Hi everybody. My name is Marco and today I will talk about East which is a companion tool for building NCS and Zephyr applications that we have developed in earnest. So quickly about what is East like from the from really far away. So it's a command line meta tool written Python. It's useful for creating, managing and employing Zephyr or NRF Connect SDK projects. It's built on top of West and Nordic's NRF Connect toolchain manager. It's not intended to replace them but it's to be used alongside of them and it's open source and available at our company's GitHub. So essentially what you can do with East, it supports automated toolchain installation of NCS projects. It offers sandbox development environments and it does automatic release artifacts generation. It has a support for build types. I will explain what I mean exactly by this a little bit later and it uses and includes some commonly used developer utilities, at least the ones that we found that we mostly use all the time. What will you gain listening to this talk? So you will learn, you will see some, you learn why tooling is important and how it impacts our development, basically how it enables us to be a little bit more productive. You will learn how the East was designed and why. And there's going to be the end, there's going to be hands-on demonstration of East. So a little bit about me and my background. So I'm an electrical engineer by education and firmware systems engineer by profession. I have been working in DNS for about four years now and I did, in that four years, a transition from completely completely from PCB designer slash assembly engineer to the firmware engineer, like everything, all the possible things on the way. So I have worked with on the consumer devices, medical devices, mostly IoT systems with a little bit of machine learning on the side. And internally I have been also working on some internal tooling plus the DevOps for our projects. So really quickly about what Ernest does and why this is kind of connected with what we do. So we are, for most we are a development company. So we design electronics, we develop, we develop firmware and software for them and we create mechanical designs. We specialize in creating a prototype and bringing it to an end-to-end solution as quickly as possible. And we are also a visual Nordic design partner and a Zephyr project member. So this is basically our, so this is basically our firmware stack at Ernest. Some few years ago Ernest made a strategic decision to only focus on one single platform too. And we picked Nordic because of their low power hardware, Bluetooth support and their excellent development platform. And this meant at the beginning we were mostly doing our projects using by using NR5 SDK. As the things evolved, so did we. So we switched to the NCS, which is based on Zephyr as you probably know. My, let's say my first bigger firmware project was quite interesting. They were like, it was a consumer device which had motor control. It had to advertise over BLE. You could connect to it. It had support diffuse. And it was actually four different projects, products which had similar functions and they all shared the same code base. And this code base had to support like, I think it was like at some point for each of the boards, like two or three hardware revisions. So we were creating new images on pretty much daily basis. And we turned that project from a prototype to 100k units in about nine months. We used NRF5 SDK and NRF52832 as you can see on the picture. And this was kind of like our bread and butter for all the future projects that came in. And they were similar in that case that they introduced new boards that had to be supported and they need to be quickly developed. So alongside of this, we faced some of the challenges that we, at that moment, we didn't have the answer for. So for example, how to manage several different boards and how to manage build variants. For example, I had a hardware and I was building, I could build my firmware fine. And I had a colleague that was working remotely and only had a development kit from Nordic and he was doing the Bluetooth stuff. So he still needed to somehow build the board and test the functionalities. So we needed some kind of build variant that would disable motor-controlling part and just do the Bluetooth stuff. Another one of the problems was how to quickly and efficiently create releases. So we had to be sure that whatever we put outside, the client is going to use it. It's not going to either break the device or it's going to, he's going to upload the wrong image. It's going to upload the image to a wrong device and such like that's like how to make this much more clear. And also like how to create a producible built environment. Again, like we, at that moment, at that point, we didn't have a way to say you should use this GCC version. You should use this kind of a make tool. So there needed to be a way that we can set up this fast. And also as the project came running this, we had these issues all the time and repeatedly. So we all had to solve this. So in that kind of environment, first version of the East came out. At the time, it was not named like that. It was just some internal tooling that we used. So we were 100% inspired by what Memfold was showing on their interrupt blocks. So what we basically did was we took the default NRF5 SDK make file. We expanded it a little bit so it could accept target chip, it could accept the name of the board, software and hardware revisions that will be later baked into the final image, optimization, flags and so on. And then we used a tool called invoke to call that make file. So for those that you don't know, it's like it's a tool written in Python and it's very, very similar to MIG.  It's a little bit easier to work with. And it also supports configuration automatically. So it supports configuration via YAML file. And this worked fine for a while. Like we could, we created a few commands when we were using them, but we still had to solve the tooling problem. So in that case, again, because of the Memfold, we used condos. So this is like, again, a tool for the Python packages, but for versioning and installing Python packages, but it can also do that for any kind of a binary that you can think of. So for example, we used it to download GCC, to download make, and of course, all other Python related stuff. So this tooling was very useful for us. We are still using it today. But it's only suitable for NRF5 SDK projects, not for the Zephyr or NCS. So this is basically a screenshot of what commands that we used in this program. So it's like, you can see very common ones, like build, clean, flash, debug. Nordic has had all the entire setup with a few images. So you have to create an application, build the application, build the bootloader, tie them together, sign them. So this was first done on all manuals, so we automated it. Even on this project, we were also using Memfold, so there is one command there that is like, create an image, send it to the Memfold server. So this was quite useful for us. And when we started working with NCS and the Zephyr, we found out that we had kind of the same issues as before, but some additional ones. So the first one was we were switching between the projects all the time. Most of our developers are actively working on one or two projects and maybe even maintaining the third one alongside it. And all of the projects are running different versions of NCS, so we had to switch between those versions and figure out how we're going to do the tooling. So at that point, we solved this with like, we downloaded separate versions of NCS on the computer and changed it in the shell scripts to use a specific one. So again, we just built environment at that point, we didn't have a good answer to that. And yeah, we just left it at that and hopefully most of the time, it worked okay, most of the time. And also, this was a big one, so creating firmware releases by hand took way too much time in this era. Again, one of our projects had, one of my colleagues was working on a project that after accounting for all possible boards and all the hardware variations, there were like 81 different unique combinations that you could build the firmware. And there was no way that you could do this by hand. And it was not done by hand, so only the relevant ones were done. So if something broke, you would not know it until you build the image for that board and you will find out that it broke several commits ago. So we detected that there are some problems that we can solve with this. So we set out to create some internal tool that would solve them, so that became East. So the goal that we wanted to achieve were firstly, it had to be familiar to the vast user. So we didn't want to create yet another tool that the developer will have to learn and we wanted it to be as seamless as possible. We wanted it to have to automatically detect and install the tool chains for the NRF projects, NCS projects, because we mostly used that. And it needed to have a sandbox development environment. We didn't want to have the access to the system binaries if we didn't need them or that we would have some kind of a version clashes. And also it should support automated generation of release artifacts for entire project. It should have a support for build variants and it should be suitable for CI. So ideally we wanted to have a tool that later on we could reuse in our GitHub actions to directly call it and be done with it. So we identified some building blocks that needed to be done. So the first two are kind of like trivial how to make them. I was developing this for myself. I know how to do Python. So both of these two things are well done in Python. There are existing libraries for that. So we reused that. But the third one, so sandbox development environment, it was like the choice of that will impact how the whole tool looks like and how easy it would be for a developer to actually use it. And so that was like the main point that we had to address. So we started looking at things. So of course, first we looked at the conda. And because we already knew it, it had a simple interface. We just create one YAML file. It tells I want this version of GCC. I want this version of make. And you activate the create environment and activate it and you can run the commands in it and you get that. But on the downside, it's not a real sandbox environment. You still have the access to your system binaries. On one of our projects, I was using this for quite a while until I figured out that I was using the tools that were not even specified in the YAML file. And this was like, okay, that's not good. One of the things was it's hard to create an environment file for the NCES just due to the whole amount of the tooling that is required to create it. Sometimes you can find it. So for example, conda is pulling the packages from the conda repository, which has a huge number of packages. But for example, if you don't find that package that you need, you have to create it for yourself. In previous case, for example, an NRF command line utilities were not made by anybody yet. So we had to make them so we could download them. So if there was no package, you had to create it. You had to maintain it. Also, packages can break. I had instances where I was using the same environment for a while. It was fine. And then suddenly it didn't work. So conda didn't seem like a good solution at time. But we could still use it for bootstrapping our projects and managing all other tooling that we required additionally alongside the tool chain. So the next stop was like, of course, Docker. The idea was have one image per NCS version and use the Python SDK for interacting with the containers that we would be running. So advantages, it's a real sandbox environment. You get what you install in the image. It was easy to create image with NCS tooling because they were existing examples that we could look at and learn from them. But it had all other aspects of it that we had to solve. So all the problem with the image management. So how does developer get the image? How does he work with it? Does he enter the container interactively? How to avoid the constant startup times and stuff like that? And also, looking through the Internet, I saw there were some issues with USB serial and serial post communications. I'm not sure yet because I didn't research this enough. I'm not sure yet how real are those problems. But we saw that some advance in understanding the Docker would be needed and a time was required to invest into this. So Docker seems to be a hard pad but we're going to take it because it seems the right way. So this was an initial idea, an initial architecture of the East and basically all the building blocks, all the infrastructure that you would need to run this thing. Keep in mind that the smaller block on