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IndiaMART’s recent ad campaign, Kaam Yahin Banta Hai, opens up a conversation about how business in India is evolving across generations. Aligning perfectly with the story, the campaign seamlessly talks about how IndiaMART helps MSMEs to expand their footprints in the country.
With a background as India’s largest online B2B marketplace, IndiaMART holds a 60% market share of the online B2B Classified space in India. The channel focuses on providing a “360-degree solution” to Small & Medium Enterprises (SMEs), Large Enterprises as well as individuals.
MI interacted with Dinesh Gulati, COO, IndiaMART InterMESH Limited. With his vision to make doing business easy for businesses, Dinesh has been one of the key leaders involved in continuous innovation and digital transformation for businesses. He has a strong track record of building brands from scratch and scaling them into full-blown profitable businesses in the field of telecom, media, FMCG, and e-commerce.
Q) Tell us more about the ‘Kaam Yahin Banta Hai’ campaign.
Dinesh: Our campaign Kaam Yahin Banta Hai captures three pillars – trust, wide selection, and best prices that buyers receive on IndiaMART. Taking a unique approach, the campaign series features three ad films creating a fun banter between a father-son duo and how IndiaMART swoops in to save the day. The father, a seasoned businessman accustomed to traditional sourcing and trading, is shown grappling with everyday business challenges such as arranging bulk quantities at the best prices or finding reliable suppliers. On the other hand, the son, a young, tech-savvy entrepreneur, finds better options, such as IndiaMART, to meet the business requirements easily at affordable prices. Each time, he confidently places a bet with the father – stating Lagi Shart?, a relatable expression to state a confident and a playful dare, showcasing the trustworthiness of IndiaMART. Winning the Shart everytime, the series reflects how every buyer-seller interaction is backed by trust, reliability and security, truly getting the business done.
Q) How is IndiaMart working towards retaining its consumers’ trust?
Dinesh: Over time, we have evolved into a platform that is beyond just a B2B marketplace and has become a holistic solution for any business needs, covering everything from procurement to sales and beyond. The success of the platform can be attributed to the efforts in line with our vision to make doing business easy for all, centred around innovation, trust building, and customer-centricity. Today, MSMEs face four major challenges – access to market, access to technology, access to people, and access to financ,e and our focus is on solving these challenges for MSMEs
- Empowering MSMEs with Access to Market: Our platform is integrated with AI to ensure behavior-based matchmaking, multilingual search options, price discovery, voice-based searches, processing ‘Hinglish’—a mix of Hindi and English to offer precise search results, conversational commerce, and transparency through comprehensive supplier catalog pages and trust-building measures like user ratings, reviews, and TrustSEAL Verification.
- Empowering MSMEs with Access to Technology: We enable businesses with an online webstore coupled with a comprehensive set of tools, including cloud telephony, a CRM platform called Lead Manager, product testing, lead generation, analytics, and a complete customer experience (CX). The sellers also have the freedom to manage their catalogue with features such as automated image editing, background removal, and cropping, and finance solutions to manage accounting and invoicing better.
Our three-decades journey in the Indian MSME sector has helped us deliver to a great extent on the market and tech-related hurdles. However, challenges related to finance and logistics remain two areas for us to work on. Our ongoing investments in the areas of finance and accounting to ease the billing process, GST filing, and taxation, billing are a step in supporting MSMEs with easy financial solutions. We continue to invest in SaaS-based solutions for businesses such as KYC, Background Verifications, Risk Mitigation, Digital Onboarding, and Digital Privacy and Logistics to further build IndiaMART into a one-stop solution for all the business-related requirements.
Q) How important is it to be real and relevant in brand advertising?
Dinesh: In our campaign, we showcase a father-son dynamic to provide a unique yet relatable scenario to showcase the shift in mindset across generations of business owners. From conventional ways of doing business to more digital-first thinking, business owners across metros and tier-2 & 3 cities are now embracing this change, owing to the entry of the younger generation (business owners’ sons/daughters taking over the business). The idea of ‘Lagi Shart?’ also comes directly from observing this change, a playful bet between trust in old ways and confidence in the new in -first solutions. It’s rooted in real behaviour we’ve seen in the field, especially as more users discover IndiaMART’s wide variety, best prices, and trusted seller base and understand – Kaam Yahin Banta Hai. Thus, it is important to always be extremely real and relevant in order to be relatable to users.
Q) What challenges do you see when shifting perceptions in a space as practical and price-sensitive as B2B commerce? Has the pandemic permanently changed the way users (especially older business owners) approach digital platforms?
Dinesh: B2B businesses don’t follow a lowest-price-only approach. There are multiple parameters in place, from getting the right matchmaking of seller, the right product from the exhaustive range, quality, delivery times, and other terms and conditions, which normally cover any large volume of orders or b2b deals. Thus, the challenge lies in building trust around how a marketplace can help in fulfilling all these demands of a buyer, through a single window.
During the pandemic, a large number of buyers and sellers turned to digital modes to keep their business up and running. However, this digital shift was purely because there were no other options. Thus, a lot of responsibility lies on digital/online marketplaces to continue to foster trust and confidence among that set of buyers, which can encourage them to remain on the platform and use it as a primary source of connecting with relevant suppliers. Buyers, who were once hesitant to search online, are now open to exploring online platforms, but seller trust and reliability remain core parameters, and that’s what we are addressing through our campaigns.
Online Coverage: MediaInfoline