Our Perspectives

Game Changers: The Insurgent Consumer Brands Playbook

June 1, 2023
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46 Minutes
Listen Time
Our Perspectives

Game Changers: The Insurgent Consumer Brands Playbook

46 Minutes
Listen Time
Game Changers: The Insurgent Consumer Brands Playbook
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India’s emerging consumers—both Gen Z and millennials—demand more, better, and faster. To serve their needs, a new breed of consumer brands has emerged. We define them as “insurgent consumer brands.” These brands operate with a sense of insurgency and are on track to capture an outsized share of growth in consumption. These brands have a clear sense of purpose and are winning the hearts of underserved customers in India.

In this webinar, Navneet Chahal, a partner with Bain’s Consumer Products, Retail, and Customer practices, and Hariharan Premkumar, managing director at DSG Consumer Partners, discuss the playbook for insurgent brands to grow in a capital-efficient and profitable manner, while highlighting the emerging consumer themes and archetypes that insurgents can tap early to drive disproportionate growth.

Episode Transcript:

Insurgent Brands Playbook– Webinar

Navneet  00:01

Hello, everyone. Welcome to this webinar on Bain and Company and DSG consumer partners latest report, the game changers a study of the Indian insurgent consumer brands and their playbooks. I'm Navneet Chahal partner at Bain and a member of our consumer products and retail practices. Today's session will be facilitated by me, along with Hariharan Premkumar, Managing Director at DSG Consumer Partners, he heads the firm's operations in India and has led several investments in flagship consumer brands.

Let me start by painting some context for this report. We've all seen the headlines this year of India being the most populated nation in the world. I'm not sure if the title itself means much, except that in just the past four years, 157 million upper middle and high income consumers have been added to our population, we expect another 400 million to join those ranks in the next eight years. With such a rapidly growing consumer base, the demands of the market are changing. Today's consumers and those of the future want more want better and faster options to cater to their evolving needs. In response to these demands, many of you are leading or investing or working in a new breed of consumer brands, which we call insurgent brands. These brands are capturing the hearts of underserved customers across the country. And they feel a sense of mission and purpose. They operate with a sense of insurgency, they are well on their way to capturing an outside share of the market.

This report delves into three aspects: One, the point of departure, the thriving and blooming consumer brand landscape in India today. Two the strategies and successes of these insurgent brands, providing some insight into the disproportionate growth and offering a playbook for capital efficient scaling. Three, a view into the consumers of today and of the future and how brands can tap into some of this consumer revolution as part of their playbooks to scale. So without further ado, let us dive right in. Hari over to you to kick us off

Hari  02:08

Thank you Navneet. Hello everyone. Now we'll start off with the macro outlook first. I think the most defining macro trend that will play to the advantage of insurgent brands is this growth of the upper middle class. As you can see from the graph, the upper middle class in high income segments will constitute more than 50% of consumer spends in 2030. As opposed to that, if you look at the market today, it is still the low income segments that contribute to majority of consumer spends. And hence the brands that have scaled up at present are largely brands that that cater to the mass segments or or low income groups. However, this would change dramatically in 2030.

Now we'll delve into the key themes that will drive consumption. There are three main themes that will drive consumption from today till 2030. The first one is the unorganised to organised theme, the second is premiumization, and the third is consumers adding new categories to their wallet. And as you can see from the slide, the most interesting thing is the the preference of the upper middle and high income segments to spend on categories that will ride on the premiumization and new categories themes. And this is something that we see often as consumer investors as well. Typically there are two approaches that insurgent brands take when they launch a new product. The first is offering a product that is better than alternatives that are available in the market, which plays in the premium isolation theme. It could be a brand like Veeba that offered sauces, you know with with lesser sugar or go they see which which offered Indian confectionery with jaggery instead of sugar, etc. And similarly, the other approach that insurgent brands take is solving an unsolved customer pain point. This could be a brand like Sula that created the wine category back in the day or a brand like Epigamia that created the Greek yoghurt category. So these themes, along with the growth of the upper income segment plays to the advantage of insurgent brands and it's a great time to be building an insurgent brand.

