What Manish Bhatia teaches about brand purpose

What I do is when I travel around, I go and try most times a different restaurant, a different cuisine, and try and pick up some nuances to experiment. How do you kind of grow from here when you're leading a particular segment in terms of a category? So what are the kind of growth innovations that we can expect from here? If you look at the industry evolution in India, given by the effort the government is putting on Swachh Bharat, or the consumerism happening at the premium end, a lot of new consumers are entering into the category,

but there is an increased movement upwards because bathrooms today are not hygiene places, they're becoming lifestyle places. Technically, it's the only my space. People share bedrooms and stuff like that. Bathroom is your only my space. Right. So what we are doing is that we are looking at different need states of consumers, as I spoke earlier, and also looking at how at different touch points of consumer decision journey, we as a company could intervene, and basis the need states, how do we create new brands and propositions of consumers?

Okay. Any surprises in 2019 that you're, you know, interesting? You know, it's the right time. We've been talking about digital. Bathrooms are becoming digital. We launched around six months back, you know, a digital showering solution where you could actually, using Alexa, talk to the bathroom and, you know, go and set up your temperature, take bath, etc., etc. So we are strongly investing in space which will allow you to, you know, visualize your bathroom before you make it

because that was one big pain point for consumers and maybe, you know, have connected bathrooms end-to-end, which is something which our luxury brand should be talking to the consumers next. So you've specifically also shared that, you know, the brand is looking at a consumer preference jump. How are you going behind actually, you know, getting to this target? What are the new categories, tools, innovations that are going to lead to this? Let me talk you through the journey of making a bathroom for typically a premium consumer.

You go to a five-star hotel or go to a friend and get inspired about a bathroom. As leaders in the business, you also need to create inspirational tools to trigger a, you know, need for a renovation and, you know, doing up a bathroom. So we use a lot of digital content and also, you know, back it up with offline content by creating inspirational themes. We created a DreamBath app which allows you to see actually how bathrooms across the world look like and how innovative bathrooms can be with our brands.

It allows consumers to get inspired to do the bathrooms. We also then further take them to the journey of taking some of our products in a digital connected medium, creating their own virtual bathrooms and doing a walkthrough and seeing how these bathrooms would come in once they've actually done the job. On the mass segment, we launched an initiative called a DreamBath Helpline which we thought would be as industry leaders, it was a gift back to the, you know, the consumers.

But we've been surprised that we close to 700 towns in India have reached out to us in last one year with basic needs about, you know, I'm making a bathroom and I have a thick wall. What do I do? So these kind of things, I think it was important for an industry leader to be responsive to consumers. So those kind of activities have helped out, reach out to, you know, towns like Balia's and Gorakhpur's and staff where, you know, they may not have access to answers to some of the solutions. I think these have helped us make brand more relevant and growing.

So Manish, how do you stay creative? I love traveling. I think the role allows you a sizable opportunity to travel and even when I want to take holiday, I try and explore new places across the world. So that's one passion and as you travel across these places, you explore new things, you meet new people, see new stuff. Apparently, I also love cooking. So, you know, I think Sunday lunch is a normal stuff for me. I think maybe, you know, my family would feel happy about.

And what I do is when I travel around, I go and try most times a different restaurant, a different cuisine and try and, you know, pick up some nuances to experiment. And I think between the two, it sort of impacts the creative buzz that I would have and, you know, maybe it helps in the work.