Jitender Dabas on AI and automation and customer experience

Music According to the intellectual and philosopher Edward de Bono, the problem with the internet and social media is that it encourages the idea that information is sufficient and that thinking doesn't matter. Is he right? Joining me today on Trailblazers are an esteemed panel of marketing heads and leads and heads of agencies to discuss the topic of social media. Ashish from HDFC Bank, Nikhil from Indigo, Lala Tendru from Performix and Jitu from McCann World Group, welcome to Trailblazers. I'm going to get the show going by inviting Ashish. We're delighted to have you. Now let's get the ball rolling with this provocative idea. There are many, many studies out there that will show that the exponential increase

in mental health issues amongst teenagers around the world is directly correlated with the rise of social media. What do you say to that? Well, it's not the first evil that a society has seen, right? There have been many in the past. And as we evolve and newer and newer sort of technologies come in play and channels like social media come in play, I guess we as a society adapt to it, right? We evolve, we figure out how to make more sense out of it, how to control it better. If you look at a lot of the younger population, the teenagers as you call, they're getting access to a lot more information. The amount of knowledge that this platform can provide is also humongous, right?

So it's just about using it in the right way for all of us to benefit from it. We existed and worked in the pre-digital age and then social media came along. Was it hard for you personally to get your head rounded, Ashish? Initially, yes. And it did take me time to get around it. As an individual, as a marketing person as well. You know, you're helming marketing at a huge financial services business, HDFC Bank. They're not natural bedfellows when you think about it. You know, when I open my Instagram, I'm not that interested in banks. So how do you put the two together or do you? We do, we do. And like I said, it took time for us to adapt. It's not only about reaching out to the audience, but reaching out to them in a relevant way, right?

And there's a lot of data available in the digital space. And over a point of time, we have realized that different channels have different roles that they can play for you as a brand. Where are you winning? Which channel? What works for you? So all of them work for me, right? When used in the right context, for example, and I was coming to the point that, be it YouTube or be it Insta, a lot of informative content works for us. We've identified four to five pillars that we need to add to our brand as attributes. And then events and moments related to that is where we will be present on social media. Talk about how those pillars and values inform, you know, what other brands you associate with or events. Give us examples of the right things.

Is it sport? Is it? So, yeah, it is. If I say that I'm a large Indian brand, which today is the seventh largest in the world, there's a matter of pride, right? And the very heritage and the trust and the reputation that we've created as a brand says that anything which makes an Indian proud about being an Indian is something I will associate with. You've got your auntie, don't you? Your auntie avatar who helps navigate. So that's a very interesting story. And so we've created our own very social media influencer by the name Vigilante. And the role that she plays is informs consumers about all the new types of fraud that are coming in. The MO of these frauds as to what will frauds typically do with you to sort of hook you and cheat.

OK, but just to push back slightly on this, Vigilante, great name, but Vigilante is not real. Why do I believe someone that's not real? So there are two aspects to it. One, it is brought to you by HDFC Bank, which in itself is a trusted and credible name in the industry, in the financial services space. And then the way we have created content over a period of time gives a lot of confidence. No amount of social media helps you unless you actually are a trusted brand. But talk to us a bit, Ashish, about the kind of yin and yang of physical and digital and how you play that game. Because I still go into banks. Yeah, there's a funny term which everyone uses very often nowadays called Vigilante, right? Sounds like an H or something. Yeah, yeah.

But nowadays if you see for us, I think it's about how digital can play a role in making the physical interactions of the consumers with the bank smoother and easier. And then what we do really here at the branches is we have got all our digital tools available. We have trained our branch folks. So the interactions with the consumers are paperless, smooth and sort of it becomes easier for both from our staff perspective as well as from a consumer perspective. Does your own personal social media brand matter to you? It does. How many followers have you got on LinkedIn? On LinkedIn, a thousand. Pretty good. You've been a fantastic guest. We've only scratched the surface. Thank you for coming on Trailblazers. Thank you so much.

