Enabling customers with a plethora of benefits from selection to convenience, online B2B marketplace – IndiaMART recently launched its ‘Kaam Yahin Banta Hai’ campaign. The campaign premise showcases benefits such as a large variety, convenience, and the best prices, all of these with unparalleled trust that buyers can expect on the platform.
With approximately 40% GST-verified trusted sellers, 8 million+ reviews and ratings for products, and a 4.8 Play Store app rating, 20+ crore registered buyers shop on the IndiaMART platform today and fulfil their business requirements.
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.
Medianews4u.com caught up with Dinesh Gulati, COO, IndiaMART InterMESH Limited
Q. What made IndiaMART turn to the father-son relationship as a lens for talking about business transformation? Was the idea of ‘Lagi Shart?’ inspired by actual customer insights or field behaviour?
The father-son dynamic gives 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?’ came 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 the real behavior 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
Q. What does trust look like for a small business owner in 2025, and how is IndiaMART trying to reflect that in communication?
Reliability, consistency, and transparency are three important legs to build trust. For a small business owner looking for raw materials or any products, finding dependable sellers who will supply quality products, on time and on agreed terms, access to a wider selection, and affordable prices every time is a form of trust.
Through Kaam Yahin Banta Hai, