it any differently when it comes to financial services so on the demand side I think it was there I think as I talked about it's the it's the ecosystem the requirements a lot of the processes continue to remain offline so I think the boost that has happened because of video privacy and things like that I think that has risen up to meet the demand so I think it should it should pretty much stay where it is and only go higher and higher from here alright Aparna thank you so much for joining us and sharing with us your experience joining these post lockdown months where you have given a super experience to your customers and they've been coming back to you you managed to build that brand connect with them and here's the issue you're all the best of going ahead as well thanks so much thank you Aparna so when was the last time you walked into a bank honestly I've been just doing online for the longest time ever I mean I was like conditioned for online but now definitely I think that is the way forward but I have my own little bit of inhibitions I don't know people still love to go the offline experience has its bit it will stay relevant but we don't know when would that come would it be online or offline or would it be combination of two but right I think I am not ever going back I'm even scared to write a check because I feel even my signature will be wrong I've forgotten even to write check now and Jared is agreeing I think what we're going over to you I will see you soon a quick introduction about Jared thank you so much for being with us Jared Gringas is the managing director and analyst of the real story group he has been covering the omnichannel digital marketing technologies including digital asset management omnichannel content platforms web content management email and marketing automation and a whole lot more Jared is also the co-author of the book the right way to select technology he has advised clients like Delta Air, Coca Cola Ford, Harvard Business School and many more such a pleasure and privilege to have you with us Jared you know there are so many solutions there we want to understand you know we are also getting questions on how do you build your state of the art market stack how does it look like how do you build what do you pick what do you give up what are the solutions that will fulfill your needs and how you know data analytics MI, AI are going to help in the personalization of customer experience take it away please tell us how we can navigate this stretch of the spark great thank you so much and thank you for just inviting me to be a part of this today I very much enjoyed all the speakers that preceded me it's been a fantastic discussion so thank you so I think it's important to start off with a bit of a disclaimer because the title of this session today is the state of the art market stack and just like Dr. Derga earlier said there is no easy solution for putting in a stack you can't just buy a stack from a vendor and expect to get your stack out of a box and everything to work perfectly just like that is true in my experience I get to see a perfect stack among our clients no one is doing omni channel perfectly no one has the state of the art market stack what we are all doing and as some of our other speakers have talked about today is we are all on this journey to this common goal though we all want to delight our customers and our constituents at every single touch point and if that's our common goal we need to put a stack in place that allows us to do that so what I'm going to show you today is what we are seeing from our clients and kind of amalgamate some of those themes that we are seeing from our clients to show you some models that we think might help you in constructing your state of the art market stack at least as it exists on your stage of the journey so a little bit of context here real story group the company that I work with and it's a industry analyst firm that monitors a number of different technology marketplaces with the goal of really helping our clients make the right decisions for what it is they are trying to do now that manifests itself in several different ways number one we help people pick the right technology number two we advise our clients on their overall omni-channel stacks a lot of what we will be talking about today and the third way we work with our clients is more of this council level engagement where we bring together our clients to work with each other and learn from each other as peers and then not only do they learn from each other we learn from them we pass along some of our research but these clients then inform our research road maps as well so again a lot of what I'm going to be sharing with you today is directly from these people who are making decisions at some of the largest enterprises in the world we call ourselves a different kind of analyst firm we don't think we're built in the same vein as kind of the traditional analyst firms and that's for a couple different reasons number one is our focus we're only looking at omni-channel technologies today and the other reason is our independence we don't work for software vendors in any way okay we don't speak at their conferences we don't accept meals for them we don't write white papers for them we don't advise them on the product strategy our goal is to solely sit on the buyer side of the table and help you make the right decisions for what it is you're trying to do so let's look at the first model this is the world that we live in this is our kind of famous or infamous subway map where we try to plot the different marketplaces that we're watching on a daily basis if you break it down there's subway lines that each of which represents a different marketplace and on those subway lines are a number of stops and I think we're up to about about 125 different software products from over 100 different software vendors that we're constantly watching and these are what we'll call the most significant in the marketplace you know we're certainly very cognizant that there's new vendors coming on every day but we think these are the most significant in the marketplace as we see it today and where the good news that I'll pass on to you as buyers is you have options not only do you have some of the biggest names in software at the at the hubs if you will of this of this map but you also have a lot of best of breed options in the periphery and I think having options while it can be daunting at times is fundamentally good I think you know if we were if we had a single vendor dominating I think we'd all be feeling pretty restricted but to have this type of options is good so options are good but how we digest all this information that's being thrown at us from all these different different vendors is makes this difficult and that's what I think we as analysts are here to help with we're gonna help try to make sense of this and I'm gonna give you some frameworks today to help you see the marketplace in a different way and ultimately see how you can construct your stack in a way that sets you up for for the most kind of success so it would be a martech presentation without this slide right we've already seen it a couple times today and I'm sure you'll see it more times over the next few days and I'm thrilled to hear that you have Scott from chief martech as one