 This, it is time for us to move on to our first panel discussion. We've got the business leaders round table and they're going to be talking about building brands that Bharat Trust businesses do not need to spend too much money acquiring new customers. All they need to do is a plan. So this session shows how to optimize your marketing budget to increase a profit margins and make your brand that Bharat Trust. While we're getting the stage ready for our panel discussion, I'm going to be taking the liberty of introducing to you all our panelists and our moderator. So please do give them a huge round of applause once they join us on stage. Well, the session is going to be moderated by our moderator, Aftab Naqwida, Group CEO of Gozoop and we're going to be having our panel members shortly joining us. First up, we're going to have Ashwinder R Singh, CEO, Residential Bhaltia Urban. We've got Mr. K.R. Nagarajan, Chairman Ramraj Kottan who's going to be also joined by his son who's the CEO of Ramraj Kottan, Arun Ishwar. We've got Mr. Utsav Malhotra, COO of Noise. We've got Mr. Rishi Sharma, VP of Bedinath and we've got Mr. Chai Bhuvan, the partner digital of Deloitte. So with this, we're going to be shortly once we have all our chairs being placed on the stage. But meanwhile, we hope you all are having a great time and do keep tweeting about the event. Do let the word go out. Of course, we'd love the shares of all these learnings to reach as much of audiences possible beyond this room. So while we have the stage getting ready, so just allow us a moment while we get it ready to be on the stage. Meanwhile, thank you all once again for joining us and we're going to be once again announcing the moderator and our panelists, our moderator being Aftab Naakwi, the group CEO of Gozoop. We've got our panelists, Mr. Shwinder Arsingh, CEO, Residential Bharatiya Urban. We've got Mr. K.R. Nagarajan, Chairman, Ramraj Kottan, who's going to be also joined with his son, Arun Ishwar, CEO of Ramraj Kottan, who's going to be helping in the translating. We've got Mr. Utsav Malhotra, COO of Noise. We've got Mr. Rishi Sharma, VP of Bedinath. And we've got Mr. Chheb, who are the partner, Digital Deloitte. So with this, as we can see the stage shortly being ready, we're going to be just requesting one by one our panelists and our moderator to join us. So ladies and gentlemen, with a huge round of applause, first up could we have our moderator, Aftab Naakwi, Group CEO, Gozoop, to please join us. Thank you so much. We'd give it a liberty to choose a table for yourself, a chair whichever you'd like, being in the center. We've got seven of you, so I believe a center would work perfectly for you. So while we have, of course, our moderator, Aftab Naakwi, Group CEO, Gozoop. I just shortly request Mr. Ashwinder Arsing, CEO, Residential Bharati Urban, to kindly join us. Ladies and gentlemen, a huge, huge round of applause for Mr. Ashwinder Arsing, CEO, Residential Bharati Urban. As we've got our two dignitaries on the stage, I'm going to be taking the liberty of now calling upon Mr. K. R. Nagarajan, Chairman, Ramraj Kottan, who's also going to be accompanied with his son, Arun Nishwa, CEO, Ramraj Kottan. A huge, huge round of applause for both our gentlemen for joining us, the Chairman and the CEO of Ramraj Kottan. Thank you so much for your valuable time. With this, I'd now like to, along with your applause, ladies and gentlemen, call upon Mr. Utsav Malhotra. He's delayed a little. Okay, he's going to be joining us shortly. We're going to be now, okay, perfect. Mr. Utsav Malhotra, CEO of Noise. Could we have a huge round of applause? And if I can just say, could we have some noise for him? Yes, certain funds will keep coming, and I hope the brands appreciate on that. Well, with this, we're going to be having Mr. Rishi Sharma, VP, Bedenath, if you could have the honor of having him on stage. Ladies and gentlemen, a huge, huge round of applause. And I'd now like to take the honor of calling Mr. Jeb, who our partner, Digital Deloitte, to now join us. Ladies and gentlemen, a huge, huge round of applause, please. As well as our stage is set, it is time for me to pass on the live bait into our moderator. It's going to be a tough task ahead of us to take forth with this glorious panel of yours. Over to you. Great. Thank you very much. A very warm welcome to everyone present here. Mr. Elvi Christian just shared some very valuable insights as to how the contribution of SMBs to ADEX is increasing. What looked even more promising is the growth over the next four years. And for me personally, it was a contribution of digital and how that is growing as a percentage of the total ADEX. We're very interesting to know that, in fact, our country is the ninth fastest growing market for digital advertising spends in the world. And that is also growing extremely, extremely fast. Today we'll deep dive a bit further and with all the fantastic panelists that we have here, we're going to get deeper into figuring out strategies as to what they're using to acquire customers more effectively and efficiently in a connected world in Bharat. We'll also be asking them about questions as to how they're optimizing their marketing spends, how the skewers happen for them over the years, especially