And now we're delighted to be joined on Trailblazers by Nikhil Kingcobra of Digital Marketing at Indigo. Thank you Jasper. You've injected a kind of festive note into our show with your Christmasy attire. So it's very timely. But let's start you off in kind of a similar place to where we ended with Ashish, which is the kind of physical and digital. I mean there ain't nothing more physical than flying on an airline. It's true. How do you think about digital in that environment? So I think digital for us is sort of a fundamental enabler for everything we do. So we are not looking at digital as separate. I think even flying every physical aspect, we're trying to sort of either improve our customer experience through digital,

empower our employees by giving them assets which they can help to do their job better, or just make everyone's life easy. So we're looking at digital as a foundation for everything we do. Yeah, these days, particularly on certain channels, if you don't entertain, no one's interested. But you're in a very functional environment, particularly Indigo with its on-time promises, it's all that stuff. How do you entertain? I think it's very interesting. I think for us engagement is not equivalent to entertainment. But I think what we do differently is that we want to sort of tell people how do we deliver on our core promises. So we have four core promises. We swear and live by them at all our channels. One is affordability.

The second is on-time performance, making customers experience hassle-free and courteous, and our unparalleled network. But how do you make being on time fun on social media? I mean, I hear what you're saying about entertainment versus engagement. But if I get an Instagram post that says you're on time again, I don't, you know, great. So how do we do it is we sort of try to humanize it. So we show you the behind the scenes of how do we make sure that it's on time. So for example, when we talk about our unparalleled network, we just don't showcase montage of cities. We have just started doing something which we call it 60 tours. What we did, we took one cabin crew of a town and we took her to that town and she showcased the town to the entire world.

So this way now we have done 25 cities. We'll continue to do more and more cities. We have another series which is called How to Become a Pilot. It's called License to Fly. So we do all of that stuff so that people know what is the back side of it. But why is Indigo any better or worse than it than the Spice Waller or, you know, the Tata guys or United or whoever? See, I think we very strongly feel two reasons. I think our brand in itself stands out because of how we have built this brand. So its brand is very much built on a tone of voice, consistency and simplicity. I think that really helps when we distinguish. And also what we have done is we have put really strict rules for ourselves, right?

We won't do anything which because there is a trend we want to do it. We really don't want to put an aircraft on our social media. That's a very strict rule that we have tried to put. To say how do you really engage customers without showing your product. So that's which when we do all of this it sort of creates new ideas, creativity which is as I said it led into ideas like License to Fly, 60 tours, all of this new thing. Which creates, which helps us differentiate significantly from any other brand. You guys are big into soccer right? Into football. Why is that? Why is that a moment? So I think we have recently done that. We have sort of tied up with the Indian Football Association. The whole idea was we have seen cricket.

I think we as Indigo believe, we have grown in the last 17 years. India has grown along with us in the last 17 years. Very strongly believe it's time for soccer in India. And we want to partner with them for the next, whatever, couple of years to take them there. And this is all part of our India by Indigo strategy where we want to partner with right players with whom we believe it can help really grow India in future. We're coming into the home straight, Nikhil. These customers, how do you even begin to engage the vast, I mean we've all flown on Indigo Airlines. The diversity of person you can sit next to is mind blowing. We very strongly feel that it's not tier one, tier two, tier three sort of a market.

Every market has a cohort of people who can afford air travel, who are in that strata, who want to move forward, who believe they want to go out of their town for education, for trade, etc. So we don't want to say this is a metro people, this is a non-metro people. We feel across the India there is that percentage. We want to talk to them. We want to consistently make them believe that along with us your aspirational will get. And we want to give wings to them. Okay, and last question. Do you have more LinkedIn followers than Ashish? I think I have 10,000 at this point of time. Ashish, we're establishing the pecking order. I think I'm firmly at the bottom. But we'll see if G2 or Lalitendri can dethrone the current LinkedIn champ.

Nikhil, you've been a fantastic guest. And now we're joined by Lalitendri, the CEO of Performance. Lalitendri, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. How are you doing today? Very good. Okay, I've realised here that we've just sort of dived into Facebook and the rest of it. What I'd love you to do, I mean you run McKinsey Labs, you're a veteran at TCS. Just give us a sort of 30,000 feet view of kind of where social media actually fits in with digital. I think this is where the future is. I say that with confidence because this is where the consumers are. Jasper, if you look, the reason consumers are there is because social media is innovating, maybe much faster than many of the other media channels.

