Moderated by Jeffrey Tull of Deloitte, the panel included the following distinguished speakers:

Pushkaraj Shenai, CEO, Lakme Lever

Mahesh Murthy, Founder, Pinstorm. Co-founder, Seedfund

Nissan Joseph, Managing Director, Crocs India Pvt Ltd.

Rajesh Jain, Managing Director and CEO, Lacoste India

Rajiv Nair, Chief Executive Officer, Celio* Future Fashion Limited

Richa Kar, Founder and CEO, Zivame.com

Taru Dahiya, Head of Sales – India, Google for Work

Jeffrey Tull of Deloitte observed that strength, challenges and opportunities are different for every brand. We rely on individuals to bring that brand alive in consumer’s mind.

Speaking about the immensely popular brand Lakme Lever, CEO Pushakaraj Shenai said sustaining the brand was the biggest challenge. However, to him it was as much an opportunity as a challenge. Out of the various factors of brand building, purpose and passion were the most important as also personalisation. Not just consumers, employees to have feel positive towards the brand. “We are in the service business. If our associates or consumers are not feeling good, then we need to re-think on our strategy,” he said.

Richa Kar, Founder and CEO, Zivame.com spoke about the challenge of creating a good consumer experience in the digital space. She said that since online retail does not have certain elements of offline retail such as high engagement, high face value business, product and experience play vital role. We need to constantly communicate with consumers to know their needs and build on it. In both channels the level of experience are totally different. There are emotional and logical factors too involved.

Mahesh Murthy, Founder, Pinstorm. Co-founder, Seedfund said it was always fun to watch people love products. Rajesh Jain, Managing Director and CEO, Lacoste India to inspire positive feelings towards the brand, it’s important to believe in brand environment and continue to do lot of things. Especially in offline four factor especially matter: Product and quality, Innovation, Freshness and Consumer services. If the consumer feels pampered, it really makes a big difference to brand perception.

Taru Dahiya, Head of Sales – India, Google for Work felt that finding the perfect brand was like finding the perfect partner. What are the things people look for their perfect partner? Nature, character, personality and compatibility. She advised that brand custodians should listen to the consumers, show them they are there out see the difference. “Once you are connected with consumers you create a magical spark,” she said.

Rajiv Nair, Chief Executive Officer, Celio* Future Fashion Limited feels that how passionate you are about a brand is where the difference lies. Great assortments and great products and consistently reinventing the brand and high focus on staff and services is very important.

Nissan Joseph, Managing Director, Crocs India Pvt Ltd, it is important to focus on insights of sustaining brand and the brand grows eventually. He added that we need to create an experience without walking to the store. Extraordinary brands are built by going out of way to connect with consumers.

The retail environment is changing, competition is increasing and market share is fragmenting. The consumer believes in “Now”. They want immediate product at their home.

In such a scenario for a brand to be liked, there are two important aspects according to Taru Dahiya 1) Immediacy and loyalty 2) Intend and Identity. The intent to purchase and identity of company matters a lot.

According to Mahesh Murthy it’s not just consumers but even partners of the brand need to stay loyal. We as brand have to protect consumers and create an amazing experience. The key to loyal is getting people loyal before you get loyal.

Monish Chandan, www.monishchandan.wordpress.com

Shoppable Media is a new way to make people shop. Though still in its nascent stage, retailers are exploring its potential, especially in developed markets like the US and the UK. Even China is warming up to this concept with several tests being carried out.

What is it?
Shoppable Media enables shoppers to buy online the products being featured in a video. This gives them a depiction of how the product looks or functions. It leads to a higher involvement with a product, resulting in an increased chance of it being purchased either on-line or through a physical store. The video can be featured either on a company website, YouTube or on social media websites.

Currently, the front-runners in this trend are fashion brands like Gucci, Levi’s, Only and Juicy Couture. Non-fashion retailers such as Target (in the US), Home Base and Sanctuary Spa too are experimenting with shoppable media.

The scope
The medium can be used by various products and services such as apparel, fashion accessories and jewelry, footwear, home décor, cosmetics, watches, kitchen appliances, consumer durables, spas, travel and tour and even hotels. For example, in fashion, shoppable media can help the viewer shop the ‘entire look’ of the characters being featured in the video.

In India, the concept is yet to be tested. But with the number of internet users increasing, there is definitely a scope for using this technology. Since visuals have a higher impact, merging visuals with internet shopping could be the next evolution.

India potential
Manoj Kulkarni, Director, Consumer Insights, Nielsen is of the view that with an increase in bandwidth and connectivity, more and more video content would be viewed on the net. With smartphone adoption, content viewing on devices could add to the spontaneity of the purchases as well as richness in real-time decision making.

RAI CEO Kumar Rajagopalan feels that the Indian customers adopt global trends in shopping quickly if given a chance; especially if it is technology-based or a new method of shopping experience. Shoppable media is going through its avatars and various people across the world are experimenting with it. Customers are happier to use their own devices to do shopping. They are willing to use phones and hand-held devices. It is a race for retailers to get share of time of consumers. Hence things like shoppable devices help engage better with customers.

Sridhar Hari, Global Retail Executive, IBM, feels shoppable media has potential in India. Brands that are already using video as a medium to encourage shopping, can take it to the next level by making the video shoppable. “The real challenge is in execution and scaling it up. Back-end operations and processes related to payments, fulfilment and related services must be flawless and needs to be aligned well with customer expectations,” he says.

