DMA Trailblazer Series | WION S1 - E1 | Trailblazing Brandmaster Odyssey with Marketing Mavericks!

We live in a world of brands, at home, at work, when we travel and even when we sleep. But how do you go about building these brands? How do you create compelling brand stories and most importantly gain the trust of the consumer? To answer these questions and the debate this topic are our trailblazers, brand leaders from world-cast businesses and brands and household names. We welcome all of our trailblazers today. Prashant from 1MG, Sumit from InfoEdge, Parik Ship from MakeMyTrip, Gaurav from Noise, Sai from Policy Bazaar and ET from Vega. Welcome to Trailblazers. Now first up, our guest, Prashant Tandon. Prashant, welcome to the show. You're an alum of IIT Delhi, Stamford Business School and a king cobra of the Indian healthcare sector.

But take us back if you like. A number of years ago, before all this started, you were working at McKinsey. Good consulting job, family happy I'm sure. But tell me, was your foray into healthcare a brainwave or just part of a process? It is part of a process. I think the seed of entrepreneurship actually was it started when I went to Stanford and saw the Silicon Valley and the entire spirit of entrepreneurship. I think that was very, very inspiring. And then I was working with McKinsey in the US looking at the healthcare sector out there. And that's when I saw that, OK, there's a very interesting differences between the healthcare delivery systems in India and the US. And I saw the individual components of healthcare are so sophisticated out there.

Although put together, I still don't believe it works as a system. But all the components had reached a level of sophistication that was very, very interesting to me. Thinking about how India will evolve and how the health access in India will change with technology, with digitization. And that seed was was germinating in my mind at that point. So that's part of the mechanics of it. And of course, Europe, you're a trained chemical engineer. But at that point, Prasham, were you thinking about brand personality? One thing was very clear from the get go. The brand that whatever we build has to be built on trust. That is the currency which works in healthcare. And if we can make sure that we build a patient centric healthcare ecosystem.

And that was a very, very big leap because when we came with what seemed like a very basic concept today, when we said we are coming with a patient centric healthcare model, everyone felt we were just being naive. We don't know how healthcare works. Healthcare is never supposed to be patient centric. It's always the provider centric or an insurance centric. And that's how it's in most parts of the world. And you know what we felt that that exactly is the problem. We don't build it for the patients. And if we can build a model, put the patient at the center, be the partner of that patient and win their trust, that would be the model for the future. So trust is not just a marketing campaign. It has to be every single interaction.

So a good example, if you will, Prashant of every single thing communicates the brand. Absolutely. That's it's at the end of the day, what the consumer feels about your brand. So that's okay. Prashant, that's fantastic. Last personal question. You're a good sportsman. Any time for sport these days? I love to play when I can. And yes, I do find enough time. I go swimming. I started playing a little bit of tennis, a little bit of badminton. So and we have got a table tennis table in our office. So I think I am I'm doing okay. Well, you're looking good and the brand's looking even better. Prashant, thank you so much. Fantastic guest. Thank you for having me. Sumit Singh. You have a fantastic backstory. You're the daughter of a military man.

You're a generalist. You're an entrepreneur in your own right. You've been head of the Indian Venture Capital Association. But then one day you get into InfoEdge and with no apparent marketing training, you're asked to be the CMO. How did that happen? And how did you even go about learning the trade, Sumit? So as you said rightly, I've done very varied things, started with sales, went on to Thai, IVCA. I joined InfoEdge not in marketing. I actually joined them to start their corporate comm and strategic alliances division, you know, and about 10 months into the job, I felt we've kind of set it up, got a team there, done what Sanjeev and Hitesh wanted me to do. And I said that it's time to move on. And that's when they said, why move on?

Why don't you head marketing? So I think one just got into it, you know, and one learned on the job. And you can learn, right? Because a lot of people think this is something you have to be qualified in. No, I think if you have the right instincts, it's not rocket science. And talk to us specifically, Sumit, about digital, the brave new world of digital. This is 2005. How did you get your head around it? And what are the learnings? So it was very interesting. I actually told Hitesh, I don't know these CPMs and CPCs because InfoEdge had started doing SCM way back in 2004. You know, they used to use their own credit cards. And I felt if I had to lead a team of digital marketers, performance marketers, I better know something myself.

