What Sunil Gupta teaches about brand purpose

If you are not competitive in each segment on price, you cannot grow. So you cannot be on a high horse of premiumness and you will be irrelevant very soon. The car rental industry in India is currently, you know, majorly unorganized. So how do you see that evolving? Actually, you will be surprised to know that among the most rapidly organizing segments of the economy, car rentals is one of them. Because what is happening is that people are more and more keen on reliability, safety

and therefore you see a lot of movement away from unorganized to organized. Whether it is in the corporate segment because instead of having 20 contacts in 20 cities, you can have one contact with Avis and you are getting full coverage. In the retail side also, you may not realize it, but even Uber Ola actually is caught, is getting more and more organized. Early you had to face, let's say a driver of a cab and there was no control. Whereas now with Uber Ola coming in, there are some common standards being imposed by these

companies or the platform itself sort of forces you to be disciplined. So I think it's going to get more and more organized. And that is what's happened across categories throughout history. And for example, we are doubling revenue every three years. Now the market is not growing three times as fast. So I think there's a scope for a lot of more organized players coming in. You get transparency and you get reassurance of quality. How do you view the rapid growth of the app-based taxi model? Actually, it is all about convenience.

And so it's also the right thing at the right time because lots of people may not have the means to be able to buy a car. And so you get a much faster way to get a car and be mobile. So I think that's a great thing. And as I was saying a bit earlier, because it's a standardized platform, a lot of the local misuses get taken care of. So I think it's a good move. And it's having a big impact on people who commute on a daily basis. Okay. It has an impact. And unfortunately, the radio taxis, which came in a big way about eight years back,

or the Kalipili taxis, they are slowly going, becoming irrelevant. So you refer to the word called misuses. Can you elaborate on that? Yeah. See, for example, one issue which lot of local players have is the fact that everything is manual. And so it's easy to add time or distance to bills. So I think the first thing which is most critical is to get transparency. So for example, we were the first few people to move to a GPS-based billing, you know, so that you actually pay for what you use. Okay. And not anything which is done through ulterior motels.

So all these things actually make a big difference. Okay. So Avis is primarily seen as a premium player in India. So do you see that changing, you know, given that the majority of the consumption is driven by millennials? Actually, what happens is there are two ways I want to answer this. One is the fact that millennials tend to want to share a lot. So it's a high probability of them wanting to share that they have bought or hired a self-drive car from Avis than from a guy down the road.

So that is one sort of tendency, one aspirational value, which even millennials have. So I think that is what makes us a bit more acceptable. The other issue is that premiumness is only in the mind of the consumer. Because if you do a comparison, our pricing is exactly same as anybody else's. Okay. So it's more a perception. But I think if you're not competitive in each segment on price, you cannot grow. Yeah. So you can't be on a high horse of premiumness and you'll be irrelevant very soon.

So you have to keep pricing aligned to the market and give extra value to the customer so he's willing to pay maybe 5% more. If he doesn't see that value, you can't share that 5% or even 1%. So it has to be what value you're adding to the customer and customers are willing to pay for value. So what role does native advertising or branded content play in your marketing strategy? In our marketing strategy, it's only this. Okay. We don't do mass media advertising. We don't do anything offline. It's entirely digital.

And most of it is native because there's data to suggest that a native ad is seen by a viewer 50% more than a display ad. Okay. He doesn't want to shift his eye. So it has to come in the feed. So with that kind of tendency to view display ads less and native ads more, that's a big way forward for us. So most of our content is driven by that. The other key thing we do is that almost 85% of our content is user generated. Okay. We don't put out brand claims or anything.

It's just what users tell us about the experience of using us or they look at recommendations. So a lot of our content actually is generated by our users. Okay. I spoke earlier about this, the chief adventure officer campaign we ran. We got lots of people who are willing to take a car from us, go on a trip and keep posting updates endlessly. We also look at branded content because, for example, we developed a series of vlogs on great drives in the world.

So actually, people went to those 25, 26 countries and actually described their experiences within Evis car. So Evis is there in the background, but it's not the hero of the story. The hero of the story is the guy with the car talking about the attractions on the way and all other challenges which he met. And that's perfectly Instagrammable. So that's, I think, so we depend a lot on native ads and branded content. So what would be one native advertising campaign that you are particularly proud of? See, for example, one we had was hashtag my holiday look.

Okay. So that is something which was done on Instagram. And people had to just dress themselves in a holiday dress, leisure dress, and tagged Evis and we got a million views in just about 10-12 days. So I think that is something. So the whole idea is to be relevant. Millennials like to dress up in the trendiest fashions and show their friends. So we got into that tendency and that worked very well for us. So I read somewhere that you are a cyclist. So tell us a bit more about that and how you unwind.

Actually, I think cycling is not, I don't do mountain biking or something. Gurgaon has enough places where you can cycle to. And it sort of really relaxes you because, you know, you see parts of the city, you would never see if you weren't on a bike or walking on foot. Oh, okay. So it's really interesting. And it's, I think the other sort of thought is that, you know, you can forget everything else. And you know that beyond the steep, there's a decline, you know. So it's great to relax and unwind. Thank you.