the right side is actually what the user has to interact with. Everything else is just for the guy who is doing the infrastructure. The main idea was just pass the vest commands to the Docker container. So if you call, for example, East Build, that gets turned into a vest build and it's just passed along to the Docker container to do its thing. When we made this, we were like, okay, we would like to talk, this seems like it could work. Let's talk to the Nordic guys to see what they think about this and we wanted to present the idea to them and hear their opinion about it. And of course, because we wanted to know if there are some solutions that we were not thinking about or we just didn't know it. So one of the things that they suggested was immediately was basically NRF Toolchain Manager. So this was known to us and we knew that you could install, it does its job very nicely. You can install the toolchains, you can update them every time when the new version of the NCS comes out, you have it available there, you download it and you're using it. But the downside for that was it's a GUI program, so you cannot interact with it programmatically, at least in an easy way. But then we found out from them that they also have an executable version of that program that is running in the background. And we were like, okay, that seems very interesting. So what does it do? Basically, it is the Toolchain Manager, the GUI is just the front end for it. So it does all the things that we needed. So you can see on the commands, it searches for installable and toolchains, it installs them, it uninstalls them. But what is also really cool about it, it can launch arbitrary commands inside of a sandbox environment. So this would mean that this is exactly what we were searching for and this would greatly simplify what we had to do in order to create East. So for example, there are some blocks here, so for example, an example command from East, it's like East build, some kind of board, it's just passed on to the NRF Toolchain Manager. And you basically say launch with that version of NCS and after the double dash, you add your command and that's it. So this was like, so the middle one is the first version that we started and prototype with and we were like, okay, this seems great, this works. The actual version that is used in the currently is the second one because we realized that the error codes do not get propagated outside of the Toolchain Manager. So if you send some command inside and the build fails, Toolchain Manager, it's not propagated through the error code. So you had to do some bash magic to get, to figure out if some success.txt file was created and based on the presence of that file, look to determine if this was, if this command ran successfully or not. So instead of that big block, it was just this. So this is the current architecture, so it's just the behavior East is depends on just too far. So the vast YAML file, which is present in the NCS project and the East dot YAML file, which is completely optional. So if you're not using it, you lose some of the other new features, but if you do, you still have the access to the sandbox environment or you can still write the commands and send them directly to the Toolchain Manager. So yeah, so this is the screenshot of the help output. So generally, so like a little bit of overview, so there are two, so we split the commands into different kinds of commands, two different groups. So we call them Workspace and System. Workspace commands can be run inside of a vast workplace. So and this is considered by the Zephyr and NCS anything that has the vast folder inside of it and all the subdirectories of that folder. Because we said, okay, some of the commands only make sense if they're run inside of this. The other group of commands was a system command, which is basically you can run them anywhere you want to. So the East is so it has some common vast commands like built, flash, debug. And like I said, you can configure it via YAML file. So one of the key features is built type to explain it. So it's basically just a set of kconfig fragment files. So for example, for example, if I'm working on some kind of a project and I see a need for a development version of that firmware, I would create a def build file and I would put specific development specific options into that.conf. And that would be my kind of the build type. So to order to do this and not to break anything, what is what is being done with the NCS, we said, okay, kconfig files, if you're using this kconfig files have to be stored in conf folder and project conf is now called conf. It's now called common.conf. And we if you're doing this, you're implicitly have a release build type, which is just the common.conf. So anything else that you create, it's using that common.conf plus anything on top of it. So for example, so if you have like the you can see on the left, you can see example East YAML file, you can see that for some example app, there are two different types of build types. So def type and debug type. So for example, def would have, would enable debug optimizations, would enable RTT and it would disable MCO boot just because it takes a long time to flash it. And the debug would be just enable debug optimization. So with this YAML file, there are three possible build commands that you would be using. So without any flag, so that means I'm using that implicit release version that just uses the common or def and debug that use the groups. The next thing is East release. So this was like very, this was like number one priority for us to have it. It basically just runs all the possible combinations of application, VAS boards and their hardware revisions and build types. So it's just a series of East build, VAS build commands. And it can also build samples if you list them. And the created artifacts are renamed and then zipped. And you can then, you have just a release folder with all the zips and you just upload them to the GitHub release or for example, Memphold or whatever you're using. And that's it. So there is, we didn't have to do this by hand anymore. So when to use East? So if you're working, so it's, it might be useful to use East, if you're working on multiple projects with different NCS versions, you need to build firmer images for several different boards and build variants. And you want to quickly set up projects. And you might want to use East if you don't want to manage development environment on several different machine, on several development machines. So this is, this is our, our small roadmap. We have like, we are thinking about changing a little bit of configuration format for the build types. We want to support patch files. Sometimes we find the need that we want to change something, how it's done in the Zephyr or maybe we find the bug and we don't want to wait for it to be fixed. So we fix it ourselves. And there has to be a way for a developer to be basically say, I ran vest update, maybe East update, and all the patch files are automatically applied. So you're not, it's just optimization. You're not thinking about this, that you have to do something and to avoid some debugging time. And also, because we, we had an issue with that before, we need a way to show like deltas, deltas between K config, when changing K configs, we need to be able to show the deltas what actually changed because a developer of mine was like very puzzled why enabling one option enables the whole logging system when he didn't want it, but it was just unspecified and then it got enabled. And if he said it disabled, he would get the error, but he didn't. So that's one thing that we learned. Okay, demonstration time. Let me change the view here. So, so what I will show you. So I have here like the Zephyr, the example application from the Zephyr project repository. I changed, I checked out a specific version of the NCS for this, for this presentation. So you have here like the general, the general structure. Actually, if we go inside of the application itself, like this is the general, general structure application that you have, I did already did some of the modifications for these talks just to avoid some of the waiting time, but and I will explain them which they are. So it's already, so one of the things that I did was change the West Yama to change this into NRF correct and NCS project. So I checked out the specific version already Ryan West update. And also I created a few board of the board overlays. So for example, let's see, okay, let's go and build the application. So if you wanted to build this with East, you would just write, for example, is built. Now, if I run this does the East will tell me I don't have an order digital chain manager installed on the system, it cannot do anything. It's not useful with others. So it tells me to do something without it. So it tells me to run a command that will basically do the system setup and don't don't know it for me. And it does that it puts it in some local folder. Right. And now I'm like, okay, let's try this again. Let's I have this now and I want to use it. And now it tells me that it detected the tool chain, but I don't have it installed. So you need to suffer every for every version of the NCS, you have a you have a separate tool chain and it that needs to be installed. So I did. So let's let's run this. I already downloaded the tool chain. So this part is going to go really fast. And he's just going to unpack it. But otherwise, it would take about, I don't know, like three to five minutes to get to get this working. Just to save a little bit of time. So let's try again, if this builds. Yeah, you does. Okay, so this is so taking an account.  And they would be ready, depending on their internet internet connection, they would be like, I don't know, this would be probably like 10 minutes and they could build the project and they would, they could actually run it and start working something on it. So that's how it works. Um, so to show off the, the, the, the build flex, let's, let's see what we have here. So the example application comes with some configuration file. So we have here project comf, rtt comf and debug.com. So if we look every single one of them, so project comf, okay, enables a sensor. So this one is going to be, we're going to create for this our comf folder and we're just going to move it inside and rename it. If we look into the debug, okay, so debug enables some debug optimizations and logging and console. So we also, we are also interested in this. So we're going to move it in that and also there is the rtt, we just enables rtt, but without logging. So we know that if we want this, we need to have logging enabled. So we need to use these two files in conjunction. So let's move it again into the com folder. Yeah. So there's this. Now to actually configure this, we need to create east channel file. So this I have already prepared a little bit of a snippet here because I have an example on the project site. So east.yaml and yeah, here's here. So basically, like we said, three build types, release is implicit one. Debug type is just going to use debug.com and rtt build type is just going to use debug comf and then it's going to add rtt.com. So we should be good with that. And for example, now if we go to build our application, so let's clean the build folder and run it again, you're going to see, yeah, you're going to see, so you get some extra diagnostic here message that the build folder was not found and running CMake build. And you can actually see that the common comf is used here. So the east has a echo command. So you can actually see what commands are being passed to the nrf connect. So this was useful for me for debugging. It's also useful for somebody to understand how is this actually working. And it just, yeah, in this case, it did just that. But if we clean it because it detected it doesn't have to rebuild because all the configuration is already the same. But if you're running it again, after it lists all the possible tool chains, it's going to launch, this is the command that launches the whole build. And you can see there's our west build command and then the comf file that we're setting to the common.com and the touch success thing. So we created this. So for example, if we wanted a different build type, let's say rtt, for example, the east would detect that you change the build type. So it has to rebuild the project and it would add the two overlay configs here. And you can see comf debug comf rtt. And it did that. And that's basically it. You're switching between the build types however you want. The next thing that is useful is east release. So if I just run it anywhere inside from the project, it's going to look at the east demo file and it's going to try to build all the possible build combinations of the images that I have.  