Right from the days I think we are old enough to know the early form of Facebook, MySpace, Orkut, which was essentially networks. We joined there to just share exchange. And you're part of DoubleClicks, right? I mean you guys have been around for a while. At the start of this, right? Then suddenly short-form video came. Now all marketers would agree with my esteemed panel here, video is the thing right now. Now we are seeing commerce being part of social and very soon maybe metaverse. Time will tell. What's the kind of idiot, me being the idiot's guide to social media? How do you think about it? First of all, you are not. Because you are a user, as you told me, of social media, so it is as intuitive as that.

I think for brand leaders like yours, the most fundamental thing that brand leaders needs to understand is the marketing funnel on social media is inherently different from what you use. to have in offline media. Let me give an example. In mainline media, you used to do awareness campaigns on TV or print. Then you do some offline events to do engagement, route traffic to your store. You make the sale on a store, right? Physical retail store or branches or wherever it is. That was the kind of norm 20 years back. Cut that to social media right now. Maybe you are swiping up your Instagram feed. You suddenly see a nice influencer-led makeup event going on. And you suddenly started liking, hey, that works for me.

Suddenly, you start seeing a click to WhatsApp link just below that product. In WhatsApp, you see a product catalog. You make the payment, done the purchase. What you saw in this is the traditional funnel is getting fused into a shopping event right there. It's all getting linked up. Exactly. And that's the beauty of social media. And that's how I would say all brands needs to see each interaction in social media as a potential transaction opportunity. If you cast your mind forward a bit to Web 3.0 and you're uniquely qualified to talk about this. What are we going to see happening in Web 3.0? Blockchain, NFT, all of this. Web 3.0 is a set of technologies, right? It is blockchain. It is crypto. It is smart contracts.

The application thereof is an NFT or a metaverse or so on and so forth. Metaverse was an ambitious idea. We now have Facebook as meta and so on and so forth. Time will tell how much metaverse is going to go get accepted. But the underlying technologies are real. Blockchain is getting adopted in financial services for international payments. Smart contracts are already there, right, in terms of advanced banking or financial products. And crypto is already there in terms of security. You've talked about identity. Crypto is one of the enabler of identity. So Web 3.0 is already here. The further social applications of that, be it metaverse or NFT, some time to go. Talk to us about how you think about social media and data and how you help your clients.

Now I think data is the cornerstone to make the sense out of social media. For example, we look at identifying the right audiences, right? Who do you target? That's where you start the data journey. Then you start measuring, right? If you run a campaign, how much was it taken up? How many people actually viewed? What's the number of impression? Now you have conversion APIs on social media. How do you know what offline transaction actually happened because of the campaigns you run on online? And how do you get that data in, right? And lastly, if you think, how do you actually measure the conversion at each funnel, right? So that you can get better at this. For example, in Performix, we have recently launched a product called Creative AI,

which essentially tracks the consumer's response to various creatives you create, and it predicts what metadata you should have in your creative to improve the conversion in the funnel. Okay, Lalitendrai, how many LinkedIn followers do you have? Around 8,000. Oh, Nikhil, home straight. Yeah, 10,000, 8,000, 1,000. I'm too embarrassed to say. We'll get on to G2. Thank you so much for being on Trailblazers Lalitendrai. It's a great privilege to have G2 from McCann with us. Welcome to the show, G2. Thank you for inviting me. I did a bit of background on you yesterday, and I stumbled upon, you write really interesting pieces, right? Deep, interesting pieces. So I want to get into this.

I stumbled on a piece where you'd suddenly fallen in love with Iceland because someone you knew had been there and were posting pictures, and you coined this term, citizen marketeer. Is that right? So, you know, and this is again in the context of I was scrolling through and suddenly, like social media, you end up seeing. So, and I found that I was discussing with my wife, should we go to Iceland? And the question was, did Iceland ever approach me or market itself to me? Never. I never come across a brochure, you know, or a campaign from Iceland. Who did the job for me? That friend of mine who went there with the family and posted pictures and wrote glowing things about what they experienced there looking at the Northern Lights.