So this is a very interesting slide. You know, the last two slides may have made it look like that insurgent brands are a phenomenon waiting to happen or about to happen, but the fact is, they're already growing and taking share away from incumbents, and no category is immune. As you can see, we studied six categories closely. Food and Beverage, Apparel and Lifestyle, Jewellery, Beauty and Personal Care, Home and Kitchen and Electronics. Barring none, in every category, the insurgents have grown at a much faster pace than incumbents. And the growth rate of the differential growth rate of insurgents versus incumbents is anywhere from 2x, to all the way up to 10x. So you know, in all, it's a great time to be building in certain brands, this trend is only expected to accelerate in the coming decades. And it's a fantastic time to be a consumer founder or a consumer investor, the next few decades, we'll only see a lot more of these insurgent brands grow and thrive. So we'll now delve into the more financial aspects of what has worked for the successful insurgent brands. Before we get into the takeaways from the report, I would like to take you through the the approach that we took in our study. So we studied 147 insurgent brands that were founded between 2007 and 2022. And the idea was to understand their journey as they scaled up over the years, and then distil the common lessons and trends that one could learn. As younger founders, new insurgent brands set out to build new businesses. And there were four key takeaways that we had from the financial metrics.

But before I get to the four key takeaways, there's an important caveat for everyone. As you know, there's no one way to build a successful business, the most important thing is trusting your own conviction and playing to your strengths. So please take all of these inputs as directional. And as just inputs to bake into your thought process as you go about important decisions as you build out your businesses. With that, the first first key takeaway, which also is a very popular line at DSG, which is that brands take time to build. It's a line that comes up in almost every first meeting that we have with founders, I would urge you to pay attention to the grey chart on the left, on an average, it takes six years for an insurgent brand to scale up to 75 crore in top line. That is a fair bit of time. And if I compare that to the typical pitch decks that we receive, where they often target the 75 crore mark anywhere in the second or third year, it's just important for founders to realise that the initial phase in a consumer brands scale up takes time, and it takes patience. But the interesting part is once you get to the 75 crore mark, the journey from 75 crores to 200 crores is a lot faster. On an average, the time taken to get to 200 crores is eight years. So you know, net net, the first initial six years is going to be more calibrated growth. And it's important to focus more on the foundational aspects of business building. And once the foundations are set, the faster growth comes soon after. So that's the main lesson from this slide. You know the fact that one has to be patient, especially in the first six years of building a consumer brand. Now that we know that, it takes patience to build a consumer brand. The next thing we did was was to double click on businesses that have scaled past the 75 crores mark. And we wanted to dig deeper into businesses that we felt were growing at a healthy pace with healthy capital efficiency. Capital efficiency is a metric that we monitor closely at DSG. The way we define it is the revenues of a company divided by the cumulative capital consumed by the company till that point in time. So the filters that we use to identify these brands were a 30% year-on-year growth rate on the revenue front. And on the capital efficiency front, it was 1.5x capital efficiency. When we applied these two filters, we identified 18 brands that we wanted to dig deeper into. And for these 18 brands, we studied their journey from inception to the current date to distil important lessons on key financial metrics that we could use for younger brands.

So first metric we looked at was gross margins. And as you can tell from the graph, the trendline, from year zero to present date, is fairly range bound. So this graph actually has gross margins, that were normalised to understand the variation since year 0, for each one of these brands. And this graph is just a validation of the maximum that you die with the gross margins that that you're born with, we often see the struggle that consumer brands have, in terms of maintaining gross margins as they scale, there's always a strong downward pressure because of competition, need for growth, etc. If anything, the brands in the top right quadrant have done a fantastic job in sustaining their their gross margin over a long period of time.

