UMESH PHADKE: Keep your CFO on your right,
keep your HR director on your left,
and everything else in business will take care of itself.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
I'm Umesh Phadke, and you might not
be able to tell by looking at me,
but I know more about hair care than most people with hair,
and I know more about makeup than most women
because I'm the President Director of L'Oreal Indonesia.
I would have been a Bollywood actor because straight out
of high school, I was selected to go to an acting school.
But at the same time, I'd also applied
for engineering college.
And the good boy that I was I decided
to do engineering over acting.
But that's rather simple.
I was looking for a recipe for Sichuan chili oil.
And just this morning, I made my batch, and here it is.
So the moment we realized that we
had to go to work from home for an extended period,
we first changed from being high touch in office
to high touch digitally.
We increased the frequency of contact
between ourselves and with our teams.
Every team member in my management committee
set up a drumbeat of how they were
going to monitor their teams.
My professional products general manager called it pitstop,
and he would have multiple pitstops during the day
with his teams in the initial weeks.
And then they got into a rhythm of understanding and monitoring
people.
One of the things that we found in consumer trends
was a trend called maskne.
Because a lot of consumers are wearing masks,
they're now developing acne.
They believe they're developing acne
because they're wearing masks, and so they're
looking for products to take care of acne
coming out of maskne.
I think digital was the oxygen that kept everything
going when things were looking like they were going to stop.
It was the fuel that allowed us to fly when everyone thought
the business would be grounded.
We went from being programmatic was a hobby kind of thing,
and it became almost like the mainstay
of the business because of the whole e-commerce shift.
Digital conversations became extremely important
because, like I said, consumers retreated to their homes,
so we needed to reach them.
And the only way to reach them was
through digital conversations.
Beyond that, because consumers were at home
and because consumers were consuming
a lot of digital media on a regular basis,
we had to change the content far more frequently
than we were doing before.
We also had to target consumers far more
sharply than we could before.
As a result of that, the whole structure of our business,
the process in which we do our business,
has changed and evolved.
And I think we are ready for the next gen when it comes to 2021.
We've developed a culture of test and learn all the time,
so we are ready to fail with ideas as long as we learn
from them, but we don't know when an idea will really
become big.
Marketing in 2030 will be very different to marketing in 2020.
But at the same time, it will also be exactly the same
because it will always start with understanding what
the consumer wants and delivering the best product
with her when she wants it.
What has really evolved is the execution
of marketing once you've understood the consumer needs.
If you look at it 100 years ago, it was about print media.
20 years ago, it was about television.
You had to air on primetime.
But today, it's about personalized marketing.