And then that set me thinking of the amount of marketing that consumers themselves are doing for brands when unpaid in the process of trying to project the life that they live or whatever the emotional benefit that they get off being social media. So, if you were to try and put together the amount of marketing that citizens do, so, you know, and actually borrow it from citizen journalism. So, from certain journalists, we've come to the age of citizen marketers. The essence of social media is not the content, it's the people. And the trust is the people that you trust, right? And all the corporates and brands are kind of getting a free ride on this. Do you buy that? Yes, you're right.

The fact is that social media per se is, I mean, it's an ether that pervades all around us. And if you go back to that, what hasn't, so what's changed this technology, what's changes, you know, our media from a particular kind to a particular kind that we consume around. What hasn't changed broadly is what you go back to Maslow's need hierarchy. The need hierarchy remains the same, you know, from a, you know, physiological needs to safety needs to then belonging and love to self-esteem to self-actualization. What delivers to those needs has changed. So now when I want to belong or when I want to feel a little better as a self-esteem, the devices that I used 20 years back versus what social media does is, it replaces all that.

But GC, when you, and often on behalf of your clients, kind of survey social media, just give us, it's hard to do this in a word, just give us in a word how you see it, how you see it evolving, what you like, what you don't like, simple things like that. So, you know, if you look at that, and from a, from a, from a marketer's perspective, you know, Nikhil talked about there is relationships that are human relationships and I, you know, brand is a living and trying identity by itself, entity by itself. So there are relationships that I want to form with people and I, it's, it's changed the way I'm forming those relationships. But does a relationship require trust or credibility? Yes, of course it does. The medium has changed.

In a crowd of 1000 people, I would require the attention of you. How I get that attention has changed, but the need to get attention remains the same. Now the point is, if attention is the currency that everybody is after, it's not necessary that you get attention for the right reasons always. Yeah, there's a, there's a misalignment, isn't, isn't there? Because you, you see these fellow, we talked about this before, you see these fellows have massive followings, trying to tell you about stuff they know nothing about. Their only credentials is they've got a big following. Yeah, so the, so the thing is, it's, so, so the, the, the, the stepping stones have changed. I need, I have the largest number of followers first, and then I start to build.

So therefore I might have built credibility cracking jokes. I'm a, I'm a standup comedian. I might have gotten credibility doing something else. But now that have X million followers who are young people or old people or the cohorts that are any brands you want to go after. Now I'm using that credibility to then peddle something else. Which I have no credibility, but the credibility is, but your power comes from having attention of more number of people than someone else. We're basically on, on, in, in the last couple of overs here, um, G2. Cast your mind forward a bit here. Um, I mean, the metaverse, we, we've touched on that. How, how do you see that evolving? Are you a buyer that's a whole separate world or is, or is it still linked to this world?

Uh, you know, I, I come from the Star Trek generation, you know, you know, so, you know, beam up Scotty is the world, you know, and that's the closest we thought probably the metaverse is going to go. I mean, the word, it is out in the open. Probably it will evolve. I mean, there was second life, you know, I mean, somebody, when metaverse came, somebody says this was, it didn't work. Then what's what would work and all that. I don't have an award yet. I'm not an expert. I would not claim to an expert on that. Uh, there is, uh, there is this hugely human trait of wanting to transport ourselves in imaginary world. That's what writers and poets have done for centuries.

And our metaverse comes close to doing that, to being able to, you know, transport it somewhere else. So it does sit on some bit of a, you know, very core human need. Have we reached there? Will it reach there is something that that's open, but yes, it does sit on some bit of a, you know, very core human need. But yes, there is, there is a possibility because we always wanted to, as human beings always wanted to do that. Last question. Number of LinkedIn followers. So I don't compete with any of them. I am much lower. I'm probably closer to, you know, where you would be. Thank you so much for being on the show. Really enjoyed the conversation.