of your speakers but I love this I love this this diagram not because I can make any sense about it but it just shows that there is so this world is is crazy let's be honest there's so many options it's 8,000 different vendors on here competing for your your attention your your wallet spend and a place in your stack right all of them are trying to get into your stack they're trying to carve off little pieces of your stack and some of them are trying to carve off large pieces of your stack and and again this this goes back to this 8,000 vendors is too much for anyone to make sense of so we have to start making some making some choices here as to what we're going to focus on and where we're going to apply our attention our money and and who we're going to give a piece of our stack to so in order to do that I'm going to present you with a mental model that I like to use now the shopping mall is is maybe not as popular as it once was a decade ago but I think I think many of us are still very familiar with the concept of anchor stores and specialty stores and kiosks in the hallway the mall is made up of all sorts of different sizes in offerings and you know when we look at the options presented to us as buyers of martech technology I think it's important that we start to think in this lens and say that all 8,000 of those vendors on the previous slide are not created equal we need to identify which are our foundational elements what are our anchor stores what are our specialty stores and what are our kiosks that allow us for a little bit more experimentation we might be able to be easy to switch in and out of but which are our anchor stores that we're going to truly build around so we kind of use this model and working with a number of our different clients here's one example that we did with one client where we identified web content management and digital asset management and marketing animation analytics and CRM as their anchor stores now it's important for me to point out at this stage that your martech mall is going to be different from this martech mall everyone's martech mall is different and that's okay but what I'm challenging you all to do is not look at all those vendors equally but identify what are your foundational anchors in your organization what should be the foundational systems and technologies that you're going to build your stacks upon so that's step number one the next thing that I wanted to call out here is if we once we identify our anchors how do we start to put the pieces together so as analysts what we try to do to help our clients here is to give you some reference models to kind of challenge your thinking and get you to do something in maybe different ways than you thought before and this is not a new concept but even back 20 years ago when we started this company we started out with some early reference models in the early 2000s to talk about how people were executing on the multi-channel challenge now people might have been talking about omni channel back then but let's be honest they were really doing multi-channel at best and many of you still today are doing multi-channel at best this is one of our early reference models which showed some source content from databases, structured content unstructured content and some media being sent to a single technology in many cases an early content management system that had some library services like check-in check-out version control and maybe some factory business services like some rudimentary workflows and then ultimately this single system would publish out to multiple channels now those channels were pretty rudimentary back in the early 2000s but you know we're talking web pages some wireless devices you know we're talking about XML syndication and maybe we're generating something like PDS but simple simple model to think about about consolidated different types of information into a central point and then distributing to multiple channels and that worked for a while until we got to the 2010s where we started to get a little bit more serious about consistency of our brand of our message of our content because we started to add more channels more areas where our clients and constituents are interacting with our content our assets our experiences so as more channels came along we the demand to do this better and more consistently became more and more important so what we saw happening in the 2010s is what we're calling this horizontal integration so I'll point your attention to the area the third band from the top which we call our content and engagement management band and this is where these technology are merged to serve different touch points so in addition to the content management systems that we had in the early 2000s we started to think about more of in terms of marketing or automation as it comes to our email you know can we automate how we reach segments of our customers also we started to have this new channel in terms of social social networks and we needed a better way to control our message to different people in the social area and so what we started to do is say we can't be having different messages in all of these different channels so what happened was there was this point to point integration that started to happen so in a perfect world your organizations recognize the need for an asset management system to control their images and their video and then they pushed those assets to these various systems whether it's their web content management the marketing automation or the social engagement tools and likewise we had some point integrations between web content management and your email tools or your web content management and your social tools but it was a little bit disjointed you know and only the most sophisticated companies out there had any type of integration across the board so this was useful and for many years but what resulted in the early 2020s is something like this where not only not only are these these content engagement management where your employees that are creating experiences doing most of their work these systems tend to get more bloated and bloated and bloated as more content got in there more data got into these systems more rules and personalization rules, segmentation rules started filling up your web content management systems, your email marketing tools your social engagement tools and then you add into other tools like Salesforce and you think about the people who are manning your call centers and they have all this information that they're passing along to the people who call in and ask questions and that was all well and good but these systems became bloated and bloated and bloated and invariably disconnected from each other and so we see the silos developing so I think that theme around the silos developing really started to have a bit of backlash when it came to what customers were experiencing and many organizations started to feel some pain from a disjointed experience that their customers were experiencing and I think it's important to talk about as marketers as anyone who's creating experiences in today's day and age what are we trying to do we're all trying to create omnichannel experience across the board at every single touch point absolutely so what does that mean we want to get the right content and message to the right person