What is it? Is it an app or is it a sample? For what kind of board are you building? And in the end, the build type. So at the bottom you see let's say redacted version of the build commands that are being run. So you can know what is happening. Now if anything would break at this point, the build would stop. You would get the build output and you could look and try to figure out what went wrong in this process. Now created to release files. So if we go here, we can see there's a folder inside that it's new. It's a release folder. Now if we get inside, there's going to be a few zip packages and the folder which contains all the created binaries. So the zip packages are basically contain what's inside of the apps and are useful to just push them to the GitHub. So if we go into the apps, you can see for example, here's the example app that we named. You could have several apps in your project and if you go under it, then you have different build type versions. For example, if we go to the RTT, then you see that you were building this for two different boards and finally at the last stage, you get to the final .bin.elf.hex files. Now currently the naming format that it's used here, it's not configurable. It's the one that we used and maybe it's a little bit verbose, but it just helps to prevent any accidental mistakes that happen. One specific here, what is happening here, you can see that the version was the last tag is used here. So for example, because we checked out this version, it's going to appear here, but because we have modified the Git repository, it has some changes. So that's why the system adds basically this qualifier, which is just Git hash of this current thing that happened plus the plus which says that your repository was dirty at the time when it was built. This is useful for example, when you are quickly debugging and you need to perform the whole release process all the time because you are giving out maybe to the client or maybe to your colleague the supposedly entire image and at some point you need to be able to identify what is working, which one was not working, which one was working and that's how we do it. So if you check out directly a version and sorry, a tag and it does not have any uncommitted changes, you're not going to have this qualifier here. Yeah, I think that's about it. Yeah. Thank you for your attention. Q&A time. Online. Sorry. Can you, is it micro working? We have a question online. Okay, just talk, fine. So Luke Seegers is asking, do you guys use this in CICD? Question mark. If we need to install all of this every time in a GitHub Actions, for example, it will take a lot of time. Do you have a solution for that caching, Docker, things like that? Sorry. Can you repeat please? I didn't hear well. Are you using this in CICD? Currently at the moment no, because we didn't get that far, but like it would be at that point it is trivial to actually make it run in CI because yeah, the issue is of course you're downloading something and the worrying part is that you have to re-download every time when you're doing build. This is not true because you can use, for example, in GitHub Actions, you can use caching. So for that entire, is this saving all the tool chains, all the nrf toolchain manager in a file and you can say to GitHub Actions, I want this folder to be cached. So every time you will still run the same kind of commands and this is just going to say that, yep, this is installed, this is installed, continue with the build and yeah, it's going to take a long time the first time, but every repeating one now. Okay, I've got a personal question here. Are you able to enable the S-bomb generation S-bomb? This is actually one of the issues that we have open yet and we didn't get to, not yet, but like it's... Because I think you've got some things you might be able to extend this, the generation to capture, to be useful, especially like configs and things like that. At the point, like right now, yeah, you can run, yeah, but you cannot do it correctly, you still need the tools, you still need the best tools installed to run S-bomb. We could, of course, yeah, we could add this command inside and we intend to do so, but like apart, aliasing basically commands, so just turning this into from west to the east S-bomb, like, I guess like added value would be some different, a different representation format like to say like here's your S-bomb, this is what you use, maybe something, what's changed and stuff like that, like there is, I think there's much more added value that we can create with this thing. Yeah. Happy to have a discussion and how we can make it a little bit better because, yeah, I've got ideas here too. Oh, okay, cool. But I... Yeah, sure. Thank you. Oh, thank you, yeah. So congrats from the tool, it's really cool. Then the thing is, I was thinking the NCS, the toolchain manager, the NRF view toolchain manager, it's not officially released, is it? You're basically extracting it from the package NRF Connect for desktop tool, aren't you? No, it's on the GitHub. Oh, okay. So there's a how it's called PC NRF till repository and, yeah, like some people from the Nordic basically said, like, we are using this, like try this out and after we figured out, okay, this is what it does, we're basically checking every time and so on to see like, okay, there's maybe a new version, we are directly downloading from the URL of the GitHub. Okay, I see. The binary. I see, I understand. Okay, because I'll bring this up internally to see if we can actually make official releases of this because if you're, you know, if you're using it, it makes it makes sense. Yeah, like, yeah, we found it useful. I mean, I understand that this might this might be a specific use case, like I'm like, you could say, you could say, like, I'm used to the using this stuff in the command line. And I know that Nordic is actively developing the VS code and everything environment around that. But we saw that like, even if we even if you're using that, it's still very, very beneficial for us that we are using the same kind of a tool that we would use, for example, in the CI. So we would see what the expected results is. And like, like developing stuff in GitHub actions takes a long, long time to debug. And like the debug, the debug cycle is quite long. And you're like, let's just test as much as I can on machine. So that's, that was one of the things that we wanted to do. Yeah. So, so the other thing that I want to ask is, do you test this on on macOS and Windows as well or just Linux? Yeah. So this tool just only runs on Linux, because yeah, this is mostly what we use. We had some clients that were that wanted to run this on the on the Windows. And we said, okay, like, we had to like, internally, some things in the east have to change, like, it's essentially it's a Python program. So it has to become compatible for the both versions. I think some of the clients made it run on the VCL on the on the Windows, but all not because of the two chain manager, because I'm pretty sure the two chain manager supports the three. Yeah, it does. Of course, there are three there for the there are three versions, I think even for for for the Apple for the Apple, sorry, Apple Intel, Apple Silicon, Windows and Linux. Yeah, but it was running in VCL. And as far as I heard, they had no problem using it in that in that sort in that way. But I guess it depends then how you're doing the debugging and any extra stuff like I think it builds fine. Yeah. All right. That's that's it. Thank you. Thanks. Any more questions? Yeah. Hi. Yeah, the Python dependencies. Are they installed separately or are they running in a virtual environment? Or says the Python dependencies of the east Python dependencies of Zephyr in general, the Python dependencies of the Zephyr are contained in an RF contact toolchain manager. Like this is this is the great part about this, like this is already because it's built in. So yeah, you're doing this yourself. So we are running out of time. If anybody have any extra questions, feel free to talk with me. Yeah. Thank you.


of discussion are very interesting one. It's now time that we get into what is up next with the brand love indeed has many significant implications on brand life cycle. Jiha, we have also often heard that consumer is king indeed. That being said, how does building brand love further ensure a fruitful relationship with being the brand and its consumer? To discuss this in depth, our panelists are here to elaborate the role of brand love in consumer brand relationship. Well, first I would like to welcome our session chair, head of marketing India Spotify, Neha Ahuja. We welcome you. And of course, joining us our panelists, please welcome Ashish Mishra, executive vice president marketing, Akko, general insurance, Harish Narayanan, CMO, Mintra, Hitesh Malhotra, CMO, Lelscott, Lucky Sani, head of brand Vedantu Prasanna Rai, vice president and chief marketing officer, Vipro consumer care and lightning, and it's going to be a very interesting evening. So yes, grab on to your tea or coffee and let the conversation come our way over to you, Neha. And I can't wait for it to unfold now. Thanks, Mithin, thanks Mithin. So brand love is actually one of the most important strategies that we've had as our businesses for many, many years. And I think it's become even more relevant in the current time. We also believe that once build this emotional connection called brand love serves as a foundation for a long-term customer to brand relationship and we often see the impact of this for a very long time. Like you, I am also super happy to have this, you know, absolutely stellar panel today on board and I'm sure that they will bring in a very diverse view on the topic. So without much further delay, let's get started. Hitesh, we can start with you. What we really want you to understand is that in your category, do you feel that you consciously invest behind brand love or you feel that it's all about consumer service, consistent communication, product market phase? What do you feel about it?  So every postcode would probably have two to three opticians around that. So, you know, earlier the communication, the focus was quite utilitarian where, you know, we talked about more as a value purchase, you know, more about the quality or more about simply speaking, the whole proposition that a customer can take out of the product. But over a period of time, we discovered that the only way to go about this is to accentuate brand love because the larger your category staggered or, you know, I would say, scattered across unstructured marketplaces or unstructured detail, the higher is your energy that you need to create brand love, right? If you're not available across anywhere, right? If you're the only seller for a particular category, then your efforts are not as much. But today you have to fight with not one or two large eyewear companies or eyewear retailers online or offline. You're fighting with about a plethora of closer to 120,000 opticians across India. So I think, yeah, it becomes a very, very important factor at that point of time. And we have realized it pretty well. We respect that and we understand it now. And we feel that the brand love in our case has to be category-driven since we are the largest seller or the monopolist in this category, the onus is on us to ensure that there is enough love for the category itself, right? So everything from getting attraction on the glasses, how they define the way your face looks to, you know, relieving the taboo which was there in the earlier societies talking about glasses and switching over to contact lenses or laser. I think we should be the champions of that communication and, you know, kind of lead from front. So yes, I think now it is very important because we are competing with 220 or 230,000 people now. Right, right. Thanks, thanks so much. Ashish, what do you feel? Another very fierce category, right? To be part of, what do you feel about, you know, the customer experience driving the, you know, the loyalty and hence the love? So for us at that point, you know, we believe that brand love is something that is derived. It will be an eventual outcome of all our efforts. So what we are really focusing on is a simple principle that, you know, if you consistently exceed customer expectations, you know, and we do it consistently, that's the main point. And we do it over a period of time. Eventually what will, it will result in a great brand love for the brand. So it's not a, it's not a marketing strategy for us. It's something that we would like to have eventually and we would also like to aim for it. But that's not something that is driving. What is driving is making sure that we are changing the way people buy insurance. They're having a great experience while they buy, while they renew, while they clean.  