Okay, thanks Deepak for joining me out here. I'm sure with the wealth of experience that you bring to the table, there will be a lot of learnings that you will be sharing with the folks out here. So from a broad team standpoint, considering that the rich experience that you have in the banking industry, I just wanted to try and understand and being the nature of the business that's traditionally considered to be a so-called legacy, having been around for so long, how does the technology is being adopted in this legacy business? If you can throw some light in terms of the adoption process of technology and how specifically you have seen the journey out there. Thanks Kaur for that question and thank you Exchange for Media for giving me the opportunity. Happy to be here and share some thoughts and perspective which could be of some value to the audience here. So I think the tech space is only constantly gonna evolve and you're gonna see a surge on newer offerings or evolution on the tech side in a big scale and in a bigger way. You know, it was very interesting to see some of the AVs that were just played and it's insightful to see how tech is coming together, how the whole AI playbook is enabling some of the rudimentary behavior that marketers would struggle with. So it goes perfect with the theme of agility that CMOs or marketers are today seeking. Specifically to the context of our discussion when I look at and we were talking about briefly in terms of acquisitions and retentions and how tech is enabling it, I was reminded of the whole genesis of humankind. We were basically, you know, genesis was of a hunter behavior where we would go out and hunt for food and all sorts of means to survive. And then it came to self-producing through farming, right? And today if you look at a farmer's life, he tends to kind of optimize his yield which we use in our day-to-day brand language as arpu by looking at what seasonality, what kind of a producer will do well and therefore he changes gears in terms of the seeds that he sows in the soil, you know, in his farmland. And he looks at it at the data inputs of weather condition, seasonality, demand cycles and that's how he goes about it. Now take it forward and we look at it in our tech conversation. It's about hunters being replaced with acquisition and farmers being replaced by retention. I think the world has only changed the vocabulary but I think more or less the behaviors are the same. And what tech does for us today is allows us scalability, allows us constant optimization. But just like the farmer, we have to keep doing the, you know, toiling the hard work that is required to understand, you know, what are we really seeding in? How is it going to evolve? And I think that's where the tech playbook comes and makes it very interesting for marketers in today's time. An amazing analogy between hunters and farmers and, you know, acquisition and retention debug out there. You know, quite, you know, I'm sure that, you know, people would be able to get that right as well out there. And, you know, when it comes to, you know, building a martech stack, for example, there are so many options that are there out there. Again, within that there are, you know, the legacy players that are there in the market. There are, you know, new age tech companies, tech first companies. There's a lot of buzzword around AI, I'm sure. And with so many choices for that instance, you know, that someone has, how do you go around building a martech stack?  What are the things that come to your mind that someone should consider while building a stack, you know, on their side? So, you know, tech is very exciting. And in the course of that excitement, I think we should not lose sight of what is set out to serve as a purpose. I think some of the challenges, and obviously I've gone through the journey and I can relate to what marketeers, fellow marketeers would probably experience, is, you know, the undoubtful challenge around the fact that it's deemed as capex, right? So, there is an upfront payout, which is extremely high. And, you know, the leadership or the decision makers tend to kind of seek inside on how this is getting recovered in terms of the efficiency promises. So, I think that's where the primary challenge sets for, as a deciding part. The second piece, like you touched, that there are legacy players and there are new age players. So, the today's reality, thankfully, is that you have challenger brands and you have legacy brands, right? And this is true for all businesses. So, marketeers are therefore in a much better position today to actually do a true evaluation rather than get restricted. I know legacy players come with a lot more credibility, but there are new emerging solutions which could be, you know, addressing the cost efficiency. And also, as technology has evolved, some of the API stacks ensure that you can pick up best of all solutioning around you. So, you know, just like, you know, a couple of decades back when one would find it very difficult to take a ready to purchase unit of a high-end desktop. That's the era when desktops were, you know, I'm talking about the early late 90s, where they were the, you know, really the reference point for technology on the computing side. You would hear people who would do the assembly. And that assembly used to be, you know, customizing those solutioning based on what's the kind of functional role it's gonna deliver for you. So, whether it meant, you know, you needed a higher GB or a RAM or processor speed based on the kind of work or computation you did. Similarly, today, the tech stacks on the martyke side, based on the kind of business you are in, the kind of consumer stock that you're operating on, and the kind of hunting that you are progressively instilling because not every businesses are alike. You can take that plunge of faith and look at, you know, taking in certain combination of, you know, it could be a legacy, a new age or a new age, because today technology has evolved to a level where there is a certain amount of efficiency, which has become a hygiene factor when you're solutioning around martyke. But I think that's a journey each of us have to go through. But if you ask me, is there an alternative to not looking at this as a focus point, I would say no. Please understand that when you reflect back yourself as a role of a marketer, you're also a consumer first.  