in the past 24 months. And most importantly, we'll be asking them as to how they're truly building a brand that Bharat loves. So with that, a very warm welcome to all the panelists here once again. Before we deep dive into the questions, I think it's important to just mention that the past 24 months have been challenging for a lot of people. But while the challenges were there, there were also a lot of opportunities. And the brands that really took these opportunities are the ones which zoomed ahead and today possibly are becoming the pride of our nation. With that, let me get in Rishi into the conversation. Rishi, in the past 24 months, we have seen that consumers have become more and more mindful about their health and being more concerned about it. How has that really impacted Bedinath as a business and what have you done to navigate that? Thank you, Aftab. That was a great question. So definitely the consumers have realized that their health and wellness is of utmost importance and they want to learn more about it. They want to read up more about it. It actually led us to have a complete digital transformation within the organization, whether it comes to the consumer-facing side or it is the company-facing side. Consumer-facing side, especially at D2C website, which was primarily more of information-giving, had to be really revamped to provide the right information that the consumers were looking for. They were looking for specific details on specific products, specific details on raw materials, specific details for specific ailments. We, as an Ayurvedic house, had to provide that information to the consumers and ensure that the right information reaches them. At the same time, we also had to revamp our complete digital presence so that they could reach us in the right way no matter where they start up from. So whether that's social media integration, whether that's SEO, whether it's linking our website to our various other channels. So ensuring that the consumer had a very easy journey to reach the right information that they were looking for and also to provide a seamless experience for them to actually purchase the products online because as we are aware, during lockdown, during the past 24 months, e-com sales were actually boosted a lot and we wanted to ensure that the consumer was able to get those products in the right way, in the fastest way and be able to buy the right product for themselves. So that complete digital transformation actually helped us provide the right guidance and the right products to our audience in the past 24 months. Rishi, I'm gonna come back to the point you made about e-commerce and D2C and I would be interested to know more about how you're leveraging D2C in Bharat but I'll come to that in a moment. Let me take the same question to Mr. Nagarajan. Mr. Nagarajan, for your company, how did COVID impact? And how did you navigate that entire thing? Did you do anything differently? You can speak in Tamil and then you can talk. Good afternoon to all. My name is Nagarajan, Founder and Chairman, Ramraj Gattan. Our total business in traditional wear of dhoti and the COVID time, we are man-featuring mask and supplied to whole South India. Tamil is really tough. It's a disaster. In the COVID time, in our company, we didn't tell anyone that we don't have a job. We gave the criteria permission to ask for mask. We made the mask and gave the market and the whole South India. No one took a job for that. Even though we were close to our roots, good afternoon everyone basically what he's saying is during the COVID times we never took a pessimistic view first thing what we did was that we decided that we are going to pay everybody the salary and we did not have a single layoff so that was a very positive intent that he had he said that I'm not going to do any of such decisions and he also saw COVID as an opportunity he didn't see that yet nearly 200 stores all those stores were closed but he never again took it in a negative way what he did was he tried to build the e-commerce site so within two months we saw our e-commerce site actually increase in volume by 100 times not by just a few percentages 100 times the volume grew and further what he did was he he had a lot of stock of fabrics so he wanted to actually you know utilize them and create masks and I don't know how many people from South India are here but in South India if you go to any temple in Tirupati or anywhere you will only see Ram Rathmas it's such a dominant position in the market because the main reason is his whole mantra was first positivity and affordability those two things is what he showed to the consumers and automatically consumers embraced it and what he wanted to say was in that financial year the COVID financial year also the business grew by 25 percent we never actually had any sales degrowth in that in spite of having four months our entire stores not operating lovely positivity and affordability great mantras for success let me take this to itself would serve past 24 months would have been very disruptive for your organization and how did you really navigate and made the best out of the situation so noise those who may not know is a smart wearables business and for us COVID had a very different impact the last 24 months almost