Pioneering brands from North India were celebrated and honored at the e4m Pride of India Brands conference, held in Delhi on Thursday. The theme of the conference is "Branding for India: Remodeling India's Investment Story and Future Growth". The conference featured an in-depth panel discussion on “Data and Digital: Tools for a New India”.
The session, chaired by Shraddha Agarwal, co-founder and CEO of Grapes, explored various topics surrounding the importance of identifying India's many Indians and using data and technology to realize new Indian aspirations. The board includes Varun Khurana, CEO and Founder of OTP; Aloke Bajpai, CEO and co-founder of Ixigo Group; Ameya Dungy, CEO of Nine Cleanliness; Siddharth Kedia, CEO of Nodwin Gaming; Mukhdar Rajit, Marketing Director, Lava International and Amit Gupta, MD, SAG Infotech.
There is no doubt that digitization has become indispensable for brands today and is growing rapidly. Moderated by Shraddha Agrawal, the panel explored the ways technology can be used to make marketing campaigns more relevant, effective and personalized.
The panel discussed why and how India's prominence in marketing has grown tremendously in recent times. The country's demographic diversity beyond culture, diet, and language are other variable parameters such as education, literacy, and varying degrees of internet penetration and digital presence. All of this plays a big role in how we market ourselves in the new India, said Lava's Mocha Rajit.
The growing interaction of consumers and touchpoints has generated huge amounts of data that offers great opportunities to improve the branding process while creating new challenges for brands. While proper branding is important for “Made in India” products, regionalization and micro-segmentation of the audience help market them better, panelists agreed.
OTP's Varun Khurana explains that data is much more microscopic than you might think. “Given the diversity of our population, this insight is invaluable to marketers looking to maximize every dollar spent,” he said. “What we do, even from a price point of view, is to differentiate ourselves because different things appeal to different categories of people. Our product portfolio has also changed.
Aloke Bajpai of online travel agency (OTA) Ixigo tells how they started when most OTAs followed Western design patterns for flights and hotels. "But if we look at the data, we see that only 400,000 people fly every day, but 24 million people take the train every day and most of them are from small towns. And in 2012-2013, no applications were pending that day.”
“Our core business strategy is targeting the next 100 million users and 90% of our users are from India or small towns. We are now the largest OTA train app in the country and the most downloaded travel app in India, all thanks to Bharat,” he announced.
The key idea is that you have to think about the product in a fundamentally different way: how you market it. "It's impossible for the same product offering to work in Tier 1 cities.
Ameyah Dangi of Niine Hygiene agrees: “As a retailer of consumer goods, we understand that one product will not solve a problem. You also need to be aware of what is needed at the micro level." He explained how the brand has grown as a local language segment over the past four years and many Indians in India are looking for quality products without having to compromise on price "They want good products because thanks to mobile devices and the internet, they know what's out there."
The panel also capitalizes on the changes, preferences and aspirations of Indians living in Tier III and IV cities, using the power of data and digital technology to understand regional markets and their consumers and improve rate assurance. of clicks. Better conversion into ROAS (Return on Advertising Investment).
The first thing data does is dispel perceptions, says Nodwin Gaming CEO Siddharth Kedia. "If you look at the entertainment industry, YouTube is what it is today because it uses content regionally, not because of its use of English content."
Usage of English content on YT is less than 8%, which is mostly local languages, with Hindi making up a big chunk, he says. “In the gaming segment as well, the penetration of smartphones has changed the demographic trend in urban India. Bharat is emerging at this time. As a result, English is now the sixth language among esports viewers after Hindi , Tamil, Bengali, Nepali and Urdu."
According to Amit Gupta, MD - SAG Infotech, innovation in technology and data is more important to 'New India' than service development. Since the population of India is huge, there are huge opportunities for data mining using AI and various technologies. The more data is collected, the more information the AI can obtain. Therefore, the importance of AI, robotics and IoT cannot be overstated. They can be used to produce more at less cost.
