The Advertising Club Bangalore, as part of the ongoing webinar series hosted a webinar on September 9th. The 15th installment of the webinar series witnessed Vikram Mehra, Managing Director, Saregama, making a very interesting Presentation on the Success of Carvaan ‘Innovation is about Anthropology and not Technology’.
The Webinar began by Radhika Ramani, Chairperson of Ad club Bangalore Programs Vertical, who said “Today’s webinar is about a story of how simplicity and nostalgia triumphed the new age and shiny, a story about innovation being about anthropology and not technology, a story about Carvaan”. Vikram began the session with factors and challenges that led to the birth of Saregama Carvaan.
“Today everyone talks about Carvaan as a success and an out of the box idea. But, when the first time I proposed the idea internally and to investors, there were enough number of sceptics all around. It is the story of some craziness we did; it is also the story of innovation,” said Vikram.
He continued, “We often start thinking that to come up with an idea, we need to be aware of the latest technology. But for any new idea for it come up, you need to be close to customers. Carvaan is a great example of that if you base your product on a deep customer insight, even if it’s not regarded as a high-tech product you may still have a winner coming way.”
Vikram further spoke about the history of Carvaan. He said, “Saregama had over 120 thousand evergreen songs belonging to the 20th century. We had the greatest library. While we were doing an internal analysis in early 2015, it was said that the music was not moving and was not giving us the dividend. The general feedback was nobody wanted to listen to old music any longer. But the customers started giving us diametrically opposite feedback. We did studies in 23 cities across India and they started accusing us of not releasing the music.”
“We were putting up music on all three major streaming application of that time. That was the time when we took a tough call that we won’t believe in every armchair consultant. We believed that customers were primary consumers of Saregama Music. We went there and took a pledge and that led to the birth of Carvaan,” he added.
According to Vikram, the entire ethos of Carvaan is lean back listening experience. He added, “We don’t want our customer to go back every 3 minutes and decide which song they are going to hear next.”
Vikram further spoke about brand positioning. “Brand positioning is about what you want to be. At the same time, I have an equally strong school of thought that says, brand positioning also means what you are not, the strategy also means what you are not going to do. Carvaan is not a product designed for 27 years old. So, why should we give them features when we know that product is not designed for them. This is one of the biggest challenges I faced apart from selling the idea internally,” he said.
Vikram then elaborated on the four pillars of Carvaan, the target age group, the functional pay off- Convenience, emotional pay off-Nostalgia, and premium imagery. According to Vikram, 2 Million units of Carvaan was sold as of January 2020.
He said, “The total amount of paid subscription of all the streaming apps in India is less than 1 Million. If you find the right target segments and you position the product correctly. There is money to be made everywhere.”
Speaking on Carvaan’s focus on regional language space Vikram said, “Of all the content owners in the country, we people are more focused on regional language space. We are investing heavily on Bhojpuri, Gujarati, Punjabi, Tamil, and Carnatic Music. We have got out of Hindi serials completely, the only languages we produce our TV serials are in Tamil and Kannada. On the movie side, we are playing across all languages. We believe the next big movement will be in the regional space. “
Sneha Walke, National Director- Growth & Strategy, exchange4media Group conveyed the vote of thanks.
She said, “The Adclub Bangalore has done 15 webinars so far and around 3500 people have logged in the past 3 months which is getting a lot of traction. A big thank you to all the people who put the webinars together. I thank Bijoya Ghosh of AdGully and Umanath, Vijay of Medianews4u.”
Like the previous installments, the webinar was a success with over 100 participants on Zoom. The webinar was hosted with the support of Ad Club’s Managing Committee and Online partners Medianews4u and AdGully. The video of the Webinar is available on The Adclub Youtube channel and facebook page.
https://www.facebook.com/theadclubbangalore/videos/315640249505244/