certainly assured that India woke up to monitoring health which was let's say two years ago a case of us educating the consumer today it was more a benefits approach to be migrated the funnel dramatically where the consumers were willing to accept but more proactively come and ask for a product that existed for us I think it was a huge learning experience to adapt and I think I don't think it was a disruptor I think it was really an opportunity for businesses to reorient themselves take a step back and not be caught in the rigmarole of the daily chores and the business is usual operations that we kind of surround ourselves with for us I think what was a revelation was that we managed to connect with our consumers a lot closely we engage in weekly zoom call focus groups of sorts with our consumers to take insights and those insights translated into products that we'd never done before new use cases started emerging where consumers basically said you know what we are at home and now the battery life needed on a an earbud is a lot higher because the work from home need has has changed how we're using the product stuff like now that we are at home we need noise cancellation because you are surrounded by 20 other people and therefore a solve is needed so when we actually did that I think not only were we serving a solution for the consumer I think the result was in how the sales translated noise today is not only India's number one smart watch brand and we've been so in the last seven quarters on the trot we are now in the basic smart watch category the number one brand in a pack and number three globally and for a homegrown brand to put India on the global map during this period I think is no mean feat most importantly our business grew 240% we registered profits the employee fold grew by almost 100% and we did all of this whilst remaining bootstrapped so I think for us it was a blessing lovely there's a way to go what's up you mentioned a lot of things including how you're getting insights from your customers and I think that was a very interesting way to do it but you also mentioned about work from home and will be interesting to understand how work from home has impacted the real estate industry so Ashwinder how is code impacted and work from home becoming mainstream did that impact in any manner your potential customers thank you actually just to give everyone a brief introduction Bhartya city is now India's largest integrated township around 150 acres of development our concept always was that it is a city within a city and at core design was an important aspect so a lot of focus was there on design we have now six thousand families staying there and somehow you know we always felt that home is not just the four walls but it is what inside those four walls and what is outside that four walls and how do you design how do you kind of design something which is 700 square feet but looks like thousand square feet because we've seen a lot of 1500 square feet it's looking like thousand square feet and as we say roti kapra Makhan this is a very sensitive subject and real estate went through the toughest phase in the last decade however COVID had a brilliant and COVID was very unfortunate but it had a brilliant impact on the millennials because that was the segment which was always talking about the shared economy and suddenly home became a very important aspect of it because of work from home and the time that was being spent on home spent in home like in Mumbai because most of the people in the family were working they would leave in the morning and come back in the evening so a home was mostly to be spent during weekends and and to sleep at night but this completely changed so the sales in the last two years overall in the residential sector which is 85% of the total real estate in India have been dramatically high very positive the millennials which is in the age group of 28 to 35 are the biggest segment that have been buying and that requirement of an extra space in the home became very important that is why they wanted to move from a rental home to your own home so work from home actually is now they say you know it's like an hybrid because it will always have some segment of the working economy working from home and they're also talking about a third space now which is neither the home nor the office but somewhere in between so that is also emerging but covered most of the developers reinvented themselves were developers with lot of brand equity it differentiated men from the boys most of the debt in the real estate sector went away in the last two years if you want to go and buy or ready to move in apartment say for example in Mumbai you might not get it today you might have to buy it on resale and not from the developer because there aren't any because everything is sold the requirement of debt from the banking world and the financial services world from developers has reduced drastically so COVID has really turned around the related sector which was going through the worst part in the previous decade so that's how it is great I should there will be very interesting to know later possibly how you mentioned about millennials how did you go about attracting them but I'll come to that in a moment let me get Jay into the