'Regionalisation & micro-segmentation of audience is key’

The e4m Pride of India Brands conference held in Delhi on Thursday celebrated and felicitated brands from the northern belt of India that have been game-changers. The theme of the conference was “Building brands for Bharat: Investing in Bharat’s future & reshaping the growth story”. The conference witnessed an insightful panel discussion on ‘Data & Digital: Tools for new Bharat’.

The session, chaired by Shradha Agarwal, Co-founder and CEO, Grapes explored various themes on the use of data and technology to reach the aspirations of New Bharat and the importance of identifying many Bharats within Bharat. On the panel were Varun Khurana, CEO & Founder, Otipy; Aloke Bajpai, Group CEO & Co-Founder, Ixigo; Ameya Dangi, CEO, Niine Hygiene; Sidharth Kedia, CEO, Nodwin Gaming; Mugdh Rajit, Marketing Head, Lava International, and Amit Gupta, MD, SAG Infotech.

There is little doubt that digital has essentially become a must-have for brands today and is growing exponentially. The panel moderated by Shradha Agrawal explored ways to use technology to make marketing campaigns more relevant, effective, and personalized.

The panel deliberated on why and how the significance of Bharat has come up so much in marketing in recent times. The country’s demographic diversities beyond culture, food and language to other variable parameters such as education, literacy, and differing levels of internet penetration and digital exposure. All of this plays a very important part in how we market ourselves in the new Bharat, noted Lava’s Mugdh Rajit.

The vast upsurge in consumer interactions and touchpoints has created massive volumes of data, which have brought about huge opportunities to enhance the brand-building process, while also creating new challenges for brands. Even as the right branding of a ‘Made-in-India’ product is important, regionalisation and micro-segmentation of audience helps market it better, the panellists agreed.

Varun Khurana of Otipy talked about how the data is much more micro than one can think. Given the diversity of our demographic, this information is very valuable for marketers who want to optimise every dollar spent, he said. “One thing that we do, even from a pricing standpoint is we differentiate because different things appeal to different classes of people. Even our product portfolio also varies accordingly.”

Aloke Bajpai of online travel agency (OTA) Ixigo shares how when they started most OTAs were going after the western templates of building for flights and hotels. “But when we looked at the data we saw that only 400 thousand people take a flight every day, but 24 million people take a train every day and most of them are from smaller towns. And there was no app that was looking at that back in the day in 2012-13.”

“Our core business strategy has been about targeting the next 100 million users, and 90 per cent of our users are from Bharat or small towns. We are now the largest OTA app for trains in the country, and the most downloaded travel app in India - all because of Bharat,” he declares. 

The most important insight is that you need to think fundamentally differently about the products -how you market to them. “It cannot be the same product offering that works in Tier 1 towns. That’s the fundamental mistake most entrepreneurs make.”

Ameya Dangi of Niine Hygiene agreed, “As a consumer goods marketer, we realised that one product will not solve the problem. You need to be cognizant of what are the needs at even a micro-level.” He talked about how the brand has evolved over the last four years because the vernacular section and the many Bharats in India are looking for quality products without compromising on the price. “They want the best-in-class products because they are aware of what’s out there, thanks to the mobile and the internet.”

The panel also touched upon catering to the changes, preferences and aspirations of Indians residing in Tier III and Tier IV towns by leveraging the power of data and digital technology to understand the regional market and its consumers, and to ensure better click-through rates or better conversion on ROAS (return on ad spends).

The first thing that data does is dispel perceptions, said Sidharth Kedia, CEO, Nodwin Gaming. “If you look at the entertainment industry, YouTube is what it is today because of the regional consumption of content – not because of English consumption of content.”

English consumption of content on YT is less than 8 per cent - its predominantly the vernacular languages of which Hindi is a big part, he shared. “Even in the gaming segment, the penetration of smartphones has changed the demographic tilt from Urban India. That’s when Bharat came into the picture. So today English is the sixth language in e-sports viewership, coming after Hindi, Tamil, Bengali, Nepali and Urdu.”

Developing innovations in technology and data is more important for the “new Bharat”, more than developing services, according to Amit Gupta, MD - SAG Infotech. The population of India, being huge, offers a lot of scope for data mining using AI and various technologies. The more data that is gathered, the more perfection in insights AI can gather. Hence the importance of AI, robotics and IoT cannot be stressed enough. These can be used to further manufacturing at low costs.”