So you know, two main takeaways from this slide. The first is pay attention to gross margin early because that will determine your steady state gross margin. And the second thing is, it's very important to sustain gross margins as you scale and fight the downward pressures as you scale up. The second one, and personally for me, the most interesting of the takeaways is on the EBITDA margin. As you know, consumer brands have the potential to get to profitability fairly early in their journeys. So we plotted the EBITDA profitability of each one of these brands from inception, to current date. And then when we plotted it on a chart, I was just fascinated on the consistency of the trend, just the way the lines fit between the the top and bottom, dotted red lines. Barring none, every brand in the top right quadrant, got to less than -25% EBITDA loss by year four. In fact, many of them got there a lot sooner. So, I think this is a fascinating input for founders, because it addresses one key question that almost every founder grapples with, which is the growth versus profitability trade off. We often have conversations with founders where, they are questioning the right pace of growth, the right amount of forward investment in teams, in marketing, because there is a trade off between growth and these investments. And, I think this chart here should give you a great framework to think about those trade offs. As you can see, every brand has gone into less than -25% EBITDA soon in their journey. And for us, this is the first milestone in the path towards profitability, ultimately, every brand has to become profitable. We see this -25% EBITDA as the first step in that direction. The other interesting thing about -25% EBITDA margin threshold is that when a business gets to that zone, that is typically where the unit economics of the business is proven. And the founder, typically also is on top of the levers that would take the business to profitability. So in general, it's a great zone to be in and the sooner you get into that zone, the better and march on towards profitability. The third takeaway, this is on capital efficiency. I briefly spoke about the metric that we measure, we use this metric to filter the brands as well. The interesting trend that we saw was that the insurgent brands, were strong on capital, the brands in the top right quadrant was strong on capital efficiency from inception itself. It is a mindset. And the main takeaway here is that, it's better that your capital efficient from inception itself, and it just helps you maintain that through the rest of the journey. Because anecdotally, we have, we do know brands that did not start off with a very capital efficient mindset at the beginning. And it is a struggle to course correct and become capital efficient later on, it's not impossible, but but it is a painful journey. So if anything, it helps to start with capital efficient mindset from early on. And as you can see, the median value of capital efficiency of the top right quadrant brands was always about one and a half X. And most of them were better than one and a half X for two thirds of their journey to till this point in time. The other inference from this slide, is the fact that consumer brands do not need a ton of capital to scale. One can scale a consumer brand to profitability, and needn't depend on investors for for a lot of money to scale the brand. So to summarise, there were four important takeaways in our study on the financial metrics. The first is that brands take time to build, especially in the initial years, it takes six years to get to 75 crores top line. The second is paying attention to gross margins early enough, as that will determine your steady state gross margins. The third is on EBITDA, profitability, the importance of driving to the EBITDA -25% zone, as early as you can, and the journey, ideally shorter than four years. Fourth, is the importance of having a capital efficient mindset as early as possible in the journey, and that will just help you take control of your destiny not depend on investor money, and drive the business to profitability and build it in a sustainable manner. So those are the four main takeaways on the financial metrics front to get into the DNA of a successful insurgent brand, I'll hand it back to Navneet now. 

Navneet  18:07

Thanks, Hari. So we now know the financial indicators of success for an insurgent brand. But like Hari said, What does the success successful insurgent brand DNA look like? And what are the dimensions on which these brands deploy time or capital or resources, which allows them to actually break through in terms of scale and outcomes? So as part of this study, we looked at 150 different brands, we had detailed discussions with several founders we tried and layered on, you know, what we learn from these conversations on top of the analysis that you saw Hari talked through, and there are actually five distinct elements we discovered that every successful brand got right. We believe these are the core tenets of the playbook if you want to scale a consumer brand in India. So let me talk through the five elements, as we laid them out.

First, and probably the most foundational is that each successful brand that we spoke to had a clear consumer purpose at the core of its existence. The founders had identified a very clear, very real, and very underserved need of the consumers. Whether this was the lack of quality headphones for the college student, or it was in some cases, healthy food options for babies or the working mother, or the lack of quality produce and options for folks that are health conscious. successful brands were born out of an acute consumer need gap, which was identified and often personally experienced by the founders. So in many cases, that founder story formed very much the core purpose of the brand, and which led to then the birth of an authentic purpose driven brand. And it had a very clear proposition links to that founder story as they started out. This consumer code is often necessary, but it's not the sufficient condition for success.

So the second most critical element that we looked at was offer innovation. Now not just on product but on price as well. Success spooling, certain brands were marked by relentless experimentation. So they had short product innovation cycles, there were very clear learning feedback loops, tailor local propositions. And also they were trying to target consumers at new price points which allowed them to then differentiate themselves from the noise and clutter that existed already. And this became then the core of what consumers started to experience as value from the brand. The third element that detract well is brand memorability. Now it's important for brands to start building memory structures in the minds of their target consumers over time. And for this, they often need to build distinctive assets. Across the brands that we studied, we saw that this distinctive assets have been built by creating assets around logos, taglines, celebrities, jingles, but in certain brands have taken it one step further and have started to actually innovate on this dimension as well. And I'll talk about some of those examples further down. 

