INSIDEBE

+On 3

On 2

Young Lions’17:

From Cubs To Kings

On 4

BACK WITH A BURP: FROOTI

GETS FIZZY

NOT A FLAVOUR OF THE YEAR INITIATIVE.Suresh Narayanan Nestle

Hindustan UnilawyerBY DELSHAD IRANI & AMIT BAPNA MUMBAI

Th e o n g o i n g l e -g a l b a t t l e b e -tween Hindustan U n i l e v e r a n d Gujarat Cooperative M i l k M a r k e t i n g F e d e r a t i o n

(GCMMF), the makers of Amul, over the debate of ice-cream versus frozen desserts, has been aptly, al-beit unimaginatively, named by the press and people as a “Cold War”. But, in the past, HUL has been in Water Wars, Toothpaste Wars, Soap Wars, White Wars, Kitchen Wars and Shampoo Wars.

In the last decade, the country’s biggest consumer goods manufac-turer and maker of Dove, Clinic Plus, Lifebuoy, Pepsodent, Kwality Wall’s, Vim, Rin and Surf, among others, has found itself regularly locked in court room scuffles with competitors over either theirs or its own combative advertising, whether issued in public interest or the company’s. In the long-drawn case of Reckitt Benckiser’s ‘Dettol Healthy Kitchen’ cleaner versus HUL’s Vim, the first shot was fired by Dettol and HUL hit back with “a harsh antiseptic or the power of 100 lemons - which one would you choose to clean your child’s tiffin?”

Soon after, Dettol anti-septic soap and Lifebuoy found themselves saying “Milord, I object!” In the case of Colgate, HUL aired a com-bative Pepsodent ad at the start of a long-weekend giving Colgate no option to invoke the law. The Water Wars saw HUL’s Pureit fight-ing Eureka Forbes over disparaging ads. And there’s the evergreen Safedi Wars between Rin and P&G’s Tide.

Being the “traditional” organisa-tion HUL is, it would be safe to as-sume that the company doesn’t think combative communication, whether directly aimed at it or not, is any laughing matter. Or an invi-tation to take light-hearted digs at each other as many “startuppers” do today. A little friendly fire, if you will. A former HUL marketing head told BE on the condition of anonym-ity, that the FMCG major is “not a tame organisation”; “Any communi-cation showing them in a bad way is not taken lightly.” Especially in cat-egories where it’s the market leader, HUL is hard-pressed to respond by slapping a legal no-tice on transgressors.

Ten years ago, there wasn’t any set policy on deploying legal. As another former employee points out, “If there was a claim made that would hurt the brand’s prospects, the legal course would be taken.” He adds, HUL has always been rather strong on their internal legal pro-

cesses. For example, every single packaging decision has to be run by the legal head.

With the frequency with which HUL has dragged others or has been dragged by others to court over ad-vertising, one can’t help but wonder is HUL as litigious as it seems to be?

While the above evidence would make a jury unanimously go ‘guilty as charged’, however we might be inclined to believe that pursuing legal action is typically not the least resort but the last. The first

course of action is a letter to the of-fending party, and an appeal to the ASCI. In its most recent high-profile case, HUL, according to industry sources, gave Amul almost 20 days to respond to its letter. That’s a life-time in marketing because by then Amul’s ad that draws on the distinction between ‘milk-walla ice-cream’ and ‘vanaspati- walla frozen dessert’, without naming the com-petition, had been viewed millions of times.

>Continued on Page 4

Is the FMCG major as litigious as it seems to be or is lawyering up its last resort?

WILL SBI’S NEW LOGO MAKEIT COOL?

BY RAVI BALAKRISHNAN

MUMBAI

The new logo of SBI set to be unrolled this week brings many changes with it. Gone is the long form State Bank of India. Gone

too is the tagline that’s accompanied its logo: ‘The banker to every Indian.’ In its place is the recognisable blue keyhole logo, and just SBI. If you are the sort of person who is averse to

change, now is the time to start thanking your stars. Things could have been different, a lot more different. Dinesh Menon, chief marketing offi cer at the bank said there was a serious discussion about dropping the old logo entirely, before they decided it would be better to “shed the old skin and get a new look.” The familiar keyhole logo

was designed in 1971 by the NID. Its designer Shekhar Kamath, in a post on Quora, explained it represented the tokens that were issued to customers at banks, and was kept deliberately simple so even a bank manager in a remote part of the country could commission a wall painting. The reason the blue circle survived was that it had started to look cool all over again. As Menon observes, “Uber too has a similar logo tilted sideways. As banking is redefi ned by the digital revolution, we felt this logo can take things forward.” According to Menon, this is an attempt to

contemporise the brand identity which coincides with its merger of associate banks including State Bank of Bikaner and Jaipur, State Bank of Hyderabad, State Bank of Mysore, State Bank of Patiala and State Bank of Travancore as well as the Bharatiya Mahila Bank.