in the right contents at the right time and ideally measure the effectiveness right if that's the perfect world and we need to be able to account for the channels we know about today and we need to be able to account for the channels we don't know about in the future because none of us could have predicted every single channel that we need to publish to today nor do we know what's coming next right so we need to prepare for ourselves for an unknown future in a way that truly scales so that we're not reinventing the wheel every time but unfortunately like I alluded to earlier the reality that many organizations are in today are that this content, this data these engagement rules are planning and oversight capabilities and our analytics have found themselves in all these different silos I know that many of you have really bloated web content management systems that have a lot of web only content a lot of customer data and product data built into those systems a lot of journey rules and engagement rules that are really quite well and well done and organized but they're only for the web or mobile you start to want to apply those same journey rules those same decisions that you're applying to your website to these other channels and it's really hard because they're all that content and data and tools and analytics are stuck in these systems and it's hard to break out of that and unfortunately for customers they're feeling that pain as Dr. Durga said earlier he gave some great examples about how some things he viewed on his mobile device and when he went to the website he did different pricing different experiences altogether and that leads to a lot of distrust in many cases abandonment by the customer or potential customer now that we've got to break down these silos so some of the reasons for these silos you know I think it's just kind of how we all grew up we had this is we're still in early days of the digital world believe it or not I think if we look back 20 years ago when our CMS was our main communication channel to multiple to multiple outputs you know we we were all learning as to what the capabilities of this type of technology were and so we aligned our teams to those technologies I'm sure many of you have some very specific web teams and a social team and an email team and maybe you have a sales team but in oftentimes or too often I should say these teams don't coordinate and don't even talk to each other and don't share what they're doing so what we're seeing is that creative content can become very channel specific and again these content, data and rules become platform specific rather than enterprise specific and if that's the case it's impossible to create customer experiences so how do we do something different so I'm going to present to you today my view of where the stack of the future is going and as I mentioned this is a journey so some organizations are further along this journey than others some are just getting started and some are doing this fairly well but no one's perfect so what I'm going to introduce to you today is what we like to call a foundational layer to our stack and here I'm going to talk about ways that you can implement systems that house the fundamental building blocks of experiences you can hear me say this time and time again your core content your core data your core analytics your core decisions your core planning capabilities if you identify what your core building blocks are that are independent of a channel and you can store them at a foundational layer that can then feed your systems of engagement at a middle tier these are the enterprises that are going to be most poised to scale for both today and that unknown future that I mentioned so let's dig into a few of these core pieces if you will and again I do want to just say this is a single view this is not a perfect view depending on your enterprise your core building blocks might take a slightly different direction as well one example that I'll throw out to some of you if you're a CPG company one of your core building blocks might be your product information so your PIM system might be one of these pieces here as well but in general I think most of our organizations can recognize that for us our building blocks are content so we started calling this red block in our stack our omnichannel content platform and when I think about what should go in an omnichannel content platform this should be my single source of truth for core customer engagement objects so this might be assets this might be stories this might be themes this might be micro experiences this might be snippets of text that are relevant to channels across the board but they're independent of the destination their core asset content that can be utilized by anyone across the organization the orange box here is also pivotal to most enterprises and that's that and I've heard this come up today it's that single view of your customer and Dr. Derga brought this up earlier as well as he highlighted the importance of the CDP or the customer data platform as a marketers view into what we know about our customers so that we're able to align that content with the right customer right if we know if we have a good view about those two building blocks we're well down our journey but speaking of journey I think what ties this all together is the rules we need to put in place so that we can determine what content gets delivered to which customers and when and how and so I think there's a lot of emphasis being placed right now from especially forward thinking organizations as to how can we manage the decisions and rules that we place to deliver which content when to which customers so we might have different rules in place to say if someone went to Facebook or Twitter or LinkedIn and engaged with a piece of our content in the social arena but then filled out a form on our site and we know they called the call center three times maybe there's a specific piece of content that we want to push to that user likewise maybe there's a totally different piece of content a different message, a different experience all together that we want to send to someone who's engaging with our content for the first time to think about journeys not in terms of a channel specific platform but as something that we can manage across platform and then finally the green box here you know to do this right this is sort of the holy grail of all management in the marketing space everyone wants to have a clear view of what's going on across the mark tech across all of their campaigns across all of their planning across all of their resources and this notion of you know having a dashboard view that gives insight into what content is flowing through the pipeline what people are working on what we're spending on this and then in a perfect world around trip analytics coming back to say is what we're spending worth it, is it having an impact and can we prove that it's having an impact and can we prove that certain things are working better than others can we use those analytics to inform us to make really smart future decisions that's the holy grail if we can achieve it so here's another view of that holy grail if you have these foundational elements in place I think we can be sure that we're creating consistent messaging we can make our customers feel that the organizations actually know us we can have coherent interaction from system to system to system and touch point to touch point to touch point we can have consistencies of our stories and we can have true relevant data coming back to us so that we can improve on this experience and make smart decisions going forward cool I give this to you as a again a reference model it's a model to challenge you to think a little bit differently I hope that you think about what your building blocks are and create that foundational layer and one of the interesting impacts that we've seen coming out of this is for organizations that have put some of these foundational platforms in place that are a little bit further on this journey we've seen that content and engagement management platform tier actually get thinner right so maybe you don't need as heavy weight of a web content management tool or social publishing tool or email marketing tool or even sales tool what if you could thin out those systems and make those a little bit simpler and instead put your resources in developing this foundational layer that is truly focused on what is appropriate for the entire enterprise I'll leave you with this a few takeaways one as I mentioned the state of the art on the channel stack is aspirational no one has that state of the art stack just today but there are but if this is probably the one of the I'd say one of the biggest themes that we've noticed from all our all our clients no matter what industry they're in everyone is trying to do this they might call it different things but everyone is trying to create consistent on brand experiences of every single touch one I challenge you to identify your anchors everyone's anchors are not the same but really push yourself to thinking about what are our true building blocks for our experiences to create delightful experiences for our customers break down those silos wherever you can move those foundational building blocks lower into your stack maybe you can thin out your experience engagement layers but move those foundational building block elements lower in your stack and I think if you do this right what you're doing is you're trying to find that right balance between structure and flexibility just like that shopping mall right if you put those foundational stores those anchor stores in place the right anchor stores in place hopefully you're not swapping those out on a regular basis hopefully those are there for the long term but it gives you the flexibility to swap out the kiosk so the specialty stores because we all know there's more technology hitting the market every single day more experimentation needs to happen and should happen but I think your organization will be in a better position for that experimentation if you have those foundational layers in place and finally one size just certainly does not fit all this is this reference model is to challenge you and get you to think about what should be in your stack but there isn't there aren't two companies out there that have the exact same stack the exact same vendors in it that's where the hard work is and I wish you all the best of luck in figuring out what should be in your state of the art stack thanks so much Jarrett for that presentation certainly there is no holy grails to this no easy way out but thanks for giving us a lot of pointers on how to figure it out for our own company for our own brand we have one question that is coming up the question is is there a way to decide what works in which country are our solutions universal not a great question and I think I think in a perfect world sure it would be an equal playing field but it's just not the reality geography is still important now I think we've made a lot of progress over the years I think we're getting to a point where it maybe is less important than we might have been 10, 15 20 years ago but in many cases geography is still important and maybe this is going to sound strange coming from the technology analysts to me it's not necessarily about how the technology is constructed because I think that is not geography specific but I think where the differences really rise up is in terms of do you have the skill sets locally to do an implementation correctly to get the support you need once you're up and running to make sure you're using the technology correctly I think those softer skills that surround the technology are really where it can break down from a geographic perspective and we've seen that with some of our clients who they felt some pain going with a vendor that didn't have resources in their area and didn't understand their market and that's where we usually see that kind of pain there is one question from my side Jared you said that in an omnichannel strategy we want to look the same we want to speak in one voice to our customer is that really very important or is it more important to offer the solution to the customer even if it's not available on all different platforms but taking with that one platform that he given the solution if that is where you're starting first instead of planning to have the solutions on every every possible platform should we then take them to the one platform where they will get what they need yeah it's interesting there's no right answer there in some cases you might be right in some cases it might make more sense to direct people to a single source but in other cases that's just not an option you have to be you have to give someone that mobile experience right you can't wait for them to go back and get back home and check it out on their laptop or something like that but I think the critical piece here is and going back to a poor of examples earlier today what we can't have is a disconnecting experience that jar and disconnect we can't have just the wrong price or one price showing up in one experience in another you'll just lose trust completely of your customer and that's where people go somewhere else if I don't trust you I'm going to leave and I think that's where to me it's unacceptable you've got to be on brand, on message and quite frankly you've got to be accurate in your data so if you can't do that don't create an experience there figure it out a different way but you have to be you have to get those things right all right Jarrah thank you so much for joining us on this webinar and sharing with us your wealth of knowledge on how we can pick and choose on what is going to work for our market stack thank you so much for joining us thank you Anisha I appreciate it thanks for having me I would also like to thank everybody joining us on this webinar if you've taken away something really interesting something that's going to stay with you long after this webinar is done do tweet or do share your thoughts on social media use the hashtag marktech inga and the hashtag e4m webinar and share your thoughts with everyone we hope that the insights shared by our experts today will put you in a position to reinvent your marketing strategy to include martech and to leverage it to get you the answers that you want the traffic that you want the revenues that you want the results that you want a big thank you to the exchange familiar team that has worked tirelessly to make this possible thank you for giving a platform for everybody to join in and share their knowledge thank you so much