Puneet Vidyarthi on brand trust and social media

you with JCB and case construction equipment have been absolutely at the front line of building India right not in I mean here we are in a fancy film studio but you've been out in in the country you're you're an expert in marketing to rural communities when we talk about innovation take us back to that get us grounded again there's 130 crore people and they deserve a better infrastructure and with the infrastructure improvement actually a lot of economic activities which are taking taking off you know a lot of industries which have never heard of food processing for example as is largely because of the infrastructure development which has happened the throughput which we have you know from farm to fork that lifecycle has reduced

because you have got better roads you have got better food processing setups better cold storage is faster transit of the food so I'm all that is helping the country to get into the next level of and do you find that I mean we've touched with some of our guests on the idea of what's the point of innovation right and as you say construction is very enabling there's not many things that are more enabling do you find that quite motivating in terms of making you innovative yeah I think my take on innovation is Jasper that you don't have to do a disruptive innovation every time right there's always a bit of innovation scope of innovation every time everywhere and not necessarily the innovation has to be in the

product side in the distribution in the marketing stuff in your training stuff in your HR stuff I mean all those small small innovations add up in your socks in your socks and they add up and become a large innovation I'll just quote an example when I was with JCB and I'm talking of 2005 2006 when not many automobile kind of organizations companies have actually you know experimented in rural India other than Maruti and Hero Honda at that time maybe Amul and ITC were the other brands which have done what we thought then how can we change and how can we you know do our innovation in marketing or in distribution in rural India and that's where the real growth is coming from

so we we you know we played around with the distribution philosophy what we had and you know typically in a conventional world you will have your distribution where the demand is where you have customers you put up a store or you put up a distribution center and that's where you build up on your business what we thought let's go to those centers where the where the demand will come in future and let's go and create that demand right it's like in a butterfly life cycle where is it egg you have pupa you have butterfly you have everything but where is the egg which will become a butterfly in the times to come so we we changed the distribution philosophy we created almost one third of our distribution put in the places where the demand would

come because there are macro indicators we know the project has been declared we know a new dam is about to come over there we i mean there are you know the information the roads have to go there so which means the demand will come and then somebody has to go and create that demand so we put up we altered the distribution that was one innovation we did then the India is a big country and the kind of infrastructure we need we need hands we need people to actually participate in that growth story so the second innovation what we did in terms of customer acquisition and we thought let's not acquire a customer who is a competitor customer and let's go and create new customers right and that's that's

something which we are doing in case construction as well we are running a project called lead and we thought let's not create a customer for say construction equipment alone let's try and create the entrepreneurship and through entrepreneurship let's try and create the livelihood so let's seed the idea of creating livelihood and entrepreneurship and in that process i see so you've got the the bigger thought is you've got the equipment now yeah now exactly now better yourself exactly so we are running a program and actually we are actually broad based at jasper so we are not limiting ourselves to only construction equipment we are going to villages we are talking to the people we are making them aware

about what all they can do whether it's a fishery it's a you know it's agriculture based occupation so many things they can do and they can also you know get into they can buy an automobile a construction equipment or anything well let's get let's get into that a bit a bit more puneet in the sense of you know you're an urbane guy um lots of kind of urban people here um going out into the country the first time meeting that was that difficult i mean so many marketers we meet they they they might have thoughts about the rural economy but they've never been there so uh fortunately just but i've been always in the brands where i mean largely it's b2c it's a one-on-one kind of a business and so whatever

we do the deal actually happens when two people sit across the table you know it's a big capital purchase absolutely absolutely so for us the way we had been trained it's not at all difficult actually we learn from the customer and my personal philosophy is that innovation starts from the customer need the trick is how quickly i'm able to understand and identify that need and provide him a solution i think that little bit of meeting these two ends is sometimes innovation sometimes is just off-the-shelf solution but trust me on this the india kind of a country and the kind of people whom we meet from north to south from east to west completely different perspectives completely different take

on their lives and the way they are influencing their social circle and the community and that gives a whole lot of learning and very exciting and it's very very cool place to be to be a marketeer absolutely and every day is a new day for us every customer is a new customer every single customer is a different customer well that's interesting and and so i mean we had we had ashutosh from um tata commercial vehicles on the last show and he was talking about the way you persuade a shrimp farmer to buy a truck was to get enough another shrimp farmer with a truck to talk to the shrimp farmer tell us more about that and and and how you use digital for example in in in rural marketing absolutely so it's very interesting

take we have so see half of our customers they belong to age group of say 40 35 to 40 and beyond uh the second generation which is in early 20s 20 to 25 how okay while in they are not the owners of the equipment but they're a big influencer so when we took on this journey we identified that in a how in a home when they're buying a capital equipment the sons and daughters of the family they make a lot of difference and their voice is now heard more more than you know uh the the commercial voice which the father or the uncles would have so through our digital uh campaigns we uh identified those influencers in those rural communities within those areas that micro influence that micro influencers

of the similar kind of a you know project or the landscape wherein they are operating and we try to reach to the next generation which is for them you know means of digital and social media and all that is more uh in thing so to say and then they took their help to you know explain and understand and then explain to the larger communities uh as big uh influencer well and presumably those kids i mean you and i when we grew up we probably you know had these little toy diggers yeah right the kids of the guy that's got the digger they don't really care about the toy anymore do they it's all digital so so so to tap that we have actually created games around equipment the training modules around on the phone on the vrs

ar so all those all those tricks or the techniques which we have you know it's like sickling with the gamification so that's part of the game i think i think that's that's probably is given for any marketeer to reach out to the larger audience i can't take the machine to a 200 people but i can obviously reach out to them digitally so it has a it has helped us to reach out to the larger number of people also to make them aware that what can be done because india is a country as i said the pace at which our infrastructure is going is tremendous so not only more and more people are required to participate in that growth there are the women of the society are also required to participate both for

operating the machines as well as manufacturing the emergency you have to manufacture those many equipment well and and actually like so much of of what we see in the brown world in india totally untapped right punit we've we've we could do a whole show on on on you alone those are amazing insights and and and and great to start with the socks yeah and end in the earth of india thank you so much for joining us thank you