>Continued on Page 4

A FORMER HUL EMPLOYEE SAYS IT ISN’T A ‘TAME’ ORGANIZATION. COMMUNICATION SHOWING THE FMCG IN A BAD WAY IS NOT TAKEN LIGHTLY

SBI ALMOST DROPPED ITS ICONIC KEYHOLE LOGO

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ACES IN MY POCKETindievibe

the twitter index

“WE WERE NEVER A CHATEAUBRIAND OR OLYMPIA AGENCY”Madhukar KamathDDB Mudra

The oldest bank in India revamps one of the country’s most identifiable brand identities

THE ECONOMIC TIMES APRIL 05-11, 2017

CCI NG 3.7 Product: ETMumbaiBS PubDate: 05-04-2017 Zone: BrandEquity Edition: 1 Page: BEFP User: sandesh.pingale Time: 03-31-2017 23:26 Color: CMYK

Three things that set Pocket Aces apart from content players like AIB, TVF, Scoopwhoop, and The Culture Machine

BY SHEPHALI BHATT MUMBAI

“So, what do you think of Pocket Aces,” we ask a popular local content player. “They’re trying to do what ScoopWhoop does and that itself is a copy of BuzzFeed,” the person says, promptly. A sweeping state-ment, but not too far from the truth given Buzzfeed and Scoopwhoop (along with AIB, TVF, Y Films) are competition for this content company, set up in December 2013, that runs Filter Copy (multi-media snackable content), Dice Media (long form videos), and Gobble (all things food). What differentiates them in this tiny content ecosystem?

Is it the fact that they recently got ̀ 20 crore worth of funding from invest-ment world’s Dharma/YRF equivalent - Sequoia Capital India? It’s not like Sequoia was the first investor on board, but it was the one that put Pocket Aces on the map, so to speak. “Even inves-tors who disappeared on us initially, were suddenly eager to fund us post the Sequoia news,” says Ashwin Suresh, the founder. But this isn’t the only content player to have gotten professional VC funding (Controversy’s current favourite TVF was backed by Tiger Global, early last year).

Is it the client list that boasts of names from Marico’s Saffola, and Red Chillies Entertainment, to the likes of Tinder,

Swiggy, Furlenco, and Velvetcase? Not quite. You may find overlaps in other players’ clientele. Could Pocket Aces’ content be more relatable, as

pointed out by Kapi l Hetamsaria, founder & CEO of Velvetcase - a de-

signer jewellery marketplace that has collaborated with the company several times? But then, how would you explain the traction all other contenders get?

To find out what really distinguishes them, we met the core team in their

Andheri office, twice. Six hours of con-versations later, we found three things that set them apart:

They are outsiders to the galaxyPocket Aces lists three people as co-found-ers: Ashwin Suresh, Anirudh Pandita, and Aditi Shrivastava (also Suresh’s life partner). All of them have grown up out-side India, in either Dubai or Kuwait, and worked as investment bankers at Citi, Bank of America, and Goldman Sachs, respectively. In 2011, the trio moved to

India after having worked in the US and the UK. “We don’t have a celeb circle,” says Pandita. “Being a Ranbir Kapoor in the film industry has its advantages. Even if 15 of your films flop, it doesn’t matter. Shah Rukh Khan doesn’t have that luxury. It’s a disadvantage of not be-ing a part of a circle.” It’s an advantage too because you bring a fresh perspective of your own, he feels.

Plus the three engineers-turned-invest-ment bankers-turned-contentwallahs have their Ivy League alumni networks that very few others in the space can boast of, with names like University of Illinois, The Wharton School, and Princeton University. “It really opened the doors of investment for us here. I always say, a Wharton degree is like a membership of the Breach Candy Club,” he quips.

They want to make everyone rich. Even the Office boyThe most interesting facet of the Pocket Aces story, for us, is their office boy Vinod Arole. Arole is a 23 year old who isn’t even a “matric pass” and yet can beat several educated adults at Kya aap paanchvi pass se tez hain! He was Suresh’s find, a lift man in his building who would always be watching some or

the other English content on his phone inside the elevator. “One day I get into the lift coming back from the gym and he points at the stuff I’m holding and says: Resistance bands? I was blown away by the kind of exposure he had. Vinod is a clear case of under-utilised potential. A super intelligent guy who would’ve topped out at 50 earning `30,000 a month at best. Give him a chance and he’ll make 10 times that amount,” says Suresh. Arole now handles company’s accounting management besides being the office boy whose favourite pastime is watching NatGeo and WWE. “My vi-

sion is to have him run the produc-tion in the company, someday. It’s all about processes, making

them efficient, and judgment calls. And he has good judgement

calls,” adds Suresh. Pandita chimes in: “One of the key rea-

sons we created this company was to give people a chance to make a viable ca-reer out of content.” Pocket Aces counts two people as its chief writers: Kartik Krishnan (long form) and Dhruv Sehgal (short form). Sehgal (25) wrote their most popular web series to date - Little Things - with next to no experience in commer-cial writing for digital. “Kartik has been writing for eight years or so and has some films to show but he knows the struggle he went through. Here, he has put out so much content,” says Suresh.

They’ve not sold out. Yet.Unlike several other startups and in-

dies that want publicity from the word go, Pocket Aces relied on its content to get the much-needed foot in the door. Where some content players succumbed to clauses like “taking the brand name 42 times during the entire web series,” Pocket Aces created 14 pieces of content for Velvetcase in a span of 3.5 months with no complaints from the audience, claims Shrivastava. “Even then the brand’s search traffic went up. It shows we were facilitating conversion without fooling the audience.” The audience is smart and on digital, they can easily tell you if you do something uncool. Pandita recounts one such critique they got for a video on Gobble: “It was for a strawberry kheer where someone said it was just gar-nished with the berries. That way one can make ‘Chammach kheer’ also because you put a spoon in it.” No ‘yeh bik gayi hai Gormint’ comments yet though and they plan to keep it that way.

shephali.bhatt@timesgroup.com

BACK WITH A BURP BY AMIT BAPNA MUMBAI

The reactions on social media to Frooti Fizz, which was launched last month, have ranged from disbelief to trepi-dation to anticipation. Sample these: “This will

either be the greatest or the worst move for Frooti.”(Deepak D’Souza on Twitter) “Iwonder how that’s going to taste now.”(Muhammad Farid on Twitter).