And that could result in you taking decisioning, which could have otherwise decades back stood the test of time and made you brand loyalist. Today you are dropping brands on the go, just because you had a negative experience. And more so that consumers today are well-empowered, unlike in the previous era, where he can actually vent it out. And that vent out is influencing future purchase cycles, future loyalty, future brand, people who could possibly opt in for your product today reacting to all of these touch points. So I think that's where you need to understand the amalgamation and need to invest in tech and how you bring this together. Yeah, so true. And the way you mentioned like, customer experience definitely comes to the forefront in this case, and considering the new age tech first audience, the digitally native audience that, and definitely we live in an era that there is digitally native audience and there are audience probably in your space, specifically in the investment space, for example, where you have people who might not prefer digital involvement too much. They might still want to call an RM and talk to them, for example. So how do you build your stack or your customer experience with so diverse population? And considering that you are sitting on a gold mine of customer data with so many different touch points that they prefer separately, how do you ensure that customer experience across these touch points are being covered? And definitely from people preferring website to offline mediums to talking to someone to even an app-based digitally native user as well. So how do you go around segmenting and building all of this? So our category or per se the financial category has largely evolved over years in terms of a brick and mortar outreach. We as a player, we obviously got incepted as one of the very early fintechs to be the buzzword that you hear today because we initiated what is the online access to capital markets. So our journey began on the online space, right? So we have a sizable base of today, 8 million plus consumers who have actively engaged for their various needs because we evolved from pure solutioning around trading to today investing, today people can buy insurance, they can buy, they can avail lending products including credit cards. So we have almost 40 to 45 plus products on our platform. So in that sense, we've always been on the digital journey but having said that, you're right that when you look at the generational referencing, the digital native tends to be a lot more comfortable in an environment where he can access information, he can access or he can make his trade decisions on the go. But while he is empowered with these solutioning, we cannot at any point in time ignore the one who's probably, there is a generational gap with but may not be as savvy or as comfortable but is equally evolving today because one thing that pandemic did for a lot of people and I think that's generational agnostic is that there was a forced adoption and that forced adoption led to people experiencing for the first time where their smartphones which were gifted to them by their loved ones moved from being a traditional reference point of just looking at a message or calling to actually using up for content on YouTube and getting to subscribe for services like e-commerce because you were locked down, so you had to order stuff, you had to use the app and that only you could do it on your mobile. And I think those things have acted as trigger points for those generational to come up. But yes, today it's not about what I can do for my consumer, it's about ensuring that I'm there where the consumer is. So there is inward-outward to outward-inward where you need to kind of know where all your consumer accessibility is and this is true not only from an Arctic perspective but also from a outreach to a consumer. You cannot say I will ensure that I will just get visible on a certain set of media vehicles. I need to know first of all who my consumer is, link it back to the product that I'm talking about, link it to the intelligence of my competition, link it to my user behavior and his journey and preferences and then start building together a robust strategy on how do I get into making him aware about my solution. So I think while there is inherent gap but I think that's bridging in and us as a business we ensure that we are accessible to our consumer across our touch point. We focus more on ensuring that the CX value, it's constantly evolving so a lot of data points across his journey, the way he is interacting on our digital assets, the friction he possibly is facing when he's engaged on our website, on our app through the heat maps, reverse data, the click or the event tracking data that gives us his challenge around some of the events that we set up, his subsequent journey towards moving into different stages, the kind of hovering of his icons that are happening on the various product category are all rich insights on a real time basis, thankfully because of the investment we've done on the MaTeX stack, that allows us to keep course correcting and creating agile journey, agile cohorts led targeting which keeps improving on a regular basis as we move forward and helps us to get a lot more sniper casted on understanding how my consumers behaving and then use that reverse insight to then ape it on a local like when it comes to future customer acquisition so that we are in a lot more, not at a very start stage but at a midpoint to move him forward and