Manifest caught up with Harit Nagpal, managing director and chief executive officer, Tata Play, to learn how organisations can deal with disruptions, whether cord-cutting is prevalent in India, brands he is bullish about, and more...

Edited excerpts:

Your career has seen stints with Lakmé, Marico, PepsiCo, Shoppers Stop, Vodafone (Vi) and now Tata Play. Could you share some learnings from your four-decade-long career?

The environment, technology and income levels have changed rapidly. Therefore, you have to keep a watch on the customer and see how those changes have impacted the buying behaviour, lifestyle, and expectations. That’s what I’ve done across these six companies and 40 years.

Differentiation - you spoke about price not being an option during your talk recently at Goafest. What are the differentiations start-ups or any other companies can have?

Pricing is not a sustainable comparative differentiating option. Differentiation cannot be based on activity, it has to be a process. Price is an activity. If you change your price, somebody else can follow within half an hour. But if it’s a process, and it’s taken you six months to build that differentiator, it will take your competitor a similar amount of time.

My suggestion is that if you want to differentiate in a commoditised market, which most markets are today, your differentiator has to be a process and not an activity.

During your talk, you also spoke about the next disruption coming sooner than the last one in a bigger way with the example of covid coming 100 years after the Spanish Flu, and a bigger disruptor waiting to come sooner than 100 years away. How can brands be ready for it? What did Tata Play do to deal with the disruption in 2020?

You can’t anticipate what is going to come. The next big disruption is going to hit you out of the blue. So the only way is to make yourself ready for what’s going to hit you. This can only be handled by organisational processes.

Two or three things that come to my mind to handle this include keeping your organisation lean, keeping a collaborative environment, and keeping the frontline empowered so that there’s the least amount of bureaucracy. This means people don’t have to come back to the senior management for every decision and approval.

If the frontline is empowered, there’s a collaboration between functions and the levels are fewer, anytime there’s a disruption happening, the operating guys can get together, assess the damage, and figure out a way to work quickly rather than going through the whole process of approvals. The only way to hit the ground running is to have a lean, mean, empowered collaborative environment.

These are the things that helped us during covid. Though our product is transmitted virtually, our set-top boxes and dish antennae have to be installed through homes.

Before the pandemic, people were visiting physical stores to recharge their TV connections. Calls had to be taken through call centres. So there were a lot of physical aspects despite it being a virtual service. Then we found our way very quickly to make the physical elements as virtual as possible.

About 76% of the recharges are coming from digital now, versus close to 25% pre-pandemic. Given that shift, what are your spends on digital? What’s the role of print within your advertising mix?

Digital spends are rising for people who are looking for niches. If you’re looking for a particular segment in a particular part of a state, then it makes sense to do a lot of digital advertising.

We are still a mass market player. For mass market players, television and traditional media continue to be very relevant. When we have a proposition for someone in Andhra Pradesh, we also have the same proposition for someone across Punjab, Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra and Gujarat. So, it’s always cheaper to do that through a mass market medium.

I won’t deny that digital is increasing, but it hasn’t overtaken television and press. Print is very regional. When we have a proposition for a particular state, we end up using it because it makes sense to use that language to reach out to the audience. A bulk of our customers are now coming from rural and villages, so if we have a proposition for users in Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh or Andhra Pradesh for example, it makes sense to go with a local publication. Print is smaller than TV for sure and it’s occasional and not usual.      

For Tata Play - we remember the ‘isko laga dala toh life jhingalala’ campaigns from the early days featuring Aamir Khan. These were disruptors in our view. Do you think Tata Play’s ads generate the same recall now?

The ‘jhingalala’ campaigns continue to be running. The brand recall as well as intention to purchase is only increasing. What you’re referring to is a time when media was less cluttered and therefore ad campaigns registered for longer.

Having said that, if you ask people who watch television only, they remember our more recent ad campaigns too. Just about a couple of years ago we had a series of about 14 advertisements with Saif Ali Khan and Kareena Kapoor Khan.

If you look at our campaigns - we had Aamir (Khan) to start with. Then we had ‘poochne mein kya jaata hai’ which was to push the Tata Sky offering for INR 200 or so.  Then came a campaign shot in Kashmir with the boy and girl, – a series of 13 ads (one released daily during the IPL). Then came the recent Saif and Kareena campaign. We’ve had South India-specific campaigns running too, one of which involved Mohanlal.

Recently, we released a campaign which had films in every language separately. It was aimed at the rural markets and got us a good amount of recall. That’s the ad almost every potential customer and retailer recalls.

If the numbers are to say anything, the brand’s top-of-mind recall as well as intention to purchase have only been rising over the years.

Cord-cutting in India – is it a big enough phenomenon to worry TV channels and D2H companies?

Television numbers were in the region of 110 million paid subscriptions in India. If cord-cutting had hit, those numbers would have dipped.

Cord-cutting hit the West because television prices were very high – around USD 100 per month. OTT came at a much lower price compared to that.

In India, TV itself is about USD 3-4 per month. Paid OTT can only be more expensive than that. We read what the Western media writes and believe it’ll happen here. The situation is different here.

There are homes in India watching the likes of Netflix, Disney+Hotstar, Prime Video and also those who want to consume content on television. So both can grow. It’s not that if one grows, the other dies. We are in OTT too, with Binge, which is an aggregation of OTT apps. That’s also growing and so is TV for us.

During your talk at Goafest, you mentioned nine out of 10 startups are chasing customers after having technology, rather than chasing customer needs. Among all of the start-ups, which ones are you most bullish about?

My point was that people have started using technology to create new products, not customer needs. I’ll share an example. Snack foods have been around for centuries. But they were based around potato chips and excluded corn etc.

In came a brand which was called Kurkure. It used Indian flavours to produce a product and created an INR 1,000 crore brand.

If you walk the streets of Mumbai or any other city in the last couple of years, you will notice a product called Lahori Zeera. This brand started in a small town in Punjab three or four years ago. The first year turnover was INR 45-odd crores, the second year was INR 220 crores. I would look at this as an INR 1,000 crore brand in the next year.

Both these brands have worked without any new technology. They just looked at consumer behaviour and saw what people want to eat when it comes to street food in India – not in the USA. They put those ingredients in their snack foods. While people have been struggling with potato chips through salt and drinks through cola, orange and lemon, these guys have put Indian spices in their products. One is already an INR 1,000 crore brand and the other is on its way to becoming one, out of nowhere.

So a startup needs to look at customer likes and dislikes and build their products around that, rather than a technology being in search of a customer. You don’t need rocket science to gain the trust of a customer. Understand the behaviour, and then produce your product according to what they desire.

Your book (Adapt to Thrive, Not Just Survive) has 10 stories you wrote about. Could you briefly state how you went about picking those topics?

When I sat down to write this book, I looked at subjects which make the most impact on businesses. So I made a list through my experience and it turned out to be 10.

Then I put in factors in each of these that help – for example, listening to the voice of the customer. And then listing what are the 10 things that we need to do. They are essentially the questions at the end of every chapter. Then I created a fictional plot around them. Most of the things written in the book are those that I have seen happen around me and some of them are my own experiences. I have just given it a fictional feel to make it look interesting.

This article first appeared in the June print issue of Manifest. Subscribe to Manifest here