TUESDAY, JUNE 12, 2018 W W W. F I N A N C I A L E X P R E S S . C O M ARE M&E COMPANIES CUED IN TO GENERATION Z, THE CONSUMER POWERHOUSE, ASKS TARUN ARORA OF INSHORTS We’re changing! Dear Readers, With effect from Monday, June 18, 2018, your favourite BrandWagon will appear in Financial Express in a feature page format. In our constant effort to stay relevant and more topical with our content, we will now bring BrandWagon to you not once, but twice a week — every Monday and Friday as an integral part of Financial Express. Do keep an eye out for our new avatar, as we continue to offer you the latest, in-depth features and analyses on what’s trending in the world of brands, advertising, media and marketing! Stay tuned… we’re just getting started. — DEVINA JOSHI IN THE NEWS Ogilvy unveils new brand identity The agencywill be‘refounding’as a creative network that Makes Brands Matter.It has also introduced a new organisational structure with three distinct units of OgilvyOne,Ogilvy & MatherAdvertising and Ogilvy Public Relations along with various company sub-brands and specialty brands under a unified group with a common identity,positioning,client service model,and P&L. Rana Barua and CLA part ways He had joined Creativeland Asia in July, 2017 as group CEO. Sajan Raj Kurup, founder and creative chairman, has taken back the reins at the agency. Barua had joined the agency from WPPowned Carat. MediaCom elevates Avinash Pillai Currently P&G leader,IMEA for MediaCom,he has been named as global leader — trading and operations for Team P&G.Pillai will continue to be based in Mumbai. Kartik Kalla appointed CCO at Radio City In his new role, Kalla will lead the network mandate for creative, content and continue to spearhead programming,marketing and AudaCITY. Nikon gets first Indian MD Sajjan Kumar has been appointed new managing director,taking over from Kazuo Ninomiya,who is moving back to Japan for a new role in Nikon Corporation. Prior to this,Kumarwas SVP at the company. Amit Doshi joins Lenovo India As Bhaskar Choudhuri moves on as head — marketing for Lenovo APAC,Doshi has joined as CMO. @ F E B R A N D WA G O N FA C E B O O K : F E B R A N D WA G O N FACE OFF P3 REVIEW CORNER P3 BLOGGER’S PARK P2 EDITOR’S NOTE T W I T T E R : ‘WE DON’T THINK LIKE OTHER F&B BRANDS’ Goodknight Cool Gel's new TVC rides on simplicity to stand out amidst competition RAW Pressery’s Anuj Rakyan talks about how the so-called disruptor brand has found loyal consumers across India Of homes that run themselves IN PERSPECTIVE KENNETH LIEW ‘Smart’ living With brands looking to simplify consumer lives, home automation is a much bigger task than it might seem. It has a long way to go in the Indian market, especially for it to find takers in the mass segment SHINMIN.BALI @expressindia.com W OULDN’TITBE nice if yourhomecouldpracticallymanageitselfat your beck and call withavoicecommand and a few taps on your smartphone screens? While an evolved, intelligent and self-sufficient system like Jarvis from the Iron Man movies may be a far cry from what is available in the market currently, it is not too bad a benchmark to aim for. Like any industry, the home automation space is trying to prove its relevance and application in consumer liveswhiletryingtoavoidbeingseenonly as a gimmick or a luxury. In India,as pera Research and Markets report, the home automation market is expected to cross `30,000 crore by 2022. ThereportfindsthatDelhi-NCR,Mumbai, Pune,AhmedabadandBengaluruaccount for a combined market share of over 50% currently.Withproductsbylegacybrands, local players, international brands and start-ups to choose from, home automation is increasinglyseeing adoption in the upwardly mobile, technologically savvy and experiment-pro consumersegment. Robot vacuum cleaner from Xiaomi Enviro Panel, Crabtree Schneider Electric’s Smart Homes app Smart products,but who’s buying? Schneider Electric India with its current rangeofhomeautomationproducts,sees uptake among the uber-luxury category which includes homes of movie stars, sportstars,businesstycoonsandthelikes. That isn’t to say that automation is absolutelyunaffordable.ShrinivasChebbi, president — partner and eco buildings business, Schneider Electric India informs that the company has launched smart home functionalities to cater to consumers purchasing newhomes in the `60 lakh-`1.2 crore bracket. “We have developedsolutionsfor,say,atwo-BHKof approximately1,000 sq ftwhichwill cost about `1 lakh,”Chebbi says. Thisdoesn’tmeanalienatingexisting VIVEK YADAV AJAY GUPTA SBU HEAD AND SVP, HAVELLS INDIA PARTNER, AT KEARNEY Crabtree did advertise in the previous fiscal year but for home automation, advertising is not the best route. Engaging with builders and high networth individuals is a far better route than advertising In India, the potential market for premium security and entertainment solutions is six to 12 million households. A broader adoption of IoT driven products and solutions will need a timeline of three to five years home owners. He further informs that some of the IoT technology doesn’t require redoing the switch boxes in the house; it is wireless with the switch box being overlaid with the IoT hardware turning it into a smart switch. Consumers today also get to choose whether to automate either just a room or