build that combination of both acquisition and retention. You touch upon very well in terms of how your retention play or how your existing customer base is actually something that's feeding on to those local likes and bringing in the right audience as well. So that definitely brings out the importance of retention and the insights driven through your retention strategy and how you tie it back to your acquisition and that's very important to make sure that you are getting the right audience which has longer LTVs, things like those, right? So again, you also touched upon the fact that being agile, being futuristic, there are so many bright young minds out here who probably want to be in your shoes in the future. What would be your advice? What would be the kind of skill sets that they need to be building in order to be a futuristic CMO like yours? So I don't know how much I can really advise but I can share with my own experience. I think sitting in this kind of an audience couple of years back, I would be enamored with all the fancy terminologies and jargons and the text referencing that would keep evolving in forums. So one thing is don't need to really worry about it. It's not so complicated as it's cited. What probably you need is get into understanding the what is the purpose it's going to serve for me and be conscious about your category and your consumer. So look at the problem from the category lens. Look at the problem from the consumer lens and then look at the enablers. Don't just go with a fanciful word of technology and say I need to put this in place. You need to understand your business reality, your consumer reality and your potential future casting that you are set out to achieve. Link it back to taking solutioning. There is no replacement of I do not need to look at tech. You definitely need to look at tech but at the same time you can look at it with a lot more meaningful address of the core purpose for which your brand stands for and then get into solutioning around it today. Thankfully post pandemic what's changed is that the whole digital playbook has moved up in scale. There are enough and more solutioning coming in. There are a lot of new age startups, players that are ready to bring you that solutioning. So you don't need to rely only on set legacy brands. The new age players are very much also delivering the similar promise. But yes, it requires you to be agile. It requires you to be up to speed at the same time. What's important is please come with a mindset of a experimental. Today the difference between a scientist and a marketeer is very limited. You know as a marketeer this is exciting time. You get to play up with so many different sets of data points which are painting a much more sharper picture for you of your consumer and category. At the same time you've got enablers like tech that can take you to scale. But what you need to have that mindset is to constantly experiment even in our own business. We run agile squads to constantly look at because with 45 set of products and multitude of data coming in we have to be conscious like that farmer looking at seasonality, who's the kind of an audience that opts for a particular type of an asset class or he's someone who looks at new products more evidently than someone who doesn't, who's got higher risk ability. What's been his past purchase behavior? What's been his trigger point? What is the channel at which he looks at engaging most? All of this today, while may sound very overwhelming, but the fact is it's all now solution through a tech lens. It's available in analytics. It's available to give it to you as insight which you just need to spend time and get familiar. And there's no right and wrong part. Every one of us have evolved or evolving. I would not say anyone has evolved. I would say I still evolve every day.  When I meet people I probe those conversation and I think that's the beauty of being a marketer that you can take that step to probe and build on those hypothesis and constantly evolve your own understanding and thinking. So true, so true. I hope that going back to basics is something that's important while technology plays an enabling function out there. But the base of marketing, which is experimentation never goes away. And lastly, Deepak, just one last question. I think you have been meeting so many people going to some of these events. I'm sure that you come across so many new trends in technology. What are the ones that you see or you are right now adopting or you would want to adopt going forward in the technology space? What excites you, the new toys? So in my mind, I mean this is my individualistic perspective on some of the data that I keep seeping in or observing. You know, the online is definitely the new offline and metaverse is going to be the new online. And I think that's where some real exciting work is happening in the backdrop. Yes, there are pros and cons that keep coming out but I'm excited to look forward. So while we're talking about Martek, there is already brands who are experimenting their journeys or experimenting how they reach out to the audience who's in that zone. I think some bit of this metaverse behavior is very evident in the young emerging kids in the household who were opted into these platforms like roadblocks and all of it. And you kind of see them taking on aftars very easily. And as parents, you still struggle on figuring it out. And then you have generation that at different age groups who kind of de-stresses by getting into gaming console and getting into that zone, right? So some of these data points give you a sense when you say that you need to be where your consumer is and that world is also evolving with whatever we hear. So yes, that's the new exciting phase. So I think web 3.0 is gonna be very exciting and yet to learn a lot but I think that's the place that I'm looking forward to. Thanks, thanks for your insights. Thanks for being a wonderful audience, everyone.