conversation Jay you've been advising working with multiple brands clients how have you helped them navigate during COVID and post-COVID times great I think at Deloitte we have been fortunate enough to be part of many success stories or over a long period of time during COVID when we when we looked at most of our clients coming to us most of the brands coming to us the fundamental theme that tied the outcome of their success during COVID time was the why behind their brand communicating in your channel communicating with new product services packaging and delivery and even all things around your product is all of which when the ethos and why you exist if that is consistently represented because that's the soul of your business most companies spend time in getting them yeah most companies got that right during COVID the ones who could not fell behind the ones who are able to utilize their messaging consistently across this and it required a lot of foundational capabilities within the organization and I I think most brands which leapfrogged had some sort of digital capabilities in their organizations. Jayal stay with you for a moment are there any marketing strategies that really stand out for you or possibly any platform which is not the usual platform that your clients use to reach out to Bharat and to really acquire customers would you like to share any example of that. We always say when you buy your platform you can only achieve parity but you have to differentiate yourself that's where your uniqueness your co-competencies needs to come into the come into the play there isn't a silver bullet what we have seen many organizations do and and quite intelligently they've been using the influencers who are not the famous ones but who have the potential in a local market and we saw the TAM report in the in the early part of the presentation turning influencers into creators was one very strong theme for the SMP brands that we worked with and we observed the second thing that stood out was spending time and energy in first party data especially for the direct-to-consumer brands where third party cookies are systematically going away it's a matter of time in in two years time you wouldn't have access to those imagine if you were to start only then and say how do I create a virtuous cycle where better services are offered to my customer when in return I get the better profile of my customer having all of those strategies in place you're not gonna get it right first time but but having small initiatives and moving the needle is very very important okay so leveraging influences as creators also leveraging first-party data making better sense out of it great strategies Jeff Jeff would you like to sorry Rishi would you like to add something to it and also tell us that when you leverage e-commerce to really connect with Bharat what are the marketing strategies that you really deployed and how did it really help sure so bad not has always been more focused on their traditional Ayurvedic medicines which we always felt was more popular on the GT segment and our focus on advertising had always been on GT you know traditional print media radio digital was barely 5 percent of our advertising spends but during COVID we realized that there was an audience in on the digital platforms as well on the digital stage who were interested in Ayurvedic products who were interested in knowing about these Ayurvedic products reading about them and they were more comfortable in ordering them say from marketplace or from the direct website of the brand and who are not really interested in going out to a store say to a chemist or a general store to buy that product and they would always compare products before buying and see whether it actually fulfills their needs and their requirements and Rishi this was not in tier one tier two cities this was in this was in Bharat across India exactly so Delhi Bombay aside we also had to go down to tier three tier four cities and we saw that the same trend actually followed there where the consumer actually wanted knowledge he wanted information and then they would want to compare and buy the right brand the right product for themselves whether it fulfills their needs or not so we realized that we had to also become the information provider and the the person who would actually help them make that decision to ensure that they get the right product and the right ingredients in that so we really pushed our own D2C website by giving them you know a lot of the required information there we'd also leverage social media a lot because especially in say tier two tier three towns Facebook YouTube these are a lot more popular especially with the younger audience and they use it as a medium to say consume data or to sort of like you know browse through videos or photos and as mentioned earlier we use use a lot of video ads then display ads and that actually like helped us grab a lot of share of that audience which helped us drive sales towards our website and during the first lockdown phase itself we saw an 800 percent growth on our D2C website which we had saw continue on for the next two years and just by that organic sort of you know audience that we were gaining through our social media we achieve that and then we started off more