I mean, Amazon is a great example, right? I love Amazon. And it just solved everything for me. And that's a brand that I can honestly say is love. You know, it's what probably would not fall in the usual range of brands that people can confess their love for. Lucky what about you? Very new category, very new brand in the country, right? What is your opinion and how has been your journey? Hi, very good evening to everyone on the panel and to you, Neha. So yeah, it's for us, it's really about experiences, right? Because we really operate in a very online, you know, only, right? We are by DNA online, right? So everything needs to be crafted, constructed from an experienced point of view.  So the way we look at brand love, Neha, is actually, it's not a stream of work to drive for us. I think it's a lens for us. I'm sure if I'm taking the word lens from the category, but I think it's a lens for us, right? So everything we got to look from a marketing point of view has to be looked at from that lens point of view, right? So quick examples, right? Look, for example, for us, advertising is a very small part of the entire play, right? A lot of our experience building happens online. So we have a very big charter called branded service design, which means that very carefully and, you know, very with love crafting delightful experiences from the onboarding to the time someone is unhappy, to the time when someone's kind of referring you back for the next year. So I think it's extremely important to see journeys. And I think I can't emphasize more in the importance of consumer journeys here to be able to really understand the consumers in terms of different need states and what are they looking for. And then for us as a service category, we really look at brand love from that lens. And a lot of initiatives make a lot of sense for us. I think, like I said, in thoughts, actions, and also in a lot of ways, communication, but take the context of COVID now, right? A lot of, you know, we know a lot of people are getting impacted and kids are getting impacted in a big way because of, you know, obviously losing parents, sometimes one, sometimes both. And what's happened is I think we were also thinking of what could one do, for example, which is meaningful, right? I think for me the really the golden word is meaningful, right? So we didn't really kind of straight away jumped on to, you know, working with let's say a few NGOs to kind of craft something which kind of, you know, does a little bit of benefit to the children because this is at the heart of what we do. We actually launched a new initiative. It's called Help India Learn. So where we've actually earned mark a certain amount of money, but money is not the point. I think we've taken the responsibility of really taking 12,000 kids on board for their education throughout. So I think for us, this is brand love, right? I think it's communication is a small part of it. We live in breathe in the service industry. For us, experience is matter most. So really crafting a superb thought through meaningful consumer journeys for different kind of students and parents who come to us and also try and value add across the spectrum. So it doesn't matter if someone's, by the way, you should know we are the largest online free education platform in India today.  We are the largest YouTube free YouTube channel in India today, which means that we continue to invest in it, not because of business sense, because we believe that the value of education is really about giving that value to students, no matter if they can't afford you also, right? So I think for us, it's a kind of an interplay between a very uniquely crafted thought through meaningful service design, a very strong action on ground in terms of how you support contextual or how you support your community, your core audience in times of highs and lows. And obviously, last of it is really crafting, communication that is purposeful. And I'm a very strong believer that I think it's time that marketers move away from mind share, marketing to really purpose and more cultural nuances. I think if you consistently build it, I think you're home. So I think that's how we look at brand love and it's a goal, it's a lens, it's not a stream of thought. Thank you. Harish, moving to you, how do you keep the love alive? I'm sure that you often engage in, you know, sort of trends that allow you to maintain that relevance to stay top of mind. So how do you keep the love alive? First of all, hello to everyone who's listening and nice to see friends. We meet in these kind of meetings, so that's great. See the way, love is a very loaded word, Nayan, if you ask me. We have not been able to define it in real life or personal life as well. So I don't see it being defined very well in terms of brand and the presentation before us, right? That talk about landmarks and maybe build something that is loved and respected and so on. For me, brand love is an outcome. It's an outcome of doing the right thing for the customer again and again and again. And that's what brand love means to me, right? So I'll give you some examples. Examples of being relevant, examples of being helpful what Lucky also was talking about. Examples of being conversational, letting the customers speak the voice of the brand rather than me telling what the brand should say. We were one of the first e-commerce companies to start communicating again when we got out of lockdown last year. And the first thing it did was called lockdown stories, where a girl and a guy are sitting at home and they are buying essentials from Mintra, right? We are fashion, we are a very inherently, very personal, very creative kind of a category. And it was a story about how a girl and a guy, a couple living in a house are able to do stuff in their homes by using Mintra. That was a start. Then we have been doing Mintra fashion superstar for the last two, three years, giving voices to people who never had a voice before. Folks from different parts of the community in terms of diverse population. We started bringing participants across the nation, across types of fashion sensibilities. And everybody loved it because we were representing everyone. Again, we were being helpful to the end customer. Third one I would give as an example is we started master classes, right? So again, India's top stylists, Bollywood celebrities, coming and teaching you how to put on a lehenga or dress for office occasion. These are things as just an e-commerce platform or a transactional platform we don't need to do. But we do it because this is being helpful. This is being going above and beyond. And this is what brand love will ultimately be driven by. And to the earlier points made, right? Brand love is not something that is driven only by marketing. I think a brand is driven by every single touch point in my first company, first job ever, used to call it moments of truth, right? In every moment of truth, whether it is somebody buying a package, a T-shirt from Intra, the first time they tried on and they feel, wow, I just paid 400 rupees for this and this is so amazing, right? I can't believe it. Or the first call they make to us to return something or the first experience they have after they call the contact center or the first experience they have when they become a Intra insider. I think each stage, each brand stage and each moment of truth builds on the reputation that the brand builds and the space it occupies in your mind. And that for me at the end of the day is brand love. And it is built over a long period of time. Just before as we were hearing Leslie talk about it, Maggie is a multi-decade old brand and most of us in this call are less than a decade old or maybe a decade and a half old. So it's a very different mindset for us. For us, I think it is more about doing what is right for the customer and being helpful over and over again that when they think about buying fashion, nothing else comes to mind. They are like, yeah, of course I have to buy from Intra. Why would I even think of anything else, right? And that I think for me is a combination of all those moments of truth and how we delight the customer at each touch point. Marketing and communication being one of those touch points. So that's how I would think about brand love. Absolutely. I couldn't agree more on Harish. On that note, Prasanna, you are in a very different, sort of managing a very different category and a very different life stage to what Harish mentioned. All of us here are managing categories and brands that are actually less than a decade old. So, and you work on a very different life stage of a category. Do you feel any differently about how you have built the brand love in your category? Yeah, thanks, Neha. And hi to everybody listening and to my co-panelists. So it's interesting. See, the other panelists in this here are all people from the service industry where there is a touch and feel and people actually provide you feedback to your face. In FMCG, there are two, three differences. One is there is a large base of consumers. Second is you're not touching them or meeting them on face to face. It is an interaction which happens through your communication and stuff. And you're also handling multiple brands. If I have to take on from what the earlier panelists mentioned, I see it as an outcome, which is exactly true. And each brand is at a different stage of this journey towards brand love, right? So if I take in my portfolio, I have some tool which is a well-established brand for 25 years. Then the concept of brand love is absolutely true. It's as good as what we've been hearing about Maggie, right? There are people in some parts of the country where they're swear by the brand, right? And they think that it does everything that a soap has to do. At the same time, if you take a new brand, it's at a completely different space and different time in its journey. So I equate this, it's very similar to quoting a girl and moving on to a relationship and going on to a marriage. So it is different stages in a relationship that you go through. It's a similar thing with brand building.  You'll have to go through the steps. First, you need to go and introduce yourself. You need to tell the consumer that you are so-and-so. Then move on to the next stage, provide them a functional promise. Then move on. At the same time, provide an emotional promise. Then over a period of time, if you're able to build that kind of emotional connect and people have started behaving from their side, consumers start interacting with you, start buying you, then at that stage, can I provide an emotional payoff which takes the relationship to the next level? Then build in a purpose that it takes it to a completely another level. So each brand, in my opinion, it's a journey where the outcome is what we can hope for is a brand love, but it is a very long journey and each brand needs to approach it from their reality in the business and stage of evolution of the brand and treat it accordingly. So each step in this journey will have a different requirement. That's how I see it. So a new brand needs to focus on the basic awareness, whereas the brand which is at a brand love stage where people are regularly buying it, there is a huge level of loyalty. There you have a lot of other activities of brand engagement, brand activation, purpose, other things that you can get into. So that's how I would define and define a journey which could be different for different brands. I agree. And I think also keeping this sentiment of how you sort of compare human relationships and the journey of that with brand love, I think let's switch gears a little bit and talk about the correlation between brand love and brand loyalty. What is the correlation? Is there any correlation? I think let's discuss that. And Harish, I will come back to you. Your category particularly has really low entry and exit barriers, right? Unfortunately, how do you ensure loyalty? And do you feel that loyalty does play a role or is there any correlation between brand love and brand loyalty? Specifically for categories like yours, which has very low entry and exit barriers. Well, I definitely think there is a strong correlation between customers who love our brand and who are extremely loyal to us. So if you talk to a customer who is, and there are fortunately for us, there is actually a way to describe it in more functional terms, right? We have an insider program, which is a loyalty program. And within the insider program, we have different tiers of loyal users. We have Mintra insider and select and delete an icon customers. And if you look at our top two, three tiers of customers, they would not shop anywhere else. For them, shopping for clothes anywhere else is like walking into a mall and then shopping for clothes from a general store versus walking into a Levi show or a mango show. So the specificity of the joy of shopping, they would swear by Mintra. And that's something that keeps us differentiated even like you said that exit and entry barriers are very low, but we do occupy that special place in their mind when it comes to fashion and it reflects in their share of wallet that they spend with us. So yes, there is a definite correlation, but again, as I said, we will aim to give the best delight to the customer the loyalty is more planned and more, you know, well-executed, I would say, the love happens to be an outcome. So we make sure that the best customers are treated even disproportionately, they are rewarded disproportionately. And they stay with us and hence brand love happens. I don't think it is the other way around, okay? But definitely strong correlation between somebody who is a loyal customer and somebody who has a strong brand love for us. Yeah, thanks, Arish. Hitesh, coming to you. Do you think you've enjoyed some suitable conditions in the recent times, right? Because of the whole external environment.  Yeah, I would say we were able to exploit a couple of conditions. Definitely one is lockdown, work from home and the time that you spend on screen, right? So now the antique layer or we call it blue spectacle, it becomes like an essential that everybody needs to wear to protect your eyes from the screen. So yes, it helps our situation to acquire new customers, especially in the kids segment, because, you know, this is one category, which is not directly, you know, influenced by the kids with the parents as well. So when you acquire a kid, you actually acquire two more parents along with the kid, right? So that's the beauty of the business, because generally the spectacle or the average business is a very referral-led business. You know, it is often said that if you're able to invoke one drive in one family, you'll automatically win about nine to 11 customers in the vicinity of that family, either the family itself or the vicinity, right? So referral plays a very strong part in that. And that's the reason most of our loyalty programs are referral-driven, right? Which you call as gold, where people can come and do trials. They can distribute the code amongst the family and then they can get a free pair of glasses. So yes, we were able to utilize a couple of spots, one is that people sitting at home, they need glasses, you know, on screen. So that's something worked in our favor. Also, you know, in the previous edition of IPL, we were able to advertise and pass that messaging like really, really strongly. And we were able to juxtapose it by different idioms that we had. And yes, it helped us gain a lot of new customers, which you were not looking at as primary customers a few years back or maybe, you know, not from the straight, you know, perspective of thinking, we thought that, okay, people with prescription eyewear or, you know, with number of glasses have to be the primary customers. Now that focus is now shifting, right? It is moving more into the zero power customers that, you know, could be a very, very potential later on. Also, there's another thing to be noticed here is that automatically if parents, I have prescription eyewear if they have glasses. So irrespective of the kid has got prescription or not, they still want to go for that category. They want to play it a little safer. So two new acquisition habits in the customer set. One is definitely the younger people, the kids are sitting at home, working on Zoom, you know, working on glasses, basically glasses in the other audience is the progressive customers. The older audience sets living in joint family equals. I'm sorry. Currently, are they, is it something? I think something is fine to say. Okay, so the other set is the progressive customers that typically the grandparents, all the people around the age of 50, 55 are living in a joint setup. We usually don't see the order coming directly from their phone numbers. It usually comes from the existing customers' phone numbers who've been purchasing regular eyeglasses, but yes, as a category, it's an inclusion. So to curtail that or to arrest that, we started creating profiles on the website on Lenscard. That means, you know, it'll actually ask who you're buying it for, just like how you see it on Netflix and who are you watching it for. So typically when you put the profile, we have stored the customer's frame size at the frame that fits his face, because we've got a 3D try-on. And on top of that, we also save the power. So the power and the frame size works like magic in personalization, because you know, we don't have any other levels of personalization like a Mensra does, right? The closest we can get to it, if you know your bridge size, your temple size and the kind of glasses you've purchased in the past. So I think yes, progressive and kids definitely has helped us acquire new customers in this situation. Interesting. Do you also see more stickiness or loyalty around this time? So there's a beauty of it is that if a customer has made more than one purchase and loyalty is not a problem for us, right? Our main game is to go to the second purchase. Our second or third consecutive purchase is after that loyalty is not an issue, right? Then we kind of become like a family business for the customer, right? Because they feel pride in sharing what they purchase and they get more customers from the same family set up with the friend set up itself. The most difficult task is to retain customer after the first purchase, right? As I said, the distractions are big, right? There is, it's a scattered industry. It's distributed over every region. So people have pretty good examples or reasons to take our product and compare it to a nearest optician and then get misinformed and buy something else, perceiving it to be as good as our product. But the moment we clear the hurdle of second, we are usually good to go. And that's the reason on most of our ages we do buy one, get one, right? So we are creating that need because luckily we have the gift of margin. We are back when integrated and we control the entire supply chain. So we run it on buy one, get one because we said it even if the pretext is that the customer makes two purchases, even the second one is free, zero rupees. In the first instance itself, the chances of the customer will stick longer is very high. Okay, great. Lucky, Hiday spoke about the power of word of mouth and reference. I'm sure that in your category, this plays a very important role in sort of one of course acquisition and then continuing with the brand love So what do you have to say about building loyalty and specifically coming by the route of the reference? Yeah, I think you put it very right, Neha, for us. I think education is one category where time is far bigger than money, right? The amount of time you spend with a brand and the more you are invested into a brand, it's like saying you don't move your, you don't shift your power and your teacher and your doctor very, very easily, right? So, and I think it's very true because some of these categories and some of these professions are such where you really get into, all tick boxes check, right? When you really know that you're in the right place, you're getting treated well, you are very relevant, you know, someone's taking care of you. So I think for us, it is actually a very, very big agenda that we need to be able to kind of really focus on, you know, retention and repeat in a very big way, right? And for that, like I came back to my previous point that it's very important to keep focusing on how the journey is unfolding. It's not just about acquiring new customers, right? For us, it's really about retaining them and really giving them value that goes beyond because for us, the acquisition cost dramatically reduces once you look at second year, third year. I think and then the cost of acquisition obviously is very, very high for a category like us. But at the same time, if you do it well, you know, we are in very aptly placed for us to not really kind of really bother about, you know, again, reacquisitions and next year onwards, right? At the same time, it's very important to know that, you know, when the disconnect is high, you won't get that person back. See, I believe that, you know, people would still, some point of the other, you know, for my friend, Harish here, I think one mistake here and there probably, you know, you'll probably would back sometime later with some other program. But I think for us, opportunity cost is quite high. And I think if there's a bad experience or if you don't see the first year going well or the first three months going well, I think you kind of lost the person for good, right? Because you don't go to the guy who cut your hair bad for the first time, right? You just don't go to him again, right? So I think for us... The correction, like, if we miss the first time, we are done. I think it's important for all of us, for sure, like through the categories here. Yeah, and I think it's also because Harish, because we kind of live in the age of abundance now, right? I think Chris spoiled for choices between brands and between the same guys giving two options and many brands fighting for the same mind space and love, so-called love, right? So I think you don't get that too many options. And for us, like, obviously stakes are quite high. It's a very high involvement category. So we really truly believe that for the first one month, we call it seven day, 15 day, and then obviously the first quarter kind of a play. And we really need to ensure that the NPS, for example, is kind of constantly maintained. We want to be very sure that the relationship metric is evolving and strengthening for our own customers, paid customers as we go forward in the journey. And word-of-mouth reference is a very, very big deal for us. In fact, it comes second after ATL in terms of both awareness creation and also getting us to customers. So I think we can't emphasize more on how important it is. But I think, like Prasanna put it here, it's a very young brand. And we've just started on the journey. It's too early to call out people who have started falling in love with the model or the brand. But I think what we can hope for is that we are able to deliver value in every experience. And I think with that in place, we hope that we really see our business kicking in from early learning. We have three verticals, early learning which starts from first standard. And we have an option of students getting trained for IITJ, right? So it's a full spectrum business, right? So I think hopefully someday there will come a student where someone's gonna be enrolled in a coding class with Vedantu and gonna go on to clear IITJ from Vedantu. So, yeah, fingers crossed. And I think that's the aim to kind of achieve. You should start flashing. I don't wanna be next Steve Jobs, right? So I don't know in today's era, these kind of things work. I think the formal world of education is kind of taken over but I think we wanna stick to sincerity. I think there's a little bit of, there's a little bit of sanctity to education, Hitesh. I think somewhere you gotta maintain that. And I think some things are short-lived than others. If you are true to your DNA, if you kind of stick to your roots, I think people will come back, yeah. Cool, okay. Ashish coming to you, I think both Lucky and Hitesh did mention that second purchase is the sweet spot somehow, right? In your category, I'm not sure how many times you were actually even able to take your consumer to sort of experience the product, right? Experience the service even once. I'm sure that the lesser, the better for you guys but what do you feel about it? I mean, what do you feel about the insurance category? How do you build loyalty where 80% of your users don't even get to experience really the product to the end? I think what's very interesting and I've been listening to everyone is like, I really find five or six different marketers agreeing to one standard definition. It has been really good to see. Everyone here believes that brand life is an outcome and it is, and as Hitesh also said, sometimes brand love can actually come from the designers or who design your product design or who design how the way the product flows. So that is not a marketing driven function. I also believe one of the thing is that if love is a loaded word and like he said, the so-called brand love. If love is a loaded word, I think loyalty is also pretty loaded. I believe that we expect customers to say, if I am loyal to this brand, I will never ever buy any other brand. Now that's done, that really doesn't happen. For example, if you slap on fresh sport and mint on a deodorant, I'll buy it. Those three things are enough. So for us, I think what I'm trying to bring to the point is customer satisfaction at every stage, whether it is at a purchase day, whether you actually get to see the brand in action. And for us, brand in action will be the time that our customer actually claims. So customer satisfaction at every stage is what we import. If you have a great, fantastic experience the first time you actually land on the app or on the website, because what has happened is there is a big misunderstanding that insurance category is complicated and you'd need help. And customers actually go on and try for the first time, they enter the card details and as they go through the journey, that delight is what we focus on. The fact that I can provide great customer satisfaction during the buying phase, during the discovery phase and then when you, and again, a great bank or a great insurance company is the one that stays in the background. You really don't feel the need of having to utilize that. I mean, if I have to turn up to my bank for something, I will really be angry. That's what I did. So, and you're right, sometimes we miss out on the fact that 80% of our customers don't claim. So how do I actually show you what great brand promise I can deliver when you actually claim? But that's the part. So instead of focusing on that, just only on the 20% you also focus on the 80, saying, hey, if you had a great year, you didn't have any issues. So enjoy this great buying process, the easiest renewal process.  So we have something called, one of the first in the industries, three day claim settlement or on account settlement. There are customers who will file a claim in the morning and I've got money in the account by evening. One of the other things that we did recently on health insurance was that for the first time ever, we credited money into a patient's account who was getting admitted into the hospital. Even before they claim it because the other hospital refused to do cashless claims. It has never been done in the industry. We are breaking this. So you deposited money into the customer's account even before they claim it. And because we knew the customer was serious, he was in the hospital. So those are the things. And it shows three out of four customers come back to our company. That's crazy. And I would take that percentage any day. And we've got NPS scores in the high eighties when it comes to people who have claimed from Apple. So this is, I think our obsession with customer satisfaction, trying to make it easy, simpler, even eventually leading to the outcome of brand loss. But that's the, as I said, that's all, we all understand the fact that it's a derived metric. Yeah, yeah, I agree. Yes, Nia, a quick point to what I was just saying is that I think there are far more light users to a brand than heavy users, right? Eventually the number of users to a brand which are light users are far higher, right? So I think it's obviously a little more emphasis today on loyalty, but I think let's remember that, like Ashish said, to be really crafting mass programs to the light users, to delight them, is as important as to be able to craft something very, very intense for the high intensity or high frequency users. So I think it's an important point that we should not miss out on the fact that all of our focus of love is only going on creating those 20% guys who come to us because we all know, you know, loyalty is an expensive metric to maintain. Absolutely, absolutely.  And when we say loyal as in the ones who I will never go to another brand, you know, that kind of loyalty we're talking about. Yeah. Okay, so quickly moving on guys, Prasanna, you manage, you know, iconic brands and tools. Does satisfaction or loyalty look any different for you?  In fact, I've grown up in the FNCG environment and I know that how two brands can coexist in the same bathroom.  Yeah, it's interesting. They have, you know, with the diverse panel here, I was just thinking about it. If you take Vedanto and the hackbook where the cost of each purchase is higher compared to a Linskart and a Minthra. And when you come to me, I will do the cheapest. So, the kind of repeat purchase that everybody has in their mind is at a different level to define loyalty. For a Vedanto or insurance, it could be two, three purchases would be considered as great loyalty. But if you come to FNCG, if a person continuously buys 50 times, even then I would doubt to call them as a loyal consumer. That's the first thing. So, the question of how many repeat purchase is going to define and how are you going to define loyalty is going to be different. But having said that, the first purchase for anybody to any of this industry, the first purchase becomes extremely important. You have to get the person for the first purchase which will have different tactics of its own. So, that's the most important. But after that, get them repeat over a period of time will be different point of time and it will depend upon how. So, in our case in FMCG, for example, we have data which I can track saying, what is the kind of loyalty and what is the kind of breakup of a customer that I'm getting up getting. So, for example, in certain markets of us like in Andhra for Santu, which is the largest brand there, almost 50% of the consumers there in that market who buy Santu, almost 80% of their annual requirement of soap is satisfied by Santu. So, that's the kind of loyalty that we're talking about. So, there are certain markets for certain brands where loyalty is a huge base of consumers unlike what we were talking earlier. Lucky was talking about it's a small base but there are different brands at different stages. But if I go to another market where the loyalty is lesser, it will be lesser. So, I need to adapt my approach to each of these markets differently. So, loyalty is a great measure to define brand love. Having said that in FMCG, there is also a possibility because over a period of time, what happens in FMCG is also inertia buying. Every time you go to the market by habit, you're buying. So, it's also important to track some of the imagery metrics which you want to position your brand on. So, apart from loyalty, that parameter also becomes important. What is key or she as a consumer said, thinking about the brand? Is there a key imagery that we are tracking? Is that going lower in spite of loyalty being high? Is an extremely important thing because if the imagery drops, you can lose your loyal customers at any point of time. They might not show it today. They might continue to buy because of inertia, but if their mind measures about your brand and the imagery goes down, they can drop you at any time. So, I would say loyalty, in addition to the way the brand images and how people see your brand or position your brand in their mind is also something very important to ensure that you have brand love. Sure, sure. Thanks, thank you Sana, very helpful. And I love to discuss the SMCG environment. It's my DNA, so I love it. Guys, moving on to the next part of the discussion, let's talk a little bit about measurement. We are most often faced by very stiff questions by our CFOs and our leadership teams, that how will this impact? How will this initiative ultimately have an impact on the P&L? I'm sure we've all faced those questions. So, let's talk a little bit about how we measure or do we measure it at all. Lucky to start with you, there is a lot of buzz in your category, right? I think it's a very fierce category right now, especially during the lockdown. How do you firstly, how do you differentiate between buzz and love, right? And then moving on to the second part is that how do you think that you've measured the impact of brand love? Yeah, so I think a couple of ways, Neha. So, first of all, I think, I don't think there are easy answers to this. We've all gone into rooms where questions on brand love and what is even brand spends driving. Forget about brand love, I'm asking a bigger question and it's difficult to today attribute to a T in terms of what exactly is brand spends doing. But having said that, there are a couple of ways to look at it, right? And couple of lead metric, couple of black metric kind of a philosophy. So, obviously, if you are a brand trying to drive brand love or at least affinity and passion towards your brand, if I break it up into a slightly more comprehensible pieces. So, I think what we do is what we are trying to kind of craft now. And I think I picked up from Nike and Nike used to do it many years back and they still do it. Is that in many parlances, we have all known of brand equity studies. But I think those are very strategically used for either to prove a point in larger boardroom meetings or more on M&A opportunities kind of a places, right? But having said that, what I am firstly trying to drive it with Anto is that we're trying to craft something like a mini equity kind of a conversation happening every once in two months. So, what we do is actually if you really break up brand love, right? It's actually comes from interpersonal theory of love, right? So, essentially, what are the components of it, right? It's affinity, right? Which is connectedness and bondedness, which in many ways, you know, brand C and Milwood Brown fundamentals have proven. It's intimacy, right? Which is how passionate you are about the whole thing and trust, naturally kind of breaking down brand love into pieces, right? So, what we are trying to craft something called, let's say a brand passion score or a brand relationship equity score, which is essentially a combination metric, which is a brand that is made for me. It's a statement that we could craft out of the brand health track, is a brand that I trust and is a brand that I passionately or purposely talk to others for or with. So, I think a kind of a composite score gives us a strength of the relationship of the brand with the core users and I'm emphasizing here core users because you can't be everything to everyone and you've got to be very specific that where are you driving this equity from, correct? And if you're, and every brand has these three set of, you know, circles, right? The insiders, rightly said, Harish is called the Winther insiders, right? Like, there's an insiders, there is the followers and then there is the feeders, right? So, with the insiders and the followers, we quickly test, you know, these three composite scores of, is a brand I trust, is a brand that I recommend or passionately or fondly talk about and is a brand that I, is made for me. It's extremely relevant for me. I think these three metric combined gives us a view of what the strength is and if you see competitively going up and down, we know the relationship is moving because of certain interventions and maybe because of category play. Like you said, it's a very hectic category and the other thing which we measure and I think it's an important thing to do is social equity. I think the share of voice, the positive share of sentiment, which is by the way a weekly metric and not a monthly by monthly kind of a thing because I think everyday conversations are happening on choosing a brand online before anything else is happening today. So I think if you are creating, giving and measuring your social equity through a combination metric of share of voice, positivity or the passion share of voice within the social sentiment and are you seeing some leading and lagging measure in terms of your brands getting called out for a particular type of attributes versus others and versus competition. So I think in between these combinations, we are able to kind of assign some weightages and create, hey, this is the strength of a brand and for users who are core, who are insiders, this is the strength of the brand versus let's say outside circle of followers or feeders. But I think I still believe the correlation of all of this to hardcore business metric of share of wallet or share of revenue or share of market is still a modeling exercise. The more data you sit on, the more the heritage of your brand, the more you are able to prove this in boardrooms and CFRs. I think everywhere else, what the task for me, for example, is to forward-looking kind of build this models and help people track those to those models that he looks like there is a correlation getting established. The more we do this, the more this is happening and the forward-looking thing is working out better that we don't have too much heritage and backward-looking data right now. So I think that's how we look at the play of measuring brand love, but I'm telling you, there is no easy answer to this. It's easier said than done. And hopefully people buy into our arguments and people kind of take a shot at this and say, okay, fine, let's look at some of the leading metrics and let's look at some forecasting on these things versus trying to prove a point here and now.  