And I remember Hitesh saying, your good at numbers, learn, learn. So in those days, I remember I started an account with 500 rupees on Google AdWords, and tried to sell blue socks and red shoes and stuff like that to learn on the job. And I think, you know, as I said, if you're open to learning, there's nothing which is impossible. How much are you spending on Google today? Oh, a lot. A lot. Let's talk a bit about customers. You're on record, Sumit, as being a great champion of customers, customer centricity. But, you know, you're in a digital world. How with brands like 99 acres, how do you actually put customers at the heart of this? So for us in most of the brands, whether it's 99 acres, Nocree, Jeevan Sati, Shikshar, our education brand,

I think the brands were built by Sanjeev and Hitesh at the core, having, you know, customer centricity. So everything that we do on product has to stem from improving customer experience or actually filling a gap of customers. So I think a lot of focus on data and we have the advantage of being in a business which is absolutely online. So we have access to a lot of data. So you see a lot of user behavior coming from there. And then once years are in the market, we actually, I personally even now conduct a lot of researches. I go and meet customers, go and meet consumers. And I think that's very important. One on one. And I think that's very, very important because if you don't do that, you don't know what you're not fulfilling.

You know, and the other thing is I've always believed that while we're very happy with people who renewed, right, people who are retained on the app. As marketers, I think it's very important to talk to the people who did not renew or did not retain. Because that's where you get the insights on what is not really working. Our absent friends are as important as our present friends. Let's let's wrap up, Sumit. We never have enough time. But let's talk a bit about the many challenges you must have faced. And what's your advice for young marketeers out there? I think one, coming from my experience, I think just believe in yourself and totally believe that you can do anything. Sumit, that's fantastic insight.

Thank you so much for joining us on Trailblazers. Now we're joined by Parakshit Chowdhury. You've been in every single division practically of Make My Trip, right? You've built whole parts of that business almost kind of single handedly. So you're the right man to ask about the evolution of the brand. But of course, at the moment, we're filled with cricket fever. Start us off, will you, by telling us how you're using cricket and your consumers connections to cricket to juice up your brand. You know, thanks for that. But Jasper, nothing is built alone. So it's always a team effort. So it's, I think, a great team led by Deep and Rajesh and happy to be a part of this ecosystem for the last 10 years.

So coming, jumping quickly into cricket, I think what we are trying to do is put the consumer at the center stage. So the fans are the consumers and they are at the center stage. And, you know, there is an evolving trend in India where people are looking post-COVID into looking into things like privacy and flexibility. These are two of the primary reasons why people are looking at alternative accommodation, which is homestays, villas, as places to stay. Let's go back a bit to COVID, Parakshit. Terrible time, body blow for Make My Trip. But how did you as a marketeer turn that crisis to your advantage? I think those were the darkest days of the travel ecosystem. And I think Make My Trip's core belief of staying with the consumer actually helped us.

We did see, Jasper, our revenues plummet to zero, actually zero. Wow. And from there, building the business brick by brick was obviously a lot of team effort and grit. But what we did at that point in time, which was very interesting, is keep the conversation alive as far as the consumer is concerned. At that point in time, the consumer needed to know what are the COVID guidelines? What are the restrictions? How can he or she travel? And not essentially look at buying and booking on Make My Trip. So we know about customer centricity, okay, and the cricket fan doing the homestays, a version of that. But what are you doing to make the brand a utility for people? Tell us about this idea of this new product of effectively renting your home out.

Perhaps I can rent my home out. Oh, yeah, for sure. You should rent and Make My Trip. So in India, the affluent Indian ecosystem, there's a trend of picking up second homes in leisure destinations. And that's what we are trying to tap into, right? So through our effort, where we are saying that you only travel to your second home maybe once in a year. So 15 days when you are kind of occupying your second home. Rest of the time, the home is lying vacant. So why don't you put it up for short term rental where we would allow like-minded travelers to come and stay at your place, experience your home, and you make some incremental money to kind of keep the home up to date. Pariksha, you've been a fantastic guest.