on the inorganic front by playing doing display ads and other advertising so I guess for us the key part was getting that organic audience initially who were genuinely looking for a product and we were just there to show to give the right product the right time to them and leveraging that and then using that base to reach the audience who are also looking for a similar sort of product helped us drive that sales to like look like audiences you would have used to leverage that as well to in addition to just two points of influencer and first-party data I think two valuable points here from Rishi one was in making sure that when someone is looking out for you your digital hygiene is in place and you're discoverable mapping the entire customer journey and possibly video ads which is really helped you. Ashwinder would you like to add something to that you mentioned about millennials and attracting them what are the kind of strategies that Bhartya Urban has used? See one of the things that work beautifully well for us was that people wanted to you know either walk to work or they now want to walk to retail hospitality so the second Leela hotel has come up in Bhartya city we have the largest mall of Bengaluru which is in north Bangalore and all of this started playing very well for us and suddenly we saw a spike not just by advertising our homes but advertising what an integrated township offers you so you know you could we saw a lot of people on their calls while walking in our walking in the park or you know just the family was having their picnic and the guy you know just on a distant was was working so the millennials because because the distance from work to home kind of blurred because you are working from home and people wanted to they were not really worried how much distance they have to travel so they wanted to be in an integrated township and that is where the millennials which was the incremental segment that gave that you know positive blip to real estate started looking out and the way we reached out to them is because real estate is a B2B2C kind of an industry in India you know you hardly have clients buying a home directly because they have their own brokers either institutional or neighborhood brokers so our focus was more on training the the channel partners giving them the USPs of what an integrated township offers making them you know just tell a story that how it is going to help the millennials if they kind of shifted to to to an integrated township and obviously we had an advantage because we didn't have competition and the channel partners then started selling quite a bit because the standalone societies weren't doing as well because the moment people had an option that they had a mall and they had a hotel and they had a great school and suddenly from 4,000 families in the last two years we are now 6,000 families so we connected directly through display ads and through video ads so that the end consumer also gets to know about Bhartya city but lot of focus was on the B2B segment where we did lot of marketing and and and to our surprise something as basic as communication through WhatsApp did wonders for us because it was a very focused segment that we wanted to train and educate and tell them what the benefits for an end consumer to stay in an integrated township is always in a standalone you know residential society. Ashwinar I've been reading a bit about Bhartya urban and what really stands out for me is design. Do you think that design played a role in also attracting millennials somewhere? You know it's it's it's something we are very proud of what happened our pitch to the architect was that our chairman's pitch to the architect was that a 680 square feet apartment should give a feel of a 800 square feet apartment and there were architects across the globe working on it because we kind of spoke to and kind of hired you know seven eight architects just on the design aspect and finally what came out was that we created a concept of Bay windows so the window got extended by a foot and that's that design suddenly made a 650 680 odd square feet apartment because in India we have to understand affordability is key you know just to give you a perspective of top the input prices in real estate have gone up by 40 to 50 percent which is steel cement etc this is the only country in the universe where the demand has gone up the input prices have gone up and supply is less because you can't create supply overnight but the prices have not gone up because because the segment or the buyer does not want to kind of there is no scope for the affordable majority mid segment to increase his or her budget so that is where the design element so we created this in Nicu Homes where we had Bay windows in every bedroom where people could spend time with their kids read a book you know watch a web series and that has created a cascading positive impact on our design element and we are now again working on design to see how can we keep on innovating and providing the best to the end consumer because now home has become a big necessity and this demand is going to be quite sustainable at least for the coming decade yeah okay Rishi mentioned about customer journey you added to it with design which plays a very important role in