So just remember this, have a broad brain about what your potential worries are. You know what I told people today on the call? I said, people are so worried about starting their own business, what if it doesn't work out? Let me tell you what you should worry about much more. Choking to death. Third cause of accidental death in the United States after cars, and I forget what the second one, is choking to death. It's not a big deal if you start a business and you fail, who cares? You could start another one, the average millionaire. It was their third business that made him rich, meaning most people do fail and they do just fine in the long run. But if you choke to death, game over. But how many people do you ever think today? Sit there and go, hmm, let me chew my food 20 times on this steak? No. The third leading cause of death.


Here's a statistic for you. About two thirds of people who get a college degree have regrets about their education choices. And this is for a lot of different reasons, but in this video, I'm gonna be going over the ones that I see most commonly as somebody who has worked with hundreds of different people to help them choose the perfect college major for them. And this is not only as someone who's gone all the way through the college education system, the university system from undergraduate to getting my doctorate degree, but I've also been studying this stuff for years, making hundreds of videos, spending thousands of hours studying it and working with hundreds of people to help them choose the best college major for them. And it became very obvious to me after consulting with so many people that I simply do not have enough time to talk to each person individually. And so what I did is I created the College 101 course and that's basically my life's work. And you can find that down in the description below. This will teach you how to choose your dream college degree, get the most out of college with the least amount of effort and land your first entry level job right after graduating. So if that's something that interests you, give it a look for a short period of time, I will be offering a discount down in the description below and I'm not just saying that, this is definitely going to be discounted and it's probably going to double in the near future. But with that being said, let's jump into the most common mistakes that I see and the first most common one is going all in on the money. I think this is probably because just the nature of my channel in general, but a lot of the people who I talk to seem to have this issue where they're kind of just going all in on the money. They want to go for the degree that makes the most possible money. And this is a huge mistake and I've gone over these studies and other videos so you can check those out if you want to go over them in more detail but basically you're not going to be any happier after around $75 to $80,000 a year. That's where your happiness maxes out. That's where you're basically taking care of all of the normal life problems that pretty much everybody has. And another way of thinking about it is by making a certain amount of money, it's not that you're making yourself more happy, it's that you're decreasing the amount of unhappiness that you experience. So if you don't make enough money to pay your rent, for instance, you're going to feel a lot of pressure. That pressure is going to turn into stress. Stress can lead to other things. It can lead to anxiety. It can lead to depression. In extreme cases, it can even lead to you having autoimmune disorders. So I think that there's a healthy amount of stress and it's a good thing as long as it's done in moderation, you do want to push yourself a little bit but there's obviously a point where it gets to, the point where it's extremely unhealthy.  The next biggest mistake I see is when someone goes all in on passion. So they basically choose the thing that they're most passionate about and they try to make a career out of it. So you might be passionate about watching Netflix or passionate about playing video games. Personally, I like both of those things. I also am very passionate about history, filmmaking. I also enjoy eating good food and all of those things that I just mentioned are things that I chose to keep as hobbies, right? They're not things that I chose to make a career out of. And the truth is if I tried to make a career out of many of those things, it probably would ruin my passion for it. And someone left in the comments section this really good analogy for this, which is, let's say you chose your ringtone, the, you know, what you wake up to in the morning, your alarm clock as your favorite song. That would probably ruin the song for you because most people are not very happy when they wake up first thing in the morning. And if you're hearing your favorite song right off the bat, that would probably ruin it for you. It would spoil it. And this is the same thing about trying to make something that's just a hobby into your career. Now that doesn't mean you can't integrate your hobbies into your career. It also doesn't mean in very rare circumstances that, you know, people are in a position where their number one passion, they can turn that into their career. But the brutal truth is, and this is something that almost nobody is going to tell you, is that no matter what you do, you're never going to avoid work, okay? You're always going to end up working. A lot of the time people will go into, and I know I pick on psychology all the time just