Mumbai: A jam-packed start to an affair, that’s what MMA’s first event in the capital looked like, on 30 June. MMA Impact India brought together the brightest marketing minds in India as it explored how marketers can navigate the evolving digital landscape, drive innovation and enduring business value and more robust consumer engagement in an increasingly dynamic and connected world. MMA Impact India sought marketers to Rethink their execution methods, Relearn leveraging tech advancements, and Rebuild their marketing organization structures that help build Winning Marketing Organisations 2.0.

The key focus areas at Impact encompassed below segments:

.    Data – Discover how to create a data strategy, build a robust data ecosystem, and develop data capabilities that can help you drive growth

.    Emerging Tech – Learn about the role of AI in marketing, data tech, madtech, and immersive innovation such as Metaverse and AR/VR can be used in your marketing campaigns to enhance customer engagement and drive business results

.    Digitising Commerce – O2O, Omnichannel, decoding ONDC, power of CX

.    Media – Discover new opportunities in CTV, e-commerce advertising, Voice & Audio, Content Marketing, Influencer marketing, Brand safety, and Measurement that can help you stay ahead of the competition

On the occasion of this event, Indiantelevision.com caught up with MMA India board member and The Good Glamm Group - Good Brands Co CEO Sukhleen Aneja. Elucidating on MMA’s collaboration with ONDC providing a platform for brands and marketers to grow and flourish, she says, “ONDC has taken a bold mission of taking six per cent of India transacting online to a number as high as 75 per cent. MMA which is an extremely credible industry body for mobile marketing in India, is playing an instrumental role in educating the entire industry on the importance and relevance of ONDC and onboard as many companies onto the platform, which is exactly what ONDC would like as partners.”

When questioned about the way Good Brands Co would be leveraging the ONDC network to its maximum potential, she points out, “We have already started having deep engagements with ONDC, and have started creating a blueprint for onboarding our brands onto the ONDC platform. In parallel, we are also working towards creating a seller app that can allow all the Good Glamm brands to be available across platforms.”

Aneja also moderated one of the sessions - Rethink, Relearn, Rebuild: The Incumbent or Insurgent Way? As part of that session, she expressed her excitement to be surrounded by some real heroes who have built insurgent brands.

The panelists for this discussion included Dabur India Limited head of media Rajiv Dubey, Sirona Hygiene CEO & co-founder Deep Bajaj, The Man Company founder and managing director Hitesh Dhingra, Heads Up For Tails founder Rashi Narang and The New Shop co-founder Aastha Almast.

She flagged off the session, “I think each one of you has built a pioneering business. You’ve been a founder, you’ve actually seen the highs and lows, and sometimes done things but not given up on your own conviction. While you have built insurgent brands, it’s always important to never lose your own motivation and to never give up, because it’s never easy to be a challenger.”

Talking about the pet market which has been underserved, Narang spoke her heart out, “The one thing that got me going was my dog, Sarah. I couldn’t seem to find anything of quality for her and I wanted her to live her best life. So I just started slowly building a homegrown one-man army and that’s how we really started.  But I think that during that journey, we connected with so many pet people, and it was their insights, relationships, and problem areas – just listening to them and hearing what they had to say, empathizing with them that gave us a huge amount of input for us to build our own products and innovate very fast.”

“Really following that design thinking approach which is something that we still do, just by staying really close to our customers, and understanding what they need. The brand is built with a lot of heart, but also science with a deep understanding of the space, our dogs and cats, collaborating with many experts that were across the board whether it was nutritionists, behaviourists, trainers- so collaboration also helps brings so much knowledge onto the table, and taking those learnings and then putting them out there. So, it’s been quite a journey and there’s a long way to go,” she added.

Coming to the male grooming category, Aneja brought out some realities - everybody seems to have painted the category with the same brush, everything looks black, the guys have absolutely poker-straight hair, and all the products look very similar.