conversions let me take you to Mr. Nagarajan I'm aware that you have substantial marketing budgets in the past 12 months or so and since you mentioned about e-commerce has your marketing budget optimized maybe from print radio more towards digital how have you gone about attracting customers last two years first covid-time level 20% growth of the in the second year look at 50% growth of the business budget number budget room but it would be just a little bit business quarrel what he's saying is that the last two years after the onset of covert the marketing budgets came down traditionally what we were spending pre covert you're only spending 20 to 25% but that did not have any impact on sales because we were already an established brand one thing he failed to add I'll just add on to it is that there in terms of the ad mix you were traditionally before covert we were mostly spending on traditional mediums now print television radio there's the fourth medium in the south which is called wall painting which is not discussed here you want to the pioneers in that but post covert we didn't make a shift in our strategy we were more embracing digital because we noticed that most of our consumers post 2017 when Geo came on board many people were starting to have smartphones and most of our traditional customers were entering the digital space and we also found the ROAs to be much better there so we did increase our budgets in digital but overall our marketing spent was reduced in the last two years compared to what we were doing before covert but our established brand presence in the south helped us in retaining our market share okay great what about you how is the marketing mix looking like at noise so I'll keep it brief but the fact is that I just want to add a dimension where for SMBs or the D2C startups especially in our case when you're a bootstrap business you have to operate with frugality marketing monies are always less you have to make the most of them as a consequence the focus on digital performance advertisement where ROI and ROAs are the holy grail so to say end up being key but I think one needs to constantly have an eye on who you are speaking to and the where and the what kind of emerge from that you start choosing platforms you start getting the messaging right if you have the right eye on who the consumer is and if businesses can actually decode that and get a grip of it I think there are more and enough platforms that do justice today okay Mr. Nagarajan had mentioned about positivity and affordability as is mantra who sir what is your mantra at noise I think for us optimization is the mantra where for every dollar spent unless there is a return attached we kind of blackwallet so we are very very conscious about the money that we spend for us the mantra truly lies in the lifetime value of the consumer and if we can get him back to be able to justify the cost of acquisition and that's that's been the success for us okay great LTV and optimization is with itself Jai what about you if there was a one line mantra what is your one line mantra I would say let your why decide your what let the why decide the what okay Rishi what about you check oh you always believed listen to your consumer you know bed not being a hundred-year-old brand we hello yes sorry so we feel that it's a part of our responsibility to listen to them and give them exactly what they need and that has helped us in the last hundred years okay listening to them Ashwinder what about you see we have always we want the consumer to move away from this square feet discussion of carpet versus super and look at a home in its complete entirety and for us design is at the core of everything and we want to deliver happiness which is worked very well for us great that's the communication we do lovely lovely fantastic great insight thank you very much I'm just gonna leave you with my one line mantra which in fact is the line from Sanskrit which says Sarvam para wasm Dukham Sarvam Atma wasm Sukham and possibly this is the best call to action to Atman Irbar which it simply means that if everything is in someone else's control you'll be unhappy and if things are in your control you'll be happy right so with that I'll just conclude this entire panel discussion and hope that we keep building brands which do not only build trust in loyalty in Bharat but also take Bharat ahead thank you everyone thank you very much thank you ladies and gentlemen a huge round of applause for all our panelists thank you so much and may I request Mr. Navala Hoja to kindly join us to give away the mementos to our panelists so ladies and gentlemen let the applause continue they've given us their valuable time and their keen knowledge and experience while sharing the anecdotes today it's an incredible day and once again a big big thank you to all our panelists ladies and gentlemen let the applause continue and with this if we may request you all to just step a little ahead and if we can have a group photograph would you like to step a little ahead yes so all of you can be in one frame Mr. Hoja yes thank you ladies and gentlemen a huge huge round of applause what an incredible final discussion this has turned out to be and once again a big thank you to all our panelists for their expertise thank you