But Nadia Chauhan, joint MD and CMO, Parle Agro is confident that with Frooti Fizz, the burp is being retained, the value of which is immense in this category. “With this launch, we are talking to not just the mango consumer but a much larger audience, including all kinds of synthetic drinkers looking at healthier alternatives,” she says.

The launch timing is significant. Carbonated beverages have been fac-ing sagging sales and an imminent threat of a sugar tax. In such an envi-ronment, adding fizz to Frooti does not seem that far-fetched an idea. Chauhan aspires to take the fruit plus fizz seg-ment — which was created by Parle Agro with Appy Fizz some years ago — to a `4000 crore category by 2022. Says Chauhan, “We are not trying to adopt

something from somewhere and adapt to here. Our R&D systems are nowhere else but India.”

At `600 crore, Frooti is Parle Agro’s

largest brand with a 65% share. This launch hopes to makes the flagship sexy by adding carbonation to the age old Frooti formula. Which

may lead to a better connect with the 18-35 year old consumer, a segment that has not been a very strong one for Frooti, thanks to the brand’s moor-ings as a drink preferred by children. Explains Jitender Dabas, CSO, McCann Worldgroup, “carbonation essentially adds excitement to the mouthfeel of a fruit beverage. It can increase the ap-

peal amongst young people and expand the segment of fruit

based drinks.” The ex-tension could add back some ‘fizz’ to the mother brand’s equity as well,

adds Dabas. As per the Nielsen Global New Product

Innovation Survey, 63% of consumers say they like it

when manufacturers introduce new products, and 57% say they

purchased a new product during their last shopping trip.

The launch is being backed by a mas-sive ̀ 100 crore marketing budget: Alia Bhatt is the face of the campaign cre-ated by New York-based Sagmeister & Walsh. In addition, the brand has also announced its first ever association with the IPL (Indian Premier League) as on-air sponsor this year.

Many feel the Frooti Fizz extension is a risk, but then the choices fac-ing a 32 year old brand in an ultra-competitive category, are limited.

Views Siddharth S Singh, asso-ciate professor - marketing, ISB, Hyderabad and Mohali, “Leveraging the popular

Frooti brand to extend offerings into this category makes sense for Parle, since the alternative would be to create a new brand which would be expensive and significantly riskier.”

The fizzy fruit drink is still a small part of this underpenetrated category. In total, 1.25 billion people in India drink 5.9 billion litres of soft drinks in a year, as per Nielsen. This makes India’s per capita soft drink consump-tion large, but 1/20th that of the US, 1/10th of Kuwait, 1/8th of Thailand and Philippines. The potential is there. As per ad-man turned filmmaker Milind Dhaimade, who has worked on Frooti for many years at Everest, every 5 years or so, a generation growing on Frooti grows out of it, and to remain in that space is a constant challenge. Activities like these could help in keeping it desir-able, he says.

amit.bapna@timesgroup.com

Jessica Walsh, partner at New York based design agency Sagmeister & Walsh shares the experience of work-ing with her first ever Indian client, and the Frooti Fizz creative journey

The Frooti Fizz journeyWe’ve worked on Frooti Fizz since the start, collaborating with the team for naming, creating the logo mark and visual language for the brand, execu-tion of the campaign, strategy for brand personality and everything in between. We teamed up with director Clim from Hornet, who conceptualised a simple short film which illustrates a mango turn-ing into Frooti Fizz. We also developed a library of optical illusion patterns that trick the eye: they appear to animate and move even when the images are static. This will surely stop viewers in their tracks when they see a moving billboard or bus stop shelter that’s not even a screen!The branding challengeThe challenge was to merge the two vi-sual languages from the existing brands (Frooti and Appy Fizz) so the consumer would feel the familiarity while also recognising it’s a fresh new evolution of these popular brands.The India connectionThis is our first client in the Indian mar-ket. Nadia reached out to us to do the brand campaign for Frooti several years ago, and after that, for Appy Fizz. A tough client?The Parle team are decisive and opinion-ated but in the best way possible. They have a great sense and instinct for what will work well in the market. It’s been a collaboration and organic process of working together to achieve the best result. Any India plans?Our goal has always been to stay small, which allows us to oversee each project carefully and give it all our passion. For now, we’re not planning on expanding.

FROOTI GETS FIZZY

indievibe

Each and every one of us unknowingly played a part in the obesity problem - Indra Nooyi

MADE FOR INDIA 2

Can Frooti Fizz, with its ‘mango meets fizz’ formula, reignite passion for the 32 year old brand?