And I think then it's like the worst situation ever. Sorry, Harish. Minthra is a very data-rich organization, right? And Lucky mentioned that the more data you have, the better measurements you can do of any kind of brand love or loyalty. So do you have any magic tools and magic wands that you sort of used to measure brand love? Don't be all wishy-washy. Actually, Lucky covered quite a few things. So I do agree with him on, so one, imaginary metrics on leadership and fashion, that matters a lot. So if somebody thinks of expertise in fashion, knowledge in fashion, choice, selection, price, offers, we measure a lot of these things in terms of mind metrics. I think this combines to an equity score and we choose the ones that matter to us the most in a particular given segment. So in a segment, if you want to be known as fashion forward and the trend leader, then we track that. If somewhere else, selection is what matters, then we track that. So we have bi-segment, we understand the imaginary metrics. Second, we do definitely social. So share of voice, positive share of voice and social. So that sounds another metric. I think the one that he didn't cover that I would add is given it's a very, very cooperative category and like you said, the cost of exiting and entering the category is so low. The common spot, very basic, you know, whether it's metrics also matters. When somebody thinks of online fashion, are they thinking of me first? And as long as that scores keep going, it means that at the moment of impulse purchase, they think of me before anyone else. So while it's a very basic type of metric, common and total spawn, that also helps us identify the impact that are above the line and brand conversations are having. While a lot of below or rather performance-led kind of pushes reflect in other things, right? So it may be consideration, maybe purchase intent and so on. So imaginary metrics, social and very, very top-level mind metrics, these are the three combination of these three is what I look at. Thank you. Thanks, Adish. It is coming to you. I think some of the points, the tools, the modeling has been covered. I think for your category, like you mentioned, sometimes the buyer is not the user himself. So that is how do you kind of measure the brand love? So honestly, Neha, I think brand love is quite perceptive and at the same time, measurable to an extent, every good CMO worth a salt would know what is the brand love of his organization. Adish's choice, whether he chooses to tell his CEO or not or whether he makes it public or not, but he knows it, right? Every CMO would know at the back of his hand what is the level of brand love his company is operating at. And I think there are two, three main factors that in a place like ours where the primary customer may not be the user at the same time, we still depend on a lot of traditional metrics. For example, for us, the comment space and social media is very important. Comment and the saves and the shares, right? We feel that Instagram today is a world of wonders for marketers. I take that stats very personally, right from a previous assignment to current one because I go very deep into it in terms of every story, every post, every reel, what is the kind of shares? What is the kind of saves that are happening on that? Because it gives me a little bit of an idea that what direction the content is heading, right? And content, it's a very, very critical part in brand love. That is one. Second is the absolute hard metrics could be things like, for example, your repeat gap, right? So your cost of purchase, if it's 100 rupees, in an ideal situation where your repeat customers are an indicator of brand love, which are not coming more than 10 or 11 rupees, right? The one-tenth of cash, that's a scenario that most of the people would want to maintain at. And I truly believe that marketing follows the rule of state, right? So as we say that a perfect state is recognized by how it takes care of its weakest. A perfect marketing is recognized by how it enchants the person who's typically not your audience as well, right? That's a very one-strong analogy which I find with marketing and a state. Secondly, you have developing state, develop state in marketing also you're developing marketing teams and develop marketing teams, right? So it's always there's a team which is following a process and getting there and but a whole lot of confusion and chaos is existing and the other teams sit comfortably where they exactly know what they need to look at and what are the levers they need to press. So one is as a soft metrics, I would say Instagram, I take very seriously and the hard metrics is a repeat cat. Somewhere in the middle of all this, you know, we do have a panel, wherever I work, I always believe in having a consumer panel. My consumer panel is a very strong indicator of whatever things we are doing as marketers is correct or not, right? The panel is not responsible to inform us about the product quality or, you know, their customer service experience to some extent, but largely we are keeping a panel to see the efficacy of what are they pursuing about the brand with every piece of communication that kind of goes out. As a marketer, we can just control communication and media, right? We don't have enough controls over the product or the supply. We can always have meetings in the boardrooms and bring these points out, but we are not direct controllers of it, right? We anticipate we pray for the best but the real control is basically communication and media. So I think having a panel, the soft metrics and social media and the hard metrics on the repeat cat versus new cat, if these three things are well maintained, you will be a developed marketing team, right? For sure, you'll be like a developed nation or developed marketing team. And basically your job becomes easy and you're getting paid for like four hours of duty every day then. Yeah, thanks, thanks Pesh. Thank you guys. I think super, super enriching conversation. I will be careful of the fact that we are on a Friday evening and we are approaching the closing time. So I think what we can do is that very quickly, let's go around the table and maybe have just one brief closing remark from all of you as what is the takeaway that you want the young marketers to sort of believe in when it comes to brand love? Hitesh, we can start with you since you're on the screen right now. Be very honest with where your brand stands today, right? There is no shame. If your brand is not at the top pedestal and there's still a journey to cover, be at least honest with yourself and the stakeholders in the company, right? There is no point sugar polishing when you really know that when you're getting a million views boosted and you get one comment that, hey, Neha, how are you doing, right? So you clearly see the signal where it stands. Just be very honest with it because that's the first step. If that is not there, then you'll pretty end up in a very messy state. And I see a lot of youngsters who want to operate a SMCG kind of scenario in a startup. It's not possible, right? Today what you see with the Britannia or Wipro or Taj Mahal or any liver company is the hard work of late 60, 70 years put together a lot of different individuals across the world. Now we are trying to fast track all of it with company like Lenscard, Mentra, Naika, so many others, Zako. So when you're fast tracking it, right? Not necessarily that the same principles will apply. Everything has to be a little bit on a fast mode and honesty. And I think that is really, really important because this is something which is missing, right?  We've got to crawl out of it, right? Everybody kind of starts believing that we are in a sweet space and then there is no scope for improvement from that point. So I think that is the most important thing I believe. Thanks for being brutally honest there, loved it. Lucky, anything from you? No, I just had to summarize with when I was looking at that topic of discussion also, the song that came to my mind was Beatles, All the Money Kind by Me Love, right? So I think to all the marketers, budding, non-budding, whatever, young old, I think you need to have your own formulas. I don't think there's a state cut metric to all of this. Just pick the foundation, simple, keep track of, and I think there are enough foundational frameworks available out there in terms of, how to measure all of these things, how to build it. But I think you just need to keep a pulse on the consumer. I think if you keep the panel like it was saying, very baby, very, very close to your consumer. I think the more closer you are, the more frequent you talk to them, the more you understand. And trust me, like understanding human beings and therefore relationships are complicated, it's not easy to get them, it's not easy to maintain them. It's not easy to even kind of build it. I think you gotta be, keep reinventing, inventing. And I think state root to the fundamentals of who the brand is. I think knowing thyself is very, very important before you go out and start whoing your consumers with all the love. So I think, yeah, to the state answer, keep your horizons slightly broader, go beyond advertising, start to look at smaller wins. I think someone said it right in gloves, even the small things matter. In fact, small things matter than the bigger gestures, right? So keep at it, find your small gestures, big gestures and know thyself and know your customers well, that's it. Thank you, Lucky, for the life lessons, much more than brand love lessons. Harish, anything from you? I agree with what Hitesh and Lucky said and I'll take a slightly different route so that I add to the conversation, right? In categories where you have a very vocal customer, let your customer build your brand with you. We tend to like, oh, my brand, I will say, I will control, I will say exactly what is supposed to be said. There's a 200 page brand guideline book that you should not cross and all that will happen, right? That age is past. The best brands are built when the customer speaks on your behalf and they are able to fight for you, they are able to speak your language, they go out and make things possible which you never thought was possible. So I think letting go of a bit of control and letting them build a brand with you and your Spotify is a prime example of it, I would say. Yes, I- That would be my tip for, especially in new age companies, let the customer build a brand with you. I completely agree, Harish. And I think this is something that, honestly, I have learned after coming to Spotify, I haven't done it in FMCG brands, even brands like Vodafone, which are very iconic brands. And a young brand like Spotify and just a matter of a year, year and a half, two years, we actually leveraged, the consumer love to build the brand further. So completely agree with you on that one. Ashish, anything from you? I think you're on mute, can't hear you. Sorry, sorry, sorry. So I would just say that every consumer has an expectation without any category. I have an expectation that when I go to a particular show or a particular category, how I will, what is my interaction going to be? So I think if I had to summarize, I would just say that, if you consistently exceed your customer's expectations when they deal with you or what they expect to do with you, and you do it consistently and you obsess over customer satisfaction, eventually you will have brand love. You'll have the love, you'll have the loyalty, and you'll have all the flowers and et cetera being thrown at you. But these are the three things.  You constantly exceed it, you do it consistently and you obsess over customer satisfaction, eventually you will have all the love. Yeah, thanks, thanks, Ashish. Anything from you, Prasanna? I was closing the mic. For me, I think most of the people have covered most of the points. The one point is slightly radically kind of going away from the main topic of putting brand love as an important thing. I actually feel it's not a very important thing. I feel that it's not a discussion that I would like to have with the CFO or a business head or in the boardroom because it's an idea which has its relevance in the marketing fraternity. Why? Because if I have to get a team to engage with the consumer in different ways, then brand love is a good way to tell him or her that you need to have a different kind of engagement to the consumer, there the brand love plays a role. Otherwise, if I have to evaluate my business, then loyalty is a good alternate, look at your repeat purchases, look at your loyal consumers, how they are growing, that's a better and more grounded way of measuring brand love. And brand love, I think, should be kept to the marketing council and the marketing room. Absolutely. I never want to have these conversations with my CFO and the leadership team trust me. Okay, thank you guys. Thank you so much. I thoroughly enjoyed discussing this topic with this diverse team and I hope you enjoyed this time spent with us. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for having us. Thank you.