The fourth important element is shopping ability. I think the one clear understanding about the consumer today is that they're multi channel now. Now, while most insurgent brands start on what we can call alternative channels, whether that's third party ecommerce platforms, whether it's their own B2C channel, they do need to expand channels as they scale. Now, the timing of channel expansion, at least in the way in the brands that we studied, turned out to be very, very crucial. And there are some conditions that we feel need to be met as every brand thinks about expanding beyond what is their natural first channel. And let me talk about that later today as well. The last but very important aspect as well is business model innovation. So brands do need to reduce supply chain inefficiencies, that is another area where they need to innovate regularly. And this can help create a differentiated advantages as they scale. So as we stepped back and looked at what is it that successful and certain brands are doing differently, these five elements stood out very clearly, let me take you through each one of them one by one. So what does consumer purpose at the core brand purpose really mean? We came up with this concept of elements of value, which is a way to measure brand purpose and how it resonates with consumers. The process here was fairly detailed included surveying hundreds of thousands of customers across multiple countries, nine product categories. What is an element of value? It is an aspect of value that the consumer experiences, we consider it delivered, if at least 50% of the consumers of the brand, rate the brand, eight or higher on a scale of 10. On that specific element of value. There are a distinct set of 31 elements you see on the page that resonate best with current consumers. The interpretation, of course of a lot of these, whether that's quality, whether that's what natural means or, you know, how it removes friction from the consumers life can have interpretations that vary by category. But what we have definitely discovered is that delivering more elements of value drives better outcomes, better outcomes in terms of the revenue growth, that the brand experiences in terms of the household penetration that it is able to achieve. And it also translates into higher repurchase rates. So as we try to make the consumer purpose or the brand purpose more tangible, we realised that we could break it down into these value elements that a brand can deliver. And the fact that a brand is delivering more elements of value, and also higher order elements of value started to become a very good predictor of how brands would differentiate themselves on growth penetration as well as repurchase rate. The other aspect to keep in mind is that different consumer segments perceive these values differently from you know, sometimes the same brand. So insurgents will typically try to go after the one or two consumer segments that they start with incumbents in general, over time, as they scale are starting to cater to a much larger set of consumers. So as we think about what the path ahead could be, not just for insurgent brands, but also incumbents that are trying to now tap into the opportunity that we see insurgents can actually grow by delivering more, to more consumer segments, whereas incumbents need to sharpen their messaging, when it comes to which group segments they want to differentiate in. The other aspect of this that was interesting was there are one or two elements of value in each category that has considered table stakes, if you think about food quality would be your table stakes element of value. And in many ways as insurgent brands think about scaling, I think the idea is to get the tables stakes elements of value, right. So meet threshold on those and out deliver on the non table stake elements of value that matter to the consumers that you are serving. And net net, I think delivering on higher order elements of value. So moving up the pyramid, as well as as making sure that over time there are more elements on this parameter that brands start to deliver to their consumers, could be a great way to think about scaling, as we delve into, you know, is this difference really apparent between incumbents and insurgents. What was very interesting is that insurgent brands, they do outperform in terms of goods, the number of elements of values delivered. So they do touch upon many different aspects into the core segment that they are catering to. And they are also able to do more on the higher levels of the pyramid. And this, then, gives us confidence that using this as a leading indicator of how brands will scale could be an interesting way to look at consumer purpose. The second aspect I spoke about was relentless experimentation. It is indeed the hallmark of all the insurgent brands that we study, there are three things that they actually get right. And they often get it better than in companies. I think one is short product innovation cycles, quick learning phases, testing for initial traction, making sure that you have a very clear measurement system in place that helps you very quickly decide whether something is working or not. The second aspect is, of course, given the customer intimacy and the very real, acute need that they start with. Being very, very fixated on consumer feedback, whether that's through large scale sampling, or other innovative ways in which they can try and develop new and innovative solutions fairly quickly. And the third aspect, but also very, very critical, is having the ability to quickly pull back what doesn't work. And I think being able to leverage these short cycles to take a call and clear measurement systems to help establish products that might not be fitting well with the consumers. And actually not spending more resources or time on those is also a critical enabler of this. I think hence, the one aspect that successful brands need to get right is to get quick and reliable product innovation cycle going and also account for new price points and whitespaces that they see in the market as they do this. The second -- the third aspect I wanted to talk about was brand memorability. This is indeed, like I said about building memory structures about creating distinctive brand assets. I think what we have observed over time is that insurgent brands in order to break the clutter, have started to