What Ajay Kakar teaches about brand purpose

I'm not sure I'm actually out of the office ever because I think it's a mindset. To start off, so about a year back, the Tiabella Capital brought all its products under the same one umbrella brand. What was the thought behind it? What are the learnings from the market that made you decide, you know, you need to sort of have one brand out in the market and how has it helped you over the year? What are the feedback? Around 2007, we sat around a table and thought what should the future of financial services businesses for the Aditya Birla group look like.

And we realized there are two options. One is go the industry route, which is product driven, category driven and go to customer as individual categories or individual brands offering individual solutions. And then we said, why not wear a consumer hat and look, is there another option? The other option was start customer first. And at least in India, at least with regard to the financial services, the customer does not start with the product. He starts with the need and his need is to have money

solutions throughout his lifetime. So, I think these two are the starting tenants of Aditya Birla Capital. How do you provide a whole spectrum of financial services solutions, which he will need throughout his life under one banner? So, we believe we have created a category called money, which is represented by our single brand Aditya Birla Capital. And underlying to that brand, we have from a consumer's language protecting solutions, investing solutions, financing solutions. And to wrap it up, we believe

advising is a key need for a on the street retail customer. So, the birth basically of Aditya Birla Capital is to give him one brand and one experience for all his needs throughout his lifetime. So, you spoke about online and offline sort of integration where and it is true of the financial services industry where a lot of discovery happens online, but the sales are finally close offline, because they are complex products inherently. How do you sort of manage that transition? What is the

maybe the share of business that you get out of digital sort of leads today that you were probably getting two, three years back? Have you seen remarkable sort of change happening there? How is that space sort of turning out? So, these are early days for us. As you said, we just launched on 1st November 2017. But, I think the learning for us is that a consumer will stay with you as long as you continue to add value to him. It is not a question of where do you catch him and how do you catch him? Does he shop online and does

he buy offline? Yes, that is possibly true. It is more because of the category. If you have a simple product like term insurance, yes, it is possible to shop online and it is also possible that you may want to complete the transaction online. Right. Right. And that is why all of us do that offering. In health insurance, we have an entire end to end offering which is online. Car insurance. Yeah. But the more complex the product becomes and we have to accept most of our products do need

hand holding, do need questions to be answered. Then we realize that high touch is also part of our offering. And therefore, I believe that in financial services, high touch and high tech will both be an integral part. The ratio may differ on who is the audience. But all audiences will want a little of both. A little bit about the how you sort of use the data that you generate out of your website. It is been it has been a while sort of you get a lot of channels for new customers. How are you using the data?

How are you plowing it back into the company with the learnings into products into sort of the organization? How are your salesperson is going and speaking to people? Where is that going? So, two quick benefits that the data does. One for the consumer and one for the business. The first thing as far as the consumer is concerned, the more we know about him and we know about people like him. And remember like I said, we capture data and we have offerings across the whole spectrum of

financial services. We make sure that we can give you a sense of Amazon kind of people like you also buy such products. So, even if you come in for a single product because that's what you have heard or know, we make you realize that people like you also need, also have bought and therefore you should also consider other products. So, we call it a next best offer. And as far as you're concerned, that's a direct benefit you get. The more data we get about you, the more accurate recommendations we can make.

And price it better for the person, right? Because you have more data to know. In new course, yes. And as far as business is concerned, for us, there are customers and then there are good customers, right? Analytics allows us to read the data and define the good customers. And then you can use that as an acquisition machine when you go out to the world at large. Cross-sell. Whether your consumer goes, you go to the consumer or your distributor goes to the consumer. So, it helps business and the customer. And that's how we want to use our data.

Thank you. The last question really, tell us a bit about Ajayi Kakkar outside of office. What, how do you recharge yourself to sort of get back on Monday morning with all the energy? I'm not sure I'm actually out of the office ever because I think it's a mindset, right? It is not those 12 hours versus those four hours. It's just you're always at work and you're enjoying it then it doesn't matter. But yes, otherwise, I do enjoy reading. I love movies and I enjoy theatre.