just one aspect, which could be security or even entertainment.The drive for adoptionwill stem from easyand affordable availability of data (internet connectivity) and infrastructure in the form of connected devices (preferably with longer obsolescence cycles). ■ Continued on Page 2 Online forums and the quest for advertisers Various portals online answer queries on myriad topics in the virtual world but is there enough room for everyone to survive? What can help rake in the ad dollars? ANIRBAN.ROYCHOUDHURY @expressindia.com SURE, GOOGLE AND Bing might have answerstoyourqueriesonlinebutsometimes, one wants humans to respond to one’s queries in the virtual world. It is then that you resort to knowledge sharing portals like Quora (started by former Facebook CTO Adam D’Angelo), Answers.com (founded by Bob Rosenschein) orYahoo Answers. While earlier, knowledge sharing platformswereforquerieslike,‘Thingsto doinMumbai’or‘Thebestwaytoprepare for interviews’,now there are specialised websites and thousands of videos on YouTube answering the same questions. When Yahoo Answers and Answers.com.com each started in 2005 (and Quora in 2008), Facebook and YouTube weren’t even one third of the size that they command today.To add to the competition in the present day scenario, all major tech brands have their own product/service forums where designated engineers answer customer queries, lending credibility to the answers. Where does this leave traditional online public forums? “Sure, there are specialised sites.Yes, Appleengineersareansweringqueriesin the company’s forum but they are answering at Quora too,”maintains Gautam Shewakramani,India countrymanager at Quora.“Not just them, but engineers/experts from othercompanies too are responding to questions. So, the one GAUTAM SHEWAKRAMANI INDIA COUNTRY MANAGER, QUORA We have not gone and pitched to any brands in India but we are seeing that a lot of them are organically running campaigns on Quora YEAR IN REVIEW, 2017 | Most closely-related Quora topics (in %) 10.8 Technology 8.7 7.3 5 Psychology Science 4.4 Philosophy 5.1 Entertainment 4.2 Education 4.9 Business 4 Health 4.3 Visiting and travel Exam and tests 4.1 Jobs and Career 33.4 Others 3.8 Economics who posted the question gets different perspectives.” The times they are a-changin’ With evolving needs of the onlineworld, Q&Aportalsareupgradingthemselvesto SMARTHOMEAUTOMATION is a worldwide trend that is getting red hot at this moment with companies like Amazon, Apple, Google and Microsoft putting in lots of effort for creating useful digital assistants across devices. In Asia, Chinese players like Baidu are also creating their own digital assistants for the local market. IDC sees the smart home device market in Asia Pacific growing from $45.5 million in 2017 to $81.2 million by 2022 with the biggest contribution coming from the video entertainment category like smart TVs, followed closely by other smart home appliances like automatedvacuumcleanersand connected washing machines. Smart home appliance manufacturers like Samsung and LG started the home automation journey a few years back before the influx ofAI assistants.However, the timing was not right with only a few applications useful enough to justify their high prices. Now, the scenario has changed. With the support of better digital assistants, many such appliances are getting more useful and the price points have dropped tremendously. The adoption trend is very different for various regions. For example, apartment dwellers in mature Asian countries are strongly adopting smart TVs and automated vacuum cleaners that prove useful in city apartment living. While in countries like AustraliaandNewZealand,adoption of smart thermostats, garage door controllers and home surveillance cameras are showing good growth, as more users stay in landed houses. ■ Continued on Page 2 keep up. Take Quora, which claims to have 200 million unique visitors per month ofwhich 50% are from the US.As perestimates,India is the second biggest marketfortheplatformwithover40million monthly visits. In India, till a few years back, reading ‘on the go’ was very popular and people were frequently interacting on knowledge sharing platforms. However, this has transitioned to ‘watching on the go’. The drop in data prices and improvement of bandwidth infrastructure has seen a serious growth in do it yourself (DIY) video consumption on YouTube in India. People get to see a question answered in detail on a video. But online forums aren’t perturbed. Shewakramani recalls,“There was once this question: what is Indian Railways doing to ensure safety?’While therewere manyto respond,one of them happened tobeRailwayMinisterPiyushGoyalhimself.This iswhere Quora is different from what is available elsewhere.” Shewakramani shares that people like former US President Barack Obama, Flipkart cofounder Sachin Bansal, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales and other famous personalities have,in the past,landed on the platform to answer a query. A‘question’of money If fighting newer technology and changing behaviour is one aspect of survival, the other is monetisation. Quora launched a self-service advertising platform in May, 2017,which enabled marketers to promote their brands through the website. ■ Continued on Page 2