My fellow Americans, today I want to talk to you about peace. Back in June of 1963, President John F. Kennedy delivered an arms control speech that is still remembered for its eloquence and vision. He told the graduating seniors at American University, I speak of peace therefore as the necessary rational end of rational men. I realize that the pursuit of peace is not as dramatic as the pursuit of war, and frequently the words of the pursuer fall on deaf ears. But we have no more urgent task." Twenty years have passed since those words were spoken, and they've been a troubled era, overshadowed by the dangers of nuclear weapons. We've seen the world's inventory of nuclear weapons steadily expand. Despite many sincere attempts to control the growth of nuclear arsenals, those arsenals have continued to grow. That's the bad news. The good news is that now at last, there is hope that we can finally begin to reverse this trend. Americans have joined together Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives to face the greatest challenge of our time, the urgent task of pursuing a lasting peace in the nuclear era. Our political process has forged a consensus, a bipartisan consensus that has united us in our common search for ways to protect our country, reduce the risk of war, and ultimately dramatically reduce the level of nuclear weapons, the foundation we need for successful negotiations. Remember, our MX Peacekeeper missile program calls for the deployment of 100 missiles. The level ultimately deployed, however, will clearly be influenced by the outcome in Geneva. If an agreement is reached, which calls for deep reductions, which is, of course, our goal, the number of missiles could certainly be adjusted downward. As the Scowcroft Commission rightly pointed out, the MX Peacekeeper missile is an essential part of a comprehensive modernization and arms control program to ensure deterrence today and in the future. We're building the MX Peacekeeper to strengthen deterrence, but it also provides vital negotiating incentives and leverage in Geneva. Andrei Sakharov, the distinguished Soviet physicist and Nobel Prize laureate, recently published an eloquent article which forcefully makes the same point. He notes that, given the Soviet advantage in land-based strategic missiles, talks about limitation and reduction of these systems could become easier if the United States were to have MX missiles, albeit only potentially. Andrei Sakharov is a hard man for anyone to ignore. When the Congress reaffirms its support for this program and authorizes the funds to modernize our strategic deterrent, our agenda for peace will be strengthened even further. In NATO, as in our other alliances, there's a renewed feeling of solidarity. Last May at Williamsburg, the leaders of the major industrialized nations demonstrated their commitment to vigorously pursue the twin objectives of arms reductions and deterrence in the Williamsburg communique. This solidarity is a source of much strength. For the graduates of June 1983, this is a time of opportunity and hope, a hope that they and their children will enjoy a safer, more secure world. That's why we must sustain our consensus. And that's why I've spent hundreds of hours meeting with members of this administration, with the bipartisan commission on strategic forces, with our arms negotiators, with members of the Congress and with concerned citizens. My message to them and to you is that I have no higher priority than reducing and ultimately removing the threat of nuclear war and seeking the stability necessary for true peace. To achieve that objective, we must reduce the nuclear arsenals of both the United States and the Soviet Union. We must achieve greater stability. That is, we must be sure that we obtain genuine arms reductions, not merely agreements that permit a growth in nuclear arsenals or agreements that proclaim good intentions without the teeth necessary to verify and enforce compliance. Our current goal must be the reduction of nuclear arsenals, and I for one believe we must never depart from the ultimate goal of banning them from the face of the earth. That's why we've presented ambitious but realistic proposals, and that's why I have been and continue to be willing to consider any serious Soviet counteroffer. And that's why I've made our original proposal more flexible and why I continue to seek new ideas for achieving an arms reduction breakthrough. Indeed, the draft treaty our negotiators recently introduced in Geneva documents our flexibility. As opportunities permit, the U.S. position will continue to evolve. The United States will negotiate patiently but urgently and always in good faith. But we cannot and we must not settle for less than genuine, mutual and verifiable arms reductions. America's post-war generation has preserved world peace and lifetime, but it's been an uneasy peace. Today's young Americans, indeed all members of the human family, desire more and deserve more. And you deserve to know that your government is doing everything possible to meet your expectations. Time and again, our nation has proved that there are no limits to what we Americans can achieve when we work together. But today we are working together to do what is right, and as a result we can look forward to a more secure tomorrow. Till next week, thanks for listening and God bless you.


Hi, I'm Cherise Bell with the Columbia Parks and Recreation Department. Welcome to City Talk. We're here to talk about the Let's Move Columbia Family Wellness Challenge. The Family Wellness Challenge is open to children and adults. The Family Wellness Challenge is 12 weeks of fun activities that focus on health and wellness. We have a variety of activities for our families to include bubble soccer, nutrition and cooking classes, water safety classes, so it's a great journey in a program for families who are looking at ways to incorporate healthy living into their daily lives and to do it as a family unit. We try to do a lot of things to expose our families to different ideas about health and wellness, whether it's different ways to cook food, activities they can do at a family like our walks with our rangers in the park, so we try to introduce ideas of ways of thinking about health and wellness, not just being in the gym. There's other things that you can do to kind of live a healthier lifestyle. We had several families who won, we had three top winners. They won prizes value at $1,000, second place was $500, third place was $250. And they're always excited about not just winning the prizes at the end, but actually all the activities that we participate in, because a lot of families are like, oh, we didn't know the city does that or that that park was there or, you know, I would never thought about doing that with my family and I'm glad, you know, we were able to learn about this and participate in this program. So this program is great for anyone who's looking for a way to be healthy with their child and other family members in the home. So the family unit should be a child, at least a sixth and older, at least one parent and it can be a grandparent, but they all have to live in the same household. So it could be the mother, father, child, and a grandparent all in the same home. But we want at least one child and one adult living in the same home. For more information, please call us at the Parks and Recreation Department at<PHONE_NUMBER> or visit us online at ColumbiaSC.net. I would say to anyone who's thinking about it and not really sure if they want to participate in this program, I would say, please, you know, call us, go to the website, check it out. We actually have families that, you know, if you want to talk to them, we can probably put you in touch with them, check out our Facebook page. This is a great program and it's free. It's open to you guys. You have access to your wellness center, to our parks, to our programs and events and it's all free and you win some great prizes as well. And it's like, there's nothing you can lose. There's no bad about this program. It's free, 12 weeks of fun, educational and you get to do it as a family. So, everything about this program is great and it's worthwhile. Thank you for joining us today on City Talk. And remember to apply for the Family Wellness Challenge by Friday, April 13th.