“NADIA AND TEAM ARE DECISIVE AND OPINIONATED”

PRESENTING THE BRAND ENGAGEMENT INDEX AS ON 22ND MARCH 2017

The weekly Twitter Advertiser Index lists the brands which have generated most engage-

ment with users on the platform

The index looks at the live list of all advertisers on the platform and measures the total number

of user engagements with all the tweets that they sent out that week - specifically this is a sum of

all the replies, retweets and favourites across all tweets that week.

the twitterindex

1. @OppoMobileIndiaFollowing the buzz Oppo created on the platform for the launch of the F3 plus, this week the conversations were

around the launch event itself. Oppo drove con-versations by asking people to tweet

with #OppoF3Plus and promoted a live Periscope feed of the launch. Over 170,000 people watched the video. This sneak peek into an otherwise exclusive event generated a lot of engagement.

2. @FlipkartFlipkart generated a wave of conversa-tions around the brand’s

#FlipkartElectronicSale by throwing rid-dles and other forms of gamified content at users. We’ve seen a lot of brands run contests on Twitter but Flipkart’s contest stood out from the lot.

3. @ YouTubeIndiaYouTube India continued its strong run in the Brand Index this week by engag-ing with the YouTube community on Twitter. While the past week was about building buzz for the Fan Fest in Mumbai,

this time it was about celebrating the Fest. The brand continued to lead conver-sations with engaging content from influential content part-ners. The

YouTube Fan Fest emoji continued to en-courage people to keep tweeting about the fest and to YouTube. It also gave fans who couldn’t make it to the fest an exclu-sive sneak peek into the event.

4. @RenaultIndiaAnother steady performance from Renault that continued to drive engage-ment around the colours of the Kwid Climber (blue and orange). It asked peo-ple to continue tweeting to the handle with their creative take on the colours.

5. @AmazonInAmazon used this week to drive con-versations and awareness around the

launch of the Redmi 4A - which was launched on the platform, targeting a fairly large and enthu-siastic tech

audience on Twitter in India. They used a video asset to drive the conversation. The video got over 540,000 views till last count.

THE AGENCY

THE CLIENT “IT’S BEEN THE MOST PRODUCTIVE CLIENT-AGENCY RELATIONSHIP” Nadia Chauhan, Joint MD and CMO, Parle Agro on the three year old long-distance part-nership with New York-based Sagmeister & Walsh

Keeping it simple has workedIt has been the most pro-ductive client agency relationship. In the last 13 years or so, I have not enjoyed adver-tising as much as I have in the last 3 working with Jessica (Walsh) and S&W.

Planning (and working) across continents

This is our third project with

S&W (after Frooti and Appy Fizz rebrand-ing). We plan the

entire year, in advance.

There are no last-minute deadlines. We use an online collabo-

ration tool called Basecamp which allows us a full

view of all ongoing projects and the status.

Their USP: Collaboration Their collaborative approach is so different from the Indian way of working which is all about being protective and territorial – individuals as well as the companies. Each of my campaigns in the last three years have delivered more than any of those in the past have and each has been a col-laboration with people from different countries. There have been times when we have been in a conference-

call with 5 countries sitting together across the globe. The entire process is focussed around growing the creative thought and nothing else.

Pleasure of working with a design-focussed agencyS&W is a boutique agency, primarily design-driven, and currently, we are the only ones they do advertising for. Design as a discipline is not as evolved and hence deployed enough in India by brands, when they should, in a market like this that is so visual and so colourful.

What makes investors bullish about content market scal-ing up and their investment in the likes of Pocket Aces? Sequoia Capital, interest-ingly, declined to comment. Another investor, Pranav Pai, Partner at 3one4 Capital, says: “As a content creator in this environment, the op-tionality in revenue streams is much stronger when you can demonstrate repeat-able connections to several

slices of the audience online.” More helpful than Sequoia’s silence, it still didn’t answer our question though. And maybe it is too early to have an answer. As another early-stage investor in the com-pany says on the condition of anonymity: “Monetisation follows engagement and con-tent has good engagement in India. You can’t connect all the dots when you make early investment.”

Each of my campaigns

in the last three years have delivered more than any of the

campaigns in the past

The trouble when it’s showtime in PokerOnline content has not been monetised well in India. a) YouTube reportedly makes little money off it.

b) The product is the video. Success of one doesn’t guarantee success of the other.

c) It is dependent on celebrities who can get too demanding once they attain even a modicum of fame.

d) There needs to be constant investment in pro-duction which may not always justify the returns because traditional clients still don’t spare the lion’s share of their marketing budget for digital.

Aces In My Pocket

SIDETAKEApple’s latest hire is a sign that it’s focusing on services, not devices

Gabriel Cubbage, Apple’s latest hire should give you a good clue about where its priorities lie.The new guy doesn’t have anything to do with phones. Or watches. Or cars. Or aug-mented real-ity glasses. Apple’s new-est employee is Shiva Rajaraman,

a veteran product manager who most recently worked at Spotify, and Google before that. According to his LinkedIn profile, Rajaraman was responsible for Spotify’s end-to-end consumer experi-ence, “including apps, features, and user experience”. At Google, he worked on recommendations, search and helped creators make money. In short, he’s helped two of the best software companies get to where they are. That matters for Apple. Revenue from its “services” business was up 18% to $7.1 billion (£5.6 billion) in Q1 this year. That’s more revenue than the iPad, and faster growth than any other product category including iPhone.