because it's so popular, but a lot of the time, people will end up going into psychology because they think, oh, psychology is very interesting. And then they think they can get a job with a bachelor's degree. They can't. They have to get at least a master's or a doctorate. And then what they end up doing at the end of the day when they finally get their first job is like six to seven hours of paperwork and then maybe one hour of psychology. And it's probably not even the type of psychology that they thought they were going to be doing. So the next biggest mistake that I see so many people make is treating their student loans like monopoly money. And this is very easy to do because this is the only type of loan that a 17 or an 18 year old can take out without any loan history or any work history or anything like that. Let's talk about other types of loans besides student loans. Let's say you try to get a mortgage loan, a loan for a house, for instance. They are going to run an extensive credit check on you.  And they're going to look at how much can you afford on this loan and that is how they are going to decide how much they can give you for a house or the interest rate they're going to charge you or even if they're going to give you the loan at all. Whereas with student loans, it's nothing like this. It's essentially a blank check. Now there are some positives to that and there are some negatives to that. It was originally designed to be a very good thing where they could get people who come from low income or medium income backgrounds the same education that rich people could get. So as somebody who grew up dirt poor myself, I do really appreciate the fact that this is an option for us. However, the way they're running it, in my opinion, is really bad because it essentially incentivizes these schools to just keep on raising tuition at a much higher pace than inflation. It's essentially just a blank check to these schools and they can just keep raising tuition and making excuses about why they're doing it. And this is why the student loan crisis has just gotten out of control. You've got people who first of all, probably can't afford the loans. They're much more expensive than they should be, probably four or five times more expensive and they're getting degrees where it's just a passion and it's probably not going to lead to a stable career. So realize that you will have to pay these student loans off. There's a lot of talk right now in the media about, oh, this person's going to forgive 10,000. Oh, this person's trying to forgive 50,000. Well, hey, maybe 10,000 will be forgiven and if that happens, that's awesome, but don't bank on it, okay? It's not a smart move to bank on this because I can almost guarantee you as somebody who's really looked into it that maybe some part of it will be forgiven but it's probably not all going to be forgiven.  So they're still in debt until they're 42. So do not treat student loans like monopoly money, only take out as much as you can afford and try to get as many scholarships and grants as possible and keep your costs low. Now the next biggest issue I see is not trying different things out. So this is especially, I think, a big problem for somebody who's introverted.  They've kind of just sampled a bunch of different things and so they sort of know what they enjoy, right? And so we talked about what your passions are and also what your strengths are but how are you gonna know what your passions and your strengths are if you haven't tried different things? So I know this is kind of a basic thing but in order to figure out what you're good at and what you like, you do have to actually try different things out. So you wanna kind of just treat it like a sample platter. Look into different classes online. There's a lot of college 101 type courses that are offered online from some of the best universities in the world, right? Harvard, Stanford, et cetera. They all offer free classes online and you can take them completely free. They'll even tell you what the textbook was. They'll give you practice questions and even tests in many cases. Not to mention the fact that you will have live recordings of the lectures. So you can kind of just sample a bunch of different things out. It's also just pretty obvious like the internet is out there. You can use YouTube, Reddit, podcasts, just to sample different subjects. But yeah, this is a very easy step to overlook but you do wanna make sure that you try different things out just to see what you like and see what you're naturally good at. And then I do think it's a good idea to double down and even triple or quadruple down on your strengths. Now the next biggest issue I see is when people don't have a plan and it's very important for you to have a plan and I've said this before but have a plan even if it's a bad one, right? Imagine if you were like a plane and you took off in your plane and you just don't know where you're going, right? You have no idea where you're going. You just fly around in circles.  Obviously that would be a horrible idea but it's very important for you to have an idea of where you're going. You know what direction you're going, how far it's going to take you in order to get there, how long it's going to take you. If you don't have a plan you're basically just gonna be like a leaf that's just blowing around in the wind. So you wanna think of your plan as almost like a map, right? You wanna have a map and figure out where you are right now and where you're going, how far that is and how long it's gonna take you to get there. Now the map itself is not going to be the journey, right?  