experiment with new ways in which they can start to build these assets, whether that's edgy or provocative communication. So it stands out on social media and other digital channels and talks directly to their consumers. Whether it's thinking about large scale sampling as a means of driving trial, and having new consumers come on board, or thirdly, actually leveraging the deep consumer love that you experience as you start out and create a very targeted proposition and making sure that you make your existing loyal customers the voices of the brand, and leveraging the power of community to actually unlock that brand memorability for a larger set of consumers. So, we are starting to see a lot of new innovative ways in which brands are going after the memorability game. The fourth aspect that I want to talk about is shop ability. And like I said, I think there are some conditions we observed that need to be met as we think about when insurgent brands should think about moving beyond their natural or their first channel. The four conditions are a established velocity in your natural cross channel. So our retailers seeing high sell throughs because of higher acceptance by consumers, do you see a diminishing ROI on the natural channel or there is some indicators of saturation that is starting to play out. The second is having clarity on your hero SKUs, you will need predictable velocity drivers when launching new channels. The third aspect is latent brand point in other channels. So even before you start to look at alternative channels, is there already some demand that is starting to come through either from consumers or retailers that gives you confidence that the brand is ready for expansion into a new channel. And the last is operational efficiency. I think before channel expansion will inevitably lead to more complexity in distribution. So making sure that your ecosystem is able to seamlessly solve for logistics or other operational challenges that might come up, is all in place. I think making sure that customer service or the experience with the consumer does not get impacted is an important consideration as well. As we looked at historically all the successful brands and how they have done this journey. What you see on the right is essentially the number of conditions that were met as they made this transition from the natural channel into additional channels in the mix. The last aspect I want to quickly touch upon is the business model innovation. So successful brands that we studied not only innovated on the front end, so they were not solving for just the new consumer propositions or price points or other aspects of the product. But they were also innovating on the back end, supply chain complexity tends to increase with scale. Businesses do think about integrated supply chains, they do have a distinctive advantage if they are able to pull that off. But I think the timing of some of these decisions is also important. At the start, if there is a clear technological differentiation, that gives you a clear, competitive advantage, then investing in manufacturing early on makes a lot of sense, this will be relevant in food categories, daily categories. But there is also a very clear case for then outsourcing at the beginning, as most electronic players would have done in the initial days. Now, as brands scale, supply chain often developed several choke points, I think what is very critical is to stay on top of these choke points and make sure that you start taking decisions about transitioning to taking over the choke points of being completely, you know, not being completely outsourced, and over time, start to build fully integrated back end capabilities that can create predictability in cost and predictability in quality. And I think that over time is sort of the transition we've seen a lot of successful brands make, to enable them to deliver a consistent consumer experience, as they scale. So as we make all of it come together, and we think about these five dimensions, I think what starts to also become apparent is that if you think about excelling on each of these elements, it does have implications on what about the consumer to you need to truly deeply understand. So for you to get the consumer purpose, right, it is important to patiently focus on higher order elements of value, create new habits in new categories and think about building brands that resonate with consumers. Offer innovation would imply, you know, focusing on new consumer trends and new archetypes and making sure that there is understanding of which behaviours preferences will lead to opening up of new profit pools, and not compete directly with scale incumbents, so every insurgent brand can find the space to get that right product consumer fit and be able to scale meaningfully broadening relevance to new consumers, and making sure that you are able to figure out where consumers are discovering brands and products and making sure you are, you know, available and communicating to those customers at those channels. On shop ability, of course, thinking through how consumers engage with different sales channels, and hence, what are the levers that you can use to start building trust with these consumers. And lastly, on business model innovation, like Harri said, You do die with the GM percentage you're born with. So making sure that you keep a very clear eye on that from day one and making sure that you're innovating and solving for the right business model at the scale at which your brand is. So and hence US brands think about building superior capabilities across these dimensions. A lot of the answers will lie in how and where consumers of today are and where the consumer consumers of the future will be. So let me actually delve a little deeper into understanding that consumer of the future, if you think about the five dimensions we spoke about, so what are the clear actions, then, you know, founders and investors and people working in these organisations can take, I think the first is deeply understand the emerging consumer archetypes in their entirety, and understand what their needs motivations preferences are. And in some senses try to marry that to what odd elements of value would you as a brand want to deliver. The second is changing consumer behaviours will lead to some big shifts, and making sure that we are able to tap into those shifts and build that