Source: Business Insider

(L-R): Ashwin Suresh, Anirudh Pandita, Aditi Shrivastava, Kartik Krishnan, Dhruv Sehgal, and Vinod Arole

Read the full story online at etbrandequity.com

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CCI NG 3.7 Product: ETMumbaiBS PubDate: 05-04-2017 Zone: BrandEquity Edition: 1 Page: BEPER1 User: sandesh.pingale Time: 03-31-2017 23:29 Color: CMYK

GLOCAL BUZZ 3The biggest constraint of the next 100 years of computing is the idea of metaphors - Evan Spiegel

“We were never a chateaubriand or Olympia agency”DDB Mudra’s outgoing group CEO and MD Madhukar Kamath on the digital divide and what’s next

BY RAVI BALAKRISHNAN

MUMBAI

Mudra for a long time prided itself on being the original Indian agency in spite of a minority stake from DDB. Any memorable stories from then?When I met AG Krishnamurthy and joined Mudra in 1988, I had to unlearn all that I’d learnt in 10 years in the business. The top 3 to 4 rankings had never been disturbed. And here was a start-up aiming to crack the Top 5! One that was based out of Ahmedabad and run by a non-ad professional — AGK began as a mu-seum curator and came in from Reliance and Vimal. He did that by getting a lot of us young-sters and giving us responsibility. I had to grow Delhi and by 1990, Mudra was the third largest agency. A key chain we were given said 15 to 50 which was about the ambition to grow from ̀ 15 crore in billing to ̀ 50 crore.

We were not a chateaubriand or Olympia agency — the chateaubriand steaks were associated with agencies in Mumbai and Olympia was the watering hole for agencies out of Kolkata. In Delhi, we had a large office in Safdarjung Enclave with 10 bedrooms and chandeliers called Mudra House. Mudra dreamed bigger than it was: the logic was let’s get a big place, and grow to fill it up. We didn’t have enough money to do up the office.

In 1990, Alan Pilkington of DDB was visit-ing to formalise a tie up with Mudra — he was also in talks with MAA in Bangalore. I sent our creative and management trainees, peo-ple like Balki, Ramki, Pankaj Mridul, Vivek Srivastava — who would go on to head agen-cies, with `50,000 and told them to go shop. We decorated one full floor till a curve in the staircase. I made sure Alan never went up the stairs! (Laughs).

We had very little business when we started, but our huge conference room gave the im-pression of it being a large agency. My entire new business strategy was getting clients over to the office for our second meeting. Our first MNC client was Sanjay Sehgal of Nestle who’d previously worked with HTA. We called in people from other offices to fill the desks, since we didn’t have enough people at the time and he was coming to inspect us.

What were some of the things that you learned to do and learned not to do through your time in advertising?AGK taught me to be the wind beneath the wings; that you can command from the rear, learn to trust and recognise ability. That coupled wonderfully well with DDB’s Keith Reinhardt who spoke of the freedom to fail and the freedom from fear.

Some of my other bosses taught me what not to do — may all their souls rest in peace. For instance, do not micromanage when you are

60; on who is getting what facilities, who is coming in at what time, how the cars are allo-cated and things like that. The second lesson: as you grow, don’t walk with your head back-wards. Watching your back makes you para-noid, and you never go forward. The insecu-rity it spreads in your team is incredible. Also as you grow and succeed, never be an ostrich. Never bury your head in the sand and become oblivious to the world around you. Never keep harping back to the good old days. Hopefully, I’ve never repeated these mistakes!

Your successors are a young, digitally driven team. What do you believe people on the wrong side of the digital divide need to do to remain relevant? I don’t think anyone is on the wrong side; they are just not taking the effort to be on the right side. People have adapted before: from black and white to colour, from only print to TV. You had to learn a different language in terms of media, creative and execution. If you want to be relevant, you should reorient yourself rather than lamenting that you are not rel-evant any more. You need to be thinking ‘how do we build business where there are none today?’ Also, you ought to work with bright youngsters and great talent; that enthusiasm rubs off on you.

What’s next on your agenda? I’ve not thought anything through. One of the things I’ve always wanted to do is travel. Doing all the 29 states of India, spending time at each of them, tops the list. I’m already get-ting a few calls: for once, I have the pleasure of sitting back and listening to options.

ravi.balakrshnan@timesgroup.com

SOME OF MY BOSSES

TAUGHT ME WHAT NOT

TO DO . FOR INSTANCE,

DO NOT MI-CROMANAGE

WHEN YOU ARE SIXTY

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1. Professor Anup Kumar Sinha Former professor of Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta

2. Kamal Basu Head of Marketing & PR - Volkswagen Passenger Cars Volkswagen Group Sales India Pvt. Limited

3. S Yesudas, MD & Co-founder, TRIGGERBRIDGE, Ex MD Vizeum

4. Thomas Xavier, solopreneur at Transformer, a creative brand advi-sory, Ex-Chairman & National Creative Director, Orchard Advertising (A Leo Burnett India Agency)

Knowledge Series BRAND EQUITY Times Ahead

Nestle’s chairman & MD Suresh Narayanan tells BEthe FMCG’s Educate The Girl Child programme is not a flash in the pan

BY RAVI BALAKRISHNAN

MUMBAI

Why did you decide on the Educate the Girl Child initiative?From an economic development perspective, you can’t leave out half of humankind. It’s been said when you educate a girl, you educate a family and it has positive impacts on parameters like infant mortali-ty, maternal mortality, child nutri-tion etc. Secondly, in partnership with Nanhi Kali, a highly respect-ed NGO, we are trying to move the dial on consciousness, but more importantly in contribution and action. What I hope and pray is this motivates people individually and collectively to be part of mea-sures and steps to educate the girl child or contribute to Nanhi Kali.

The third part is as a company, we have numerous ‘creating shared value’ initiatives. One of them is the healthy kids programme which has 150,000 beneficiaries. We notice girl children drop out really early, because they are not being allowed to continue school, or due to other issues related to hy-giene and safety. To continue this programme, it’s important we ad-dress the issue of educating the girl child. It’s not an emotional issue or one of conscience, but one of social and economic development.

You changed the packaging of your flagship products to push the mes-sage. Was that a hard decision? It’s a pioneering step. But we took the call as a company. If you are passionate about a cause and want to valorise that purpose, you have to do things differently.

It can’t just be communication. Kit-Kat, Nescafe and Maggi reach so many homes; we did that on over a 100 million packs. To reach people through traditional me-dia is one thing. But it’s very satisfying to put the message on a favourite brand that the consum-ers have in their hands.

What sort of an impact did it have? Ver y positive. It proved we were seri-ous about the cause and made fundamental changes in the approach taken to communicating. Our pas-sion resonated with consumers. Also, as an organisation of over 7,000 people, we have a young population within the company.

And this had a salutary impact on their appreciation of purpose and the role played by the organisa-

tion in addressing larger social issues.

What have the results been?A fairly substantial jump in the number of people

a c c e s si n g N a n h i Kali and

also in contributions. There’s no commercial interest in for us.

What have you planned for the next phase of the campaign?We have to constantly look for creative solutions in terms of le-veraging print and other modes of communication in order to disseminate this very important objective. Which is where the col-laboration with The Times Group and Power Of Print comes up. We are excited by the unique oppor-tunity to get the creative juices of different people and agencies across the country flowing, and to have a national platform that The Times Group offers to propagate the cause we espouse.

Why did you decide to partner with Power of Print? The Times of India is a very re-

spected and ubiquitous source of news for the kind of people we want to address. And secondly, there was a mutual synergy. The Times Group is looking at ways and means of enhancing creative content in print so it remains relevant, and we are looking to enhance creativity in our com-munication to get our message across in a stronger, more imagi-native way.

What according to you would be the ideal outcome of this partnership?We’d like to see that educating the girl child initiative translates into greater awareness and admission of children into school. Secondly, we will be well served if commu-nication through Power of Print leads to an increased awareness of the cause.

Considering this is a problem that’s not going away any time soon, is Educate The Girl Child going to be a priority 5 or 10 years down the line? For us, this is at the centre of our nutrition education programme. If it has to succeed, girl children need to be part of it. It’s not a flavour of the month or a flavour of the year initiative. It’s likely to be a sustain-able platform in the future too.

ravi.balakrishnan@timesgroup.com

SIDETAKEWorld’s biggest startup campus

When it comes to hobbies, some tech billionaires are off trying to buy land in New Zealand to pre-pare for Doomsday. Not Xavier Niel, who is one of France’s richest men and worth £7 bil-lion, according to Forbes. Niel is spending his millions turning an old railway depot in Paris into what he claims is the world’s biggest startup campus. It’s the first space of its kind in the city, housing up to 1,000 international startups under one roof. The building is based in Paris’ 13th arrondissement, an area mostly known for warehouses and Chinese restaurants, local VCs told Business Insider. Station F is still a building site, but the first startups are due to move in dur-ing the first week of July..

Source: Business Insider

Not A ‘Flavour Of The Year’ Initiative

Read the full story online at etbrandequity.com

3THE ECONOMIC TIMES APRIL 05-11, 2017

CCI NG 3.7 Product: ETMumbaiBS PubDate: 05-04-2017 Zone: BrandEquity Edition: 1 Page: BEPER2 User: sandesh.pingale Time: 03-31-2017 23:29 Color: CMYK

SBI’s CMO Dinesh Menon says, “We were initially not thinking of doing the rebranding together with the merger. But once the merger got de-ferred due to demoneti-sation, we felt it was the right thing to do; to kill two birds with one stone.”

SBI has revamped its blue and giving the B a few de-signer touches, all of which resonated well during re-search. Oddly enough, in spite of topping the Twitter index several weeks run-ning, Menon believes, “We’ve not done a good job of com-municating our wide suite of digital products. We want to contemporise and be seen as a progressive brand. We are working on a dramatic digi-tal product and once we do that, it will add up to the digi-tal face of SBI.” Abbreviating the name, while done and undone with monotonous regularity by ad agencies and the like (see the change from J Walter Thompson to JWT to back again), is quite a departure from convention-al thinking at SBI. But what

won the day for the abbrevi-ated name is the belief that it is more in synch with today’s generation and technology.

What’s going to be missing from the logo is The Banker To Every Indian line. The decision is purely design led. Menon assures us hur-riedly “It doesn’t mean we’ve ceased being a banker to ev-ery Indian.” The idea is to declutter and have a more easily visible and identifi-able logo on advertisements or sponsorships. Menon doesn’t anticipate anyone missing the line too much: “We’ve been living that phi-losophy a long time. We’d like to believe people see us as the

bank of India and therefore everyone’s bank. And so it’s time we had the guts to drop it. Like they say less is more.”