Bringing to the fore about building a brand in a category that is sinking in the sea of sameness, Dhingra brought out, “When we started out, we knew that the biggest focus for a digitally native brand or a new-age brand has to be the brand – so the brand story, the brand purpose – it’s very important to have a differentiated story if you’re competing with the incumbents as well as your peers who have raised a lot more capital than you. Anyone can copy a product, but no one can really copy the brand connect that you have with your consumer. So as a company, we started investing in telling our brand story from day one. It started with the packaging, which was slightly more aspirational than whatever was there on the shelves. It started with innovations on the product side. When we started out in 2015, there were obviously large incumbents offering one or two products catering to men – like a face-whitening facewash or a deodorant. But apart from that, there was no depth in the category as such. So firstly, we knew that we would have to create this category by launching more and more interesting products. Today we have almost 120 SKUs in the grooming category itself – which is a large portfolio considering there was nothing five to seven years back. And second, obviously disrupting the channel as well. This year, we’ll be a Rs 250 crore net revenue business and 70 per cent of our business is still online. I think that also differentiated us from wherever our nearest competitors are.”

A remarkable social entrepreneur, Bajaj is passionate about intimate hygiene and the menstrual care category.  They have a huge mission on ending period poverty. It is such a differentiated space that they have taken and built the business on.  It took a man like him to solve a problem that women have been suffering from for years.

About what led him into getting into a business like this, Bajaj tells, “Without making it sound fancy, I think it was serendipity, the way this category fell into my lap. Professionally, I had been into events and a business of handmade carpets that is run by my wife. All along, I had seen that whenever it comes to intimate menstrual hygiene issues, women had made their life around finding ‘jugaads’. Like if you’re going on a road trip, the solution to a washroom would be I’ll use the washroom at home and not really look for a clean washroom on the way because there are none. Similarly, for menstrual hygiene concerns, there were similar solutions like a hot water bottle or painkillers would be in the bag always. But nothing specific was available for these unmet needs. So in 2013, on a road trip, the idea for Pee Buddy, our first product was born – where we were four couples travelling from Delhi to Jaipur. A friend’s wife suggested that she had someone in Europe use a contraption to stand and pee, like a plastic bottle shape, cut into half, and made into a funnel. While everybody laughed it off, I think somewhere I thought that it was a very interesting problem to solve. So, it just started as an accidental discovery of the category. But once you get deeper you realise when it comes to this category, there are no solutions – we are still scratching the surface when it comes to hygiene solutions available for women in this country.”

Almast has a bold vision of creating India’s 7-Eleven, she has got 120 convenience stores all started by her, completely bootstrapped. She spilled the beans about what led her into starting this, and what are some of the challenges specifically in retail that she is facing now, especially with the pace of discounting that one encounters in online business, which is now probably the biggest drug that the online business is used to.  

She said, “Fortunately, for the convenience retail industry, no convenience retailer ever discounted anything. So, that’s just a beginning of a profitable business right from the ideation stage. So why we thought of convenience retail? This is a personal problem of mine, my friends, anyone who is young and lives away from family, was constantly travelling for work/for education, had no idea what was around them, supermarket and grocery stores were too far; kirana stores were unstandardized – they didn’t have round the clock service, they weren’t quick and half the time they didn’t find whatever they  needed at one store and would require six to seven kirana store trips to figure out what they want – it was a pain, and this is actually our own journey. The New Shop is my third start-up and in my early struggling days, we used to live in Mumbai. On the way to office, we would look for breakfast options, pen drives, and stationery – things that we needed for the day. And on the way back, we needed groceries, or a drink or something – things that we needed on the way. On railway stations, we only found vada pavs, drinks – I had typhoid consecutively for six months, one after the other – it was so unhygienic. And sitting in the train, me and my co-founders used to wonder – why are 7-Eleven and Circle K not entering India? We’re the youngest population in the world, we’re upwardly mobile, and we’re the largest working population in the world. And as data has it, every country which has grown through a massively, young dominant working population, convenience retail explores those countries. A recent example was Indonesia. So that day we took a pledge, the next business we do is going to be convenience retail. 2019 is when we started doing this and this problem was reminded to me when I was living in Bangalore. I got very sick at 8 pm, and in Bangalore, you can find beer at 8 pm but not a Brufin. So, you go to multiple stores – but the only place you would find a Brufin is in a hospital. So this problem of standardized quick round-the-clock access is so great that – the problem is so omnipresent, that we don’t even realise and acknowledge it.”