Thank you so much for coming on Trailblazers. Thank you for having me Jasper. Now next up, Gaurav Mehta, Chief Marketing Officer of the epic brand that is Noise. You talk in your marketing about being real, about being authentic. How are you real and authentic through Noise? So I think there's a lot of tailwind behind this particular brand becoming what it has become. There were a lot of macro factors, but I think what we did really well, what the founders did really well for Noise was to understand the impact that fitness and health were having for each and every Indian, especially the younger lot, right? 15 to 24, 25 to 34.

This cohort was getting exposed to the impact that health and fitness can have on their lifestyle and their, very frankly, physical augmentation. I think once we understood that part, we knew that we had to be really, really real with people about giving them an ally that helps them get the best out of their health, their fitness, and what they want to do with their physical faculty. Because there's nothing more personal, right? This is your body. It's no one else's body, right? But then that's where the fun starts, right? So if you can really make a huge fundamental change for consumers with the way organic matter that they're living with, that is like trust of the highest level. We understood the lifestyle technology.

Once these two things, these two points of the spectrum come together, we start to make meaningful contribution to our users' life. By wearing this particular watch, are you getting all your health matrix in real time to make better decisions? And are you looking good also while doing that? But you're in an extraordinary landscape. So people like ET here, they've worked for Panasonic, Samsung, you know, established technology giants. We have Apple, we have Sony stomping the market. How have you managed to break into that and in such a complicated country and from nowhere? I mean, you know, a large part of it comes from one of the founders. I mean, he's a fitness freak, Amit. And he was very invested in fitness and health.

So he understood from a user perspective what kind of products are needed in the country right now. And I think some of the big calls were taken when they were not the norm. I'm like, you know, about investing to make in India, about like making sure that we had our own apps when nobody was investing in an app ecosystem. Very frankly, understanding that consumer mindset in India. A lot of time people say that India, I'm like, you know, just price the product low and things will sell. That's absolutely contrary to what what Indians love. We like value for money, but we don't want something which is seen as cheap. So we understood that this product has to appeal to the aesthetic sense as well as the functional sense.

Tell us about some of the significant big milestones when you broke through, particularly from a brand perspective. Gaurav, when do people start to say, ah, I trust this person to be on my wrist? I think it's been a journey which got boosted because of a lot of macro factors also. We were speaking to Pariksit about the impact that COVID had on travel industry. But travel, sorry, COVID also had like a big impact in a positive way on this wearable industry. All of a sudden people got even more invested in health. And that's where I think a smartwatch really became something integral to their daily life as we were struggling with COVID and so on and so forth. The fact that we invested to make in India gave us the economies of scale.

And also because of that, we were able to pass it on to the consumers. Gaurav, we're only scratching the surface of this brand story. Thank you so much for being on Trailblazers. Pleasure. Thanks, Jasper. Thanks, Sainurayan. So let's talk a bit about insurance and branding. I mean, insurance is a great mystery to many, a black box. And if I dare say so, for some people, possibly not the most exciting thing they can think about. Maybe they need it. Maybe they don't need it. Insurance is pretty much the most boring category. And I've been in this boring category for the past 10 years now.

And, but I can guarantee you that it is the single most important product that a consumer should have in his portfolio, be it health insurance or term insurance and car insurance, pretty much mandatory. I'll quickly tell you a short story before I move into the push and the pull. Before this, I used to work in another insurance organization where one of the sales head had once come to me and said that, I mean, look, whatever advertising or marketing you do, it doesn't matter because we are the people who are going to sell the product and it pushes what something works. And cut to when I joined Policy Bazaar and this, yes, she had this dream of getting Indians on a platform like Policy Bazaar where the people come and compare.