W hat mat ters more than logos and taglines to customers old and

new is service. And while SBI weathered demonetisa-tion fairly well – it shot up the ranks on Brand Equity’s Most Trusted Brands sur-vey from 35 to 5 – its deci-sion to review charges and impose fines on customers who didn’t meet minimum levels of deposits has earned it copious ire. At the time of going to print, messages of dubious provenance floated around on social media, some making the charges out to be a lot worse than they actually were. It’s an indication of how fragile brand reputations are in an age of hair trigger reactions, mass rage posting and even quicker sharing. Problems t hat no a mou nt of logo tweaking and contemporis-ing can fix.

ravi.balakrishnan@timesgroup.com

Clearly, HUL’s letter to Amul was met with an unsatisfactory response thus landing the mat-

ter in Bombay High Court. While the com-pany did not respond to

questions about its gen-eral approach in these

cases, and when and under what cir-

cumstances it opts for le-gal recourse, on the cur-

r ent m at t er in court it said:

“ H U L m a n u -f a c t u r e s a n d

markets both ice creams and frozen

desserts in India. Both contain milk/

milk solids and do not contain vanaspati. We

filed the petition so as to stop the airing of the

factually incorrect adver-tisement on frozen desserts

being aired by Amul as it was creating apprehen-sions among consum-

ers.” Self-regulation is key

today so that the company is

able to define the rules of engage-ment in the future. Company in-siders, who wish not to be named, told BE that typically HUL prefers to sort out differences out of court instead of being strapped with lengthy and often expensive legal battles. In 2011, for instance, in an unprecedented move the com-pany appointed four r et i r e d HC jud ge s as independent om-budsmen in di f fer-ent regions to resolve cases filed against the company by its sup-pliers, distributors, stockists and retail-ers, as reported by The Economic Times.HUL’s executive direc-tor – legal Dev Bajpai told ET then, “The idea is to have an al-ternate dispute resolu-tion mechanism with the whole philosophy of customer centricity and the main reason is resolution of matters.”

In another case that could have shaken up the fairness cream category, industry insiders told us when HUL found its patented Fair & Lovely formula active in its competition’s premium cream, the company chose to resolve the mat-ter out of court. It was decided that the competition’s formula would be

tweaked and the patent infringe-ment would therefore be invalid.

While combative advertising is not new, we’ve seen this genre of ads make a vengeful comeback in recent times. The device’s most pro-lific user today is Patanjali, every one of its ads made to expose “real facts” about the competitions’ prod-

ucts. Brand consultant Harish Bijoor, and a for-mer HUL employee him-self says, “To an extent I do believe Amul always had this campaign in its back-room. The bra-vado to take it out into the drawing rooms of Indians has come from the Patanjali-style of ad-vertising. Patanjali is the new Indian Samurai on this count!” Bijoor tells us to expect a lot more ac-tion of a similar kind for today the eco-system for

this type of ad warfare is just right. The current Cold War flare-up isn’t

HUL and Amul’s first public brawl over ‘ice-cream versus frozen des-sert’. As of this writing, Bombay High Court had provided no interim relief to HUL and Amul’s ad contin-ued airing. Whatever the final ver-dict may be, what we know for sure is that it will certainly leave one party in a summer of discontent.

delshad.irani@timesgroup.com

We live in a world in which courage is in less supply than genius - Peter Thiel

Continued from Page 1 >>

BE CLASSIC 3

Here are the teams that will be going to the Cannes Lions 2017, having proved themselves in a tough fight, squaring off against the best, brightest and youngest in the country

Through the course of the Young Lions, one felt some of the gloom about the ad-vertising and mar-

keting business recede. If the industry keeps some of these bright women and men in its fold – all under the age of 30 — things aren’t likely to be as bad as the numerous doomsayers would have you believe.

Irrespective of category, the best presentations came from a place of clear-headed thinking, a great strategic un-derstanding of the brief and the target consumers and an awareness of the communica-tion tools at their disposal.

Like we mentioned, these victories have been earned the hard way. The judges were not in a particularly obliging mood and teams were fre-quently grilled on the finer as-pects of their plans and asked to justify their decisions.

To those who didn’t win this time around, there’s always next year (provided you are still under 30). To those who did, congratulations. Make India Proud.

Young Lions’17: From Cubs To KingsMARKETING BRIEF

THE MEDIA BRIEF

THE PRINT BRIEF

(L-R):Hemant Shringy, ECD, BBDO India; Ashish Khazanchi, managing partner, Enormous; Amer Jaleel, chairman & CCO, Mullen Lintas; Tista Sen, SVP & NCD, J Walter Thompson

(L-R): Sanjeev Bhargava, director, Times of India; Anitha Krishnan, marketing head, Birla Estate; Sujit Ganguly, head - brand and corporate communications, ICICI Bank; LK Gupta, founder, CMO Now

“The teams that stood out in my judging session were the ones that came with a strategic thinking as the foremost requirement, followed by the clarity of thought and other parameters. Overall it was a good bunch, the case studies were real, practical and real life studies and hence were hotly contested.”