She went on, “That’s when we realized that the country is going through massive infrastructure development – our airports are going to get modernized, our highways are going to be world-class quality, and the residential areas that we’re living in are going to get upgraded. Then why would that neighbourhood-friendly squad not get upgraded with the same kind of modern experiences that the world across is used to? So, that’s why it’s called the New Shop. And since then, there has been looking back. Our value proposition was very clear to the customers from day one. We never had to spend a single penny on CAC (customer acquisition costs), no marketing – this is something which has grown purely through word-of-mouth. We opened the first store, every single person in the catchment realized that there is a 24/7 store within walking distance, providing me home deliveries and having everything under one roof. And that led to multiple stores, customers talking about – why don’t you open a store in our locality. And that led to franchise entrepreneurs coming to us seeking to own The New Shop store, and there has been no looking back. We’re two and a half years old, and we are profitable already, growing superfast, our willingness to create entrepreneurs in India and franchise is a path we chose – as paid entrepreneurs, we know how typical entrepreneurship is in India especially. 83 per cent of the people in India would want to pursue the path of entrepreneurship, and this is much higher than the global average of 50 per cent. One in two people would quit their job if they had the option of starting up – nine of our employees are The New Shop owners, so given a chance to quit their job, they decided to quit their job and buy The New Shop franchise. That’s the vision with which we are growing, and we’re making entrepreneurship more accessible and democratized, along with the retail option.”

People would give an arm and a leg to quit their job and join the entrepreneurship world. Dubey has had a remarkable two-decade career at Dabur. Dabur itself has been pioneering – the categories that they have built over the years – whether it’s Real Juices, honey, chyawanprash, or even Dabur Lal Tail. They have found the niches, owned the niches, and have continued to stay extremely clear about their strategy – the way they have gone chasing rural penetration. There are remarkable lessons to be learnt from Dabur.

Emphasizing on the advice that he would like to give to insurgent brands on what are some of the things that they could look at learning from his experience, he explains, “We have been pioneers in a lot of categories – we’re the first ones to launch chyawanprash, honey, and juices. We launched our Ayurvedic toothpaste – we were the first ones to launch it and are the leaders in that category too. We have launched these categories and have retained our consumers over a period – we have been number one. It’s very hard to reach number two and sustain the position of number two – becoming number one is very difficult. The most difficult part for any marketer is to find new businesses and retain the existing ones. That’s the challenge and that’s what we’ve trying to do over the years – trying to retain the consumers. All these categories have a high level of lapsage.  For example, every year for chyawanprash we have to tell the same story and acquire new consumers – our lapsage is very high. New consumers who come into the category, they usually don’t start consuming it very quickly.”

He adds further, “Similarly, brands like Red Toothpaste – it’s a very difficult category. When we entered this category, Dabur was zero, Colgate was like 67 per cent. Today Colgate Dental Cream stands at around 26 per cent, and we have reached about 13 per cent. Dabur, as a company, has become the number two oral care company in the country, number one across the East coast which is Orissa, AP; Tamil Nadu we are number one by far, taking the lead from Colgate. It was very difficult to tell the consumers a new story and to get them to use toothpaste, which is red in colour and tastes very different too. It’s not been easy for any company, but the most difficult part is to retain consumers over a period of time and get new ones every year. As you spoke about Lal Tail, it is a baby oil – you don’t use baby oil all your life. When a baby is born, you seek information about such products. And so for us, every time a baby is born, it’s an opportunity for us – you have to acquire a new consumer. In that way we are incumbent, but we have to remain insurgent in a way so as to remain in business. Learning from insurgent brands, we have launched lots of products in the e-commerce space – we don’t have very significant shares in those categories, but we have built the categories like that. For example, last year we launched baby diapers – which is a digital-first category – launched products In the baby care range. We have launched products that are totally different, not very Dabur-like products but which appeal to the masses – like apple cider vinegar which is not found anywhere – we launched that. These are the digital-first brands that we got into and trying to see success over there. But as a company, we are very restrained in a way that we try to experiment first, go into the marketplace, see how the product performs, and then go out. We still try to remain afloat and try to do newer things.”

The event proved to be an informative and insightful platform for brands that want to take the ONDC route and are even already on it, also talking about various aspects of AI, CTV, e-commerce, and other elements that help make brands seen and felt amongst consumers.