So you wanna avoid those crocodiles, right? So the map's probably not gonna tell you that. But at the very least, it's going to give you the basics of what you need to do in order to get to your destination. But another problem I see is people have a plan but they don't really research it and improve it, right? So having a plan is good but chances are the first plan you come up with is not going to be perfect. So it is important that you come up with a plan even if it's a bad one but if it does end up being bad you can go back later on and figure out why that was. Maybe it's that you're just not very passionate about it. Maybe it's that you thought it was a certain way like the career was a certain way and then it ended up maybe shadowing them and you're just very bored. You don't wanna do that. The picture that you have in your head of what a career is like is probably completely different than what the actual career is like and a perfect example of that is doctors. If you go into health or if you just go into a degree path where you have to take some of the intro level science courses, you are gonna run into, I swear it's like at least 50% of the class is going to be pre-med, right? So about 50% of the class is gonna be people who want to become doctors and the truth is most of these people are not going to make it of course because it's extremely competitive and more than that, most of them have no idea what they're getting themselves into. Thank goodness a lot of med schools actually require people to shadow because once they start shadowing doctors and seeing what they actually do on a day-to-day basis, they realize, oh, it's not like it is on Nip Tuck or one of those shows that they've been watching since they were 14. And a lot of the time they realize that the only reason they're going into the career to become a doctor is because their family has been kind of coercing them to do that since they were young. So a lot of people will go into college thinking, oh, I wanna become a doctor and then when they actually look into it, when they actually research it, they realize I don't wanna become a doctor because I don't wanna work 80 hours a week and have no life and all the other things that come along with it. So in that case, as long as they had a plan, they can go back and look at their plan and say, you know what, I think the reason I didn't wanna become a doctor is because of the fact that they just work so much and it's so difficult in order to do it. It takes way too long. However, the reason I wanted to get into the career in the first place is because I wanted to help people out, right? And that's kind of why I was attracted to the medical field. And so what they can do is they can be like, okay, I will look into other medical related degrees and medical related careers. Now that's a very simple example, but it's important that you had a plan in the first place so that you can figure out why that plan was wrong and then go back and improve it. And one big thing you can do, especially when you kind of whittled it down to a certain amount of careers that you're interested in, is actually asking people in those careers. And that brings me to the next point, which is asking the wrong people for advice.  You know what you should do? You should become a lawyer. How did they know that you should become a lawyer? Are they a lawyer? Of course not. They're just giving their advice just based off of hearsay and maybe something that was true 20 years ago, but it's not necessarily true today. And the important thing here is that you ask the right people for advice. So if you are interested in becoming a physician assistant, for instance, you should try to find either physician assistants or the people who hire them. So recruiters, hiring managers, or business owners. Ask them for advice on what would be the best path in order to become a physician assistant and whether it's a good option for you as well. So when it comes to doing research, there is two different types of research, right? There's general information and then specific information. And you can get a lot of great general information just off of the internet. Lots of different websites like Reddit, Facebook, YouTube, et cetera can give you good general information. However, when you whittle it down to a small enough list, you want to get specific information and that is seeking people out who are actually in the career. And then you would ask those people key questions which are going to be important. So for instance, you might wanna ask them, what's the most important thing I can do when it comes to getting hired? And they might tell you get work experience, right?  Or they might tell you the opposite. Maybe they'll say getting good grades is the most important thing you can do because you wanna be able to get into a good grad school. The point here is you're not going to really know until you ask people their opinion and get a couple different opinions just because you might run into someone who's way too positive or way too negative. Get a couple different ones so you can have a balanced outlook. All right, so check out my other videos right here. I made them just for you and if you haven't done it already, go ahead, hit that like button, hit the subscribe button, leave a notification bell and comment down below any thoughts, comments, criticisms, et cetera that you have on the video and I will see you next time.