— Sujit Ganguli, ICICI Bank

“All the judges felt that while there were some really smart as well as bold ideas, none of them estab-lished a strong business linkage. None of them had done a thorough job of understand-ing barriers to the category and why competition does well. Nobody used any props also. Presentation doesn’t just mean a PPT.”

— Kartik Sharma,Maxus South Asia

“There were some great ideas and good presen-tations but you don’t judge just that. You judge whether the team that wins here will be able to fight the best at Cannes Lions.”

—Amer Jaleel, Mullen Lintas

Mithila Saraf and Nishad Jagtap (Famous Innovations)

Sachit Handa and Vikram Shashimohan (Hindustan Unilever)

Ronnie Thomas and Tejas Shah (PHD Media)

(Top to bottom): Manas Mishra,MD, Mediant; Tanmay Mohanty, group CEO, Zenith India; Kartik Sharma, MD, Maxus South Asia; Premjeet Sodhi, COO - Initiative, IPG Mediabrands; NP Satyamurthy, ED, DDB Mudra Group

The online battle between Chiptart and Parazon is heating up with high blitz ad campaigns, mega sales and discounts. Research reveals brand loyalty is very low and consumers are merely looking for the best deal. They compare prices and buy from the site that has the cheapest option. Your task is to build loyalty through differentiation beyond price. As the market-ing head of Chiptart, how will you achieve this? Come up with an all-round marketing plan that im-proves percentage of repeat customers, loyalty levels, conversion rates and overall value per transaction.

Budget: ̀ 150 crore

In a market cluttered with payment wallets and wallet options from banks, your client, PHIM, is a late entrant. The advantage you have is this app is backed by the government and works even on feature phones. Come up with the media strategy to make people, especially the non-tech savvy ones in lower SECs, adopt this app.

Budget: ̀ 200 crore

Hindustan UnilawyerWill SBI’s New Logo...

HUL PREFERS TO SORT ITS-DIFFERENCES WITH OTHER BRANDS OUT OF COURT, SAY COMPA-NY INSIDERS

SIDETAKE:Ad blocking has grown far beyond a mere niche phenomenon into standard prac-tice for many savvy Internet users. eMarketer, the lead-ing research firm for marketing in a digi-tal world, estimates that about 25% of the US Internet users were employing ad blockers as of the end of 2016. But the prac-tice remains skewed toward desktop/laptop computers and is less common on smart-phones. In an earlier media era, ad blocking consisted of going off to the bathroom when commercials came onto the TV screen. In the digital era, it is a bit more complicated: Consumers deploy technological means of blocking ads, while advertisers and pub-lishers try to block the

blockers. This growing usage of ad blockers wwis leading to new challenges for anyone who needs to get their product in front of the eyeballs of readers and viewers. eMarketer has put together the leading report on ad blocking that analyzes data from the com-pany’s latest estimates and forecast on ad blocking in the US It shows that the practice is much more common via desktops/laptops

than smartphones, and that it is concentrated among younger inter-

net users.

Here are some key takeaways from the report:

The percentage of people using ad blockers is grow-ing at a significant

rate, though blocking established much of its presence earlier in the decade. eMarketer expects three in 10 internet users will be using blockers by the end of 2018.

Desktops/laptops—rather than smart-phones—are the main venue for ad blocking. The proportion of desktop/laptop inter-net users who deploy blockers is more than twice as large as the proportion of smart-phone users who do so. (However, as noted be-

low, our definition of ad blocking excludes some smartphone actions that can have the effect of screening out ads a user might otherwise receive, even though this does not fall into the technical category of ad blocking.)

Unsurprisingly, younger people are more likely than their elders to use ad block-ers. But the younger also conduct much of their digital activity on smartphones (where ad blocking is less feasible), which likely limits the amount of blocking that occurs in their typical digital day.

Ad blocking is still in a volatile stage, and it is possible that some sudden advance in technology could greatly alter the rate of blocker adoption by consumers.

Source: Business Insider

30% of all Internet users will ad block by 2018

Before

After

Reading a newspaper first thing in the morning is a strong habit with millions of Indians. However in re-cent years, young digital natives prefer to read news on apps. This is not good news for the newspaper brands; as current loyalists age, the morning habit will die out. What should newspaper brands do to build interest for the young audiences who are today indif-ferent? How do they make them readers and get back to the daily habit?

Budget: ̀ 100 crore

Regn.No.MAHENG/2002/6711Volume 16 Issue No. 14Published for the Proprietors, Bennett Coleman & Company Ltd. by R. Krishnamurthyat The Times OfIndia Building, Dr. D.N.Road, Mumbai 400 001Tel. No. (022) 6635 3535, 2273 3535, Fax- (022)-2273 1144 and printed by him at (1) The Times of India

Suburban Press, Akurli Road, Western Express Highway, Kandivili (E), Mumbai 400 101. Tel. No. (022) 28872324, 28872930, Fax- (022) 28874230 (2) TheTimes of India Print City, Plot No. 4, T.T.C. Industrial Area, Thane Belapur Road, Airoli, Navi Mumbai-400708 and (3) TIMES PRESS, Plot No. 5A, Road No. 1, IDANacharam Ranga Reddy District, Hyderabad-500076. Editor: Ravi Balakrishnan(Responsible for selection of news under PRB Act). © All rights reserved.

Reproduction in whole or in part without the written permission of the Publisher is prohibited.

4THE ECONOMIC TIMES APRIL 05-11, 2017

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