What Sharad Gupta teaches about digital transformation

So the entire marketer world and budding marketers, I think the mantra would be conceive, perceive, act. You're a leading player in two categories. One is farm and the other one is construction. So how is marketing different in these categories as compared to the mainstream? Okay. So first, let's understand how rural patterns are changing. Urban exposure has been a kind of a long-time activity where people were exposed to a lot of optics. And for them, the communication was optics plus value or premium orientation for a brand or a product or a marketing.

Rural is now getting exposed to a lot of platforms. For example, you talk about social media. Rural has just started absorbing it. They want to have a product or a brand talk to them in terms of simplifying their challenges at the rural level. Right. While a premium or an urban audience would take a campaign or a product on the face value and the premiumness that it brings to their table. Right. So also, at Escorts, you've been trying several new concepts such as electric tractors, autonomous farming equipment.

But do you think that your consumer is open to that? It's a very critical point actually. See, what we are trying to do is we are trying to bring in innovation to the practices. Right. Now, I'll take your point that today's farmer might not be very open to consume an electric or autonomous technology. But he wants to learn about it. But he wants to learn about it, get exposed to it, which can enable these people to use these services. You know, charging pods, infra-allays, battery-allays. And when battery cost comes down or autonomous solutions are…

And the farmer sees a price advantage in that. It sees a, you know, electric costs. Electric tractor will really bring down their fuel costs when the battery gets on to affordable limits. Similarly, autonomous has a law of application which increases the productivity of his farm produce. For example, an autonomous technology can talk to you about soil productivity and soil nutrition. It can talk about the soil preparation. It can talk to you about the pest control mechanisms. It can give you crop status.

Mention your marketing strategy, say, divided into three bases. Yeah. How do you? See, definitely I'm not saying that we are averse to ATL. We will still have to go to our ATL TV and radio, which brings in more of that. If you follow that IDA model, you know, of age-old advertising, attention and awareness is definitely through my ATL, which brings in the first phase of awareness to the market. Then comes to me, build customer connection, which is more like a building interest and desire.

That comes through direct marketing or through social media or through digital platforms or digital interface between me and my customer. Then comes consideration and trial, which is important. That comes through my dealer and outdoor medium where people see something and want to go for a demo. The fourth comes as the purchase intent. That straightaway comes from my ECRM mode. That's my marketing strategy for classifying my prospects, my qualified prospecting. So, if you want to arrange this order, I'll say we have got ATL, but that's a small portion.

We are today investing a large on digital interface and social media interface. Print definitely holds a percentage. Language. Language colloquial. So, yeah, this is where... One last question. You're an industry leader when it comes to agri-marketing, which is the most difficult segment. So, what would your one piece of advice be to the budding marketeers? I think one definitely is to get onto data analytics. Very important. Today, the first phase of marketing starts with data analytics and intelligence through empirical data,

harvested data and the data which is available in the market. So, we need to assimilate that data first, analyze the trends. And based on the trends, you need to really bring on to your strategic marketing approaches that caters to a particular consumption pattern. You need to get onto the TG, on the ground, to understand a lot of insights that the consumer has, wants, requires and aspire. So, the entire marketeer world and budding marketeers, I think the mantra would be conceive, perceive, act.