The Indian shopper is still evolving. When interviewed, a few shoppers said they were more likely to purchase a product if they see it in a video; however, they would rather go to a brick-and-mortar store to make the actual purchase.

Although it may take a few years for India to totally adopt this technology, retailers should gear up to test it. It will be interesting to see which retailer will go for the first mover advantage.

The consumer need for product data
The consumers are interacting with their products and brands very differently than in the past. The convergence of online search and social media engagement has made consumers more connected than ever, and entirely comfortable interacting digitally with brands and retailers.

Today’s consumers don’t care if they shop in a store, via a phone, or online. They want easy-to-use solutions that satisfy their lifestyle needs and preferences. As a result, industry has focused on providing them with a seamless shopping experience.

Moreover consumers have a more holistic view of retail options as a result of online reviews and social media – and they are quickly learning whom to trust. Therefore, Consumers are demanding more digital product information from a trusted source to be linked to the physical products they use and consume across multiple channels – anytime and anywhere. In addition, regulators are becoming advocates for the consumer – demanding greater disclosure and data accuracy.

A deluge of digital data
Data has never been easier to find. At the same time, it has never been as challenging to find accurate data consumers can trust. With this in mind, consumer trust and brand recognition is of utmost importance to businesses today.

To meet consumer expectations and help to connect them with the information that they are looking for, product data must be presented online in a consistent, searchable way that both humans – and machines – can understand and use. This in turn, will enable Retailers and brand owners to comply with emerging regulations for online information sharing.

Leveraging the power of data
If Retail community is to fully utilize the power of the Web and deliver value to their consumers, they must first agree on a standardised way to represent product data using global standards. Without this, brand owners and retailers will not be able to reap the benefits of optimized product visibility and searchability. Worse, search engines will continue struggling to understand and navigate the mountains of unstructured information that companies publish online every day.

To reach a global audience, retailers and brand owners need to agree that accurate and trusted data is essential. Questionable data will turn off potential customers and undermine brands.

There are several critical elements in packaging that attract consumers like shape, size and graphics of the packaging. Shape and size address the utility, handling comfort and storage requirements of a consumer. Graphics define consistency of brand colours, brand element detailing, brand message and clarity of information on the pack.

Since all these elements directly speak to the consumer, a lot of focus is now on pre-media. The primary goal of pre-media is to bring consistency in branding across different pack formats, multiple retail and packing locations. The red colour of Coca-Cola, the purple of Cadbury, the Gold of Five-Star chocolates, Blue of Pepsi, the Yellow and Red of Maggi are what reach consumers first. Consumers find comfort in associating with reliable brand colours. For brands, it becomes the starting point of engaging consumers with their products.

While brand owners today understand this concept, India throws up a lot of unique challenges at them. With a large geography to cover, logistics is a critical challenge. Brand owners address these through multiple packing locations – which create a tremendous challenge in brand image consistency.

The solution for this is to create a right pre-media strategy that organizes communication. Pre-media, through merging production challenges, legal limitation and brand identity elements, helps brand to achieve consistency on the retail shelf. By working as partners to consumer brands, pre-media players also help brand owners to manage critical production networks. A proper pre-media strategy helps brand owners to control cost of production and pass over the value saved to the consumer.

For global majors, India is a land of unique opportunity and challenge. Efforts to bring global brand standards has already picked up in the last few years. This is also pushing home-grown players to better their standards. Today, winning depends to a large extent on communicating with the consumers in a consistent manner. Brands are realizing this, and pre-media is playing a critical role in helping brands achieve their goal.

Malls are in the business to achieve a good return on their investment and efforts as are retailers. Unfortunately, in more cases than we would like to believe, the Vanilla tenants are short-changed! Even more so if they are not part of a large chain or a multinational. This can potentially lead to a breakdown of relationship and even confrontation.

One way to avoid this is to draw up a reasonable agreement, one that is fair to all involved. The central basis being that both retailers and a Mall’s management are in this business together and one cannot thrive without the other. Demanding a fair arrangement via the legal route or government lobbying based on protection laws existing in the West, are other options.

However, I feel that a more practical, quick and sensible option would be to adopt a genuine ‘revenue share’ model. This means the retailer pays as rent, a fixed percentage of sales on a monthly basis without a minimum guarantee. Needless to add this arrangement should be reviewed / renewed after a mutually agreed period. There also could be parameters set with the overall revenue generation zone, category wise. Arbitrary, unilateral decisions is not conducive to a healthy relationship, I hope we all agree.

The rest of the agreement also needs to be modified to bring parity and true collaboration for future growth and stability:

• CAM charges need to get more transparent and uniform; they cannot vary substantially among Malls, without good reason
• Liability clauses should work both ways for failures on obligations or errors from both
• Infrastructure responsibility clearly lies with the Mall management and promised performance here needs to be assured.

With the true spirit of a joint venture, both Malls and Vanilla Retailers can flourish to maximise results, ensuring customer delight. After all, the customer is not only of the Mall or of the retailer alone. The customer is the same for both.

Utopian idealism? Maybe, after all that is the flavour of the season. So, let’s hope for the best. I readily concede that building and running Malls is not easy. But neither is running a retail store. That’s why true collaboration is the only way forward. One cannot dispute that.