It was, it was, it really challenged me that, you know, how, how does, how does, how does, how does one do that? And the solution was pretty much simple that, you know, there was no education around a product called insurance because as we said earlier, it's pretty much a boring category and no one wakes up in the morning thinking about insurance. They have other worries, but if you actually talk to them about the importance or you talk to them very clearly and educate them very clearly about why do you need it? Then there is no way that they won't come to you. So, in our communication, we call a spade a spade. Maybe we've been accused of, you know, slightly our communication is on the negative side, but we used to do it with the tongue in cheek.

So that kind of, you know, really woke up people to actually log on to the site and, you know, come to and start searching for it. So you're, you're humanizing this otherwise dry topic. And as a brand, you're kind of as much like a teacher mentor brand as you are a professional services brand. So our brand is pretty much a reflection of how passionate Policy Bazaar, we call ourselves PVans, you know, how passionate we are about educating Indians about understanding insurance as a concept. So, so that, that kind of, you know, trickles on on the personality of the brand also. If you ask about, ask Policy Bazaar about the biggest challenge, the biggest challenge is still the consumer inertia for us. How do you, how do we battle it?

How do we overcome that? Because the task for us is to still wake up the consumer and get him to our side. So that is one big challenge from a category point of view. From a media point of view, again, one has to be constantly ahead of the curve. Because, you know, every, every day, the adoption of media is of consumer, consumers using the media is pretty much evolving and changing on a daily basis. Okay, so I say, stay alert, you look pretty alert and you're, you're building a fantastic brand. Our next guest, ET Single, CMO of the wonderful Vega. Start us off with media. As, as, as, as Sully was saying, you know, it's all change out there. Everything's changing.

How with an amazing brand, you know, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a well established band like Vega, do you think about media and channels ET? I must say that, you know, at every step of the consumer journey, everything is changing, right? Even at Vega, we've kind of transformed our media strategy and, you know, the cross platform digital approach is what works, right? Beyond just giving a lot of savings, right? Which is say a minimum of 20%, depending upon what industry and category we're talking about. Digital has for sure given a new opportunity, you know, to brands like us. And especially being a household, you know, a legacy brand, the idea of creating enough brand excitement, right? Around the product is what is needed today.

And I think through digital, we've been able to sort of do it far better. So, so you're anywhere and everywhere, but in the end, right? We all know this compelling content is king. Tell us how with the, you know, with, with the 2023 version of Vega, how do you think about content ET? It works on three pillars literally, right? So whether it's an, I would say three E's. So entertainment, education and empathy. I think that's what consumers and audience look for. And this is of course, ranging from Gen Z's to millennials and to a little bit mid age guys as well. To create that content, you know, something that would not just come off to you while you're browsing on your, you know, social platforms, et cetera.

The idea is to of course, create it as compelling as possible so that there's two way conversation happening on the brand, right? Especially with beauty as a category, 33% of the beauty consumers, right? Has been quoted by one of the largest e-commerce players in India are loyal to one brand. So there lies an opportunity wherein you're able to sort of add value to their funnel to what they're searching for and help them discover the right products and the right experiences. So as a brand, of course, today brand is not what, you know, you're speaking of yourself. It's what consumers are speaking of you on the social and whether it's reviews, whether it's ratings. When you think about your, your communities, right?

Your, your consumer communities, give us example or one example of how you go, go about getting conversations going with a particular community. So for example, we have something called Vega grooming talks. We call it VGT. The idea is to kind of engage with not just the influencers, top creators, but also say, for example, a derma, right? A dermatologist who kind of comes in, gives live master classes, et cetera, to the consumers to be able to tell them and educate them with the right usage of the product and the application. Right? So like I said, I think our commitment is to not change or transform people with this whole beauty appliances and so on and so forth. We want to empower them, right?

So that we can further de-seasonalize and contemporize DIY and DIY as we call it, which is groom it yourself. Thank you so much for being here. The worlds of advertising and marketing have always fascinated people from the 1950s mad men to Steve Jobs to trailblazers in partnership with DM Asia. We have incredible guests on this show with more coming up. Massive big hitters from the worlds of advertising and marketing, leading Indian brands, leading global brands. I'm Jasper Reid and join me on the next episode of Trailblazers. Trailblazers.