into the consumer journeys that we design to actually then drive velocity and conversion for the brand is also extremely critical. And finally, we do believe that the flywheel of consumer love will actually get activated if we deepen trust with consumers. So it's very, very critical to continuously iterate on the proposition, expand the elements of value you want to deliver, and also do this for an ever increasing base of consumer archetypes. And building that trust is going to be very dependent on understanding what drives these archetypes and making sure that you are then leveraging, you know, the right levers to actually connect with these consumers and build some degree of brand loyalty and trust. The first element I want to touch upon as we think about what is the task at hand for in certain brands, is when we speak to consumers, they very clearly appreciate the innovation that insurgent brands bring. So that last bar you see at the bottom insurgents definitely, you know, score well above incumbents on being more innovative. But what is actually lacking that first bar you see on the top is actually consumers tend to still find incumbents more trustworthy, this is probably driven by them having been around for longer for decades and having greater advertising muscle, more brand building experience, and just sheer, you know, a time on their side to have built a relevant, credible, trustworthy brand in the eyes of the consumer. And so in some senses, if you think about the one big aspect of the job that insurgent brands need to get right, it is how do you build more trust with the consumers that you want to cater to. And as we think about that, I think there's also, you know, different archetypes in the market. Today, we studied, we spoke to 1,000 plus customers spent a lot of time going in into the details of what their hopes, dreams aspirations are, what their preferences and behaviours are. And we arrived at five archetypes, two of which are material, relevant consumers of today, and three of which are potentially consumers, that will become important in the next five to seven years. The first archetype I want to talk about is the social climber. I think many of you will relate to this archetype. These are sort of affluent millennials, a large proportion of them, you know, are professionals, I think what defines their life is solving for a better tomorrow. So in some senses, I think they their motivations are driven by how do they make tomorrow better than today. So whether that is, you know, being health conscious saving enough for that rainy day making sure that they've set aside enough corpus, you know, for their children for their retirement for their health, but at the same time, also looking at how can they make the most of the time and money that they have today, it is very interesting, as you talk to these consumers about their brand preferences, how they purchase in the market, they do value, you know, family and societal values, there is an element of, you know, how the brand is perceived in the market, what the packaging states that does play a role in their decision making, they are also differentially compared to all the other archetypes that we studied, influenced by ratings and reviews. So, they like making their own decisions they like, you know, relying on the opinions and experiences of other consumers, even if nameless and faceless as a means to figuring out, you know, what products, they want to try how they want to build a loyalty and trust with different brands. The second archetype, which was an interesting contradiction to the first one, is the affiliates. These are folks that are predominantly, again, it is not a one to one mapping with demographics, but predominantly Gen Z, the less affluent, they are very driven by wanting to belong. So they definitely, you know, are more influenced by the group, they hang out with them by their parents or society and what they definitely their choices and their behaviour is definitely very influenced by what the group around them thinks, is good, bad or ugly. I think in that sense, they also look to, you know, find that sense of belongingness in the way they purchase products, the categories that they engage with. And hence, I think, their behaviours and the way they engage with brands also starts to differ, they are much quicker to adopt trends in the market, they do want to make sure that they don't get left behind as far as whatever is cool in the group or whatever is the most relevant and they are less worried about they do save, but they are less worried about creating a large corpus for tomorrow, they like to live in the here and now and hence, this would you know, the typical archetype would be the contact centre employee that you might see in your organization's or around you who still who aspires to and wants to own an iPhone, have the right brands in that city, and actually want to solve for, you know, elevating their lifestyle to match their peers. There are three additional four additional archetypes or that I would like to call about a call out which are not as material or relevant today, we started to see some green shoots of these behaviours in the market. But essentially, what we believe is that these archetypes will become very, very pertinent and very material over the next decade. There is the Maximizer these are folks that are trying to solve for making the most of their time here. So you will see them optimise running marathons, optimising for experiences, solving for as many, you know, as much value as they can create and investing in themselves. And being very, very conscious about making sure their physical and mental well being is is is primary, and making sure that they are able to make the most of you know, every aspect of their life, whether professional or personal. The consciously productive are folks that want to make sure that they are expanding the horizons of their experiences, making sure that they are solving for you know, staying productive, they give back to the community they like to They are influenced very strongly by that as well. And hence, we started to see some elements of, you know, sustainability and environmental awareness that's starting to come through on this on this archetype. The global citizens are very travelled, well experience sort of, you know, citizens of the world, their worldview is not limited to the place they stay in, it's actually informed by what's going on in the world, that trends, brand preferences, ways of purchasing are very, very influenced by, you know, the many different trends happening across the world, and hence, are slightly ahead on the curve, in terms of, you know, what recent trends are. The last one is the repple. These are this is the archetype by powering, I would say the growth of, in some senses, the expressive where category, they want to wear their opinions on the sleeve, they are very, very, you know, independent and how they think, and very individualistic, and are almost using every opportunity of what they purchase and how they live to prove and show to the world who they are and what they want to solve for. I won't spend a lot more time here, hopefully, you know, you'll see a lot more detail around the behaviours and preferences of these archetypes in the report as you read it, but we believe that these archetypes are what will start to define, you know, the consumer behaviours of tomorrow. And as brands think about the ways in which they want to relate to customers of where brand discovery would happen, some of the differences in behaviour that we start to see become very, very relevant. So whether it is the importance of social media, and how certain archetypes engage a lot more, with certain social media channels, and advertisers versus, you know, celebrities and their influence on different archetypes, I think those choices start to become a lot more pertinent and explicit for brands as they delve deeper into what what each archetype is solving for similar narrative around, you know, how they build trust. So there are differences. Like I said, the social climbers are solving for online reviews and ratings being the primary drivers of information as they think about which brands they want to purchase, whereas versus certain others that are solving for, you know, the reputation of the brand or micro influencers that actually play a bigger role in determining their preferences. The other aspect I want to call out is the role that communities have started to play in how brands think about building a loyal consumer base. And as I spoke about this earlier, I think the many ways in which you can either bring people together so have shared causes at the core of it, drive, you know, sampling, via people who have already probably become loyal customers, and also get the flywheel going by bringing these two groups together and making sure that your customers existing customers are starting to become the voices of the brand in the broader community is also a way in which a lot of brands can start to think about driving conversion and velocity. The last aspect I want to touch upon in the context of building trust is there are certain megatrends we have observed across different archetypes that are starting to become very, very pertinent. And it is, it will be helpful for brands to think about these trends and how they want to tap into some of these to start and build those connections and channels of trust with the consumer. On the left, the four that you see are, you know, very clearly emerging across archetypes. So whether that is better for you products in the context of natural products, or chemical free products, the element of you know, whether it's made in India or not for across different archetypes, you know, that starting to play an important role in what they purchase, the physical and mental health being the core of what they want to solve for, and hence any products that speak to you know, benefits for them personally and their health. And the last is just being more responsible, you know, inhabitants of the earth to hence how, you know, the eco life aspect plays out elements around sustainability around Treatment of Animals about what's better for the planet, is starting to become more and more material in at least the communication that they appreciate. On the right, you'll see certain trends that have been specific to some archetypes and as these archetypes become more material in the market elements around, you know, being minimalistic, and whether that reflects in your packaging or in the products that you put together community and how we you leverage the power of community to, you know, build the brand, as well as giving consumers the ability to be individualistic and to express themselves I think those are the three that are starting to emerge, which are specific to some of these archetypes. So as I close, I would love to sort of step back again and talk about the five elements and I think what are hence the actions that insurgent brands need to take to you know, cater to being a consumer purpose driven brand at the core, Are you clear about which consumer archetypes and elements of value you want to target and excel on, on you know, innovating on offers and products are you on trend, which are the mega trends as I just spoke about that the brand wants to leverage and hence as you think about your product portfolio, as you think about the pricing, you know, innovation that you want to do, which of these trends would you want to marry those two, the third element is around building memorability. So, are you leveraging the power of communities to drive brand awareness to drive consideration and to start building trust with your core consumer segments. The fourth element is making sure that you are available and you are, you know, present across different channels that your consumers interact with, and making sure that you make these transitions at the right time meeting the conditions that are necessary to expand channels successfully. And the last is as you scale up, will your current operating model enable you to maintain that differentiation in the market or will it require innovation? And will it require more customer experience being centred in how you think about the back end and where you choose to innovate? So those would be some thoughts. We'd love to leave behind with with all of you and with that, you know, would love to invite Hari back and here are the resources of you know, available of where the report will be available. Hari and I of course, the contact details are shared here. Please do reach out to us if you'd like a copy of the report, and our co authors Joydeep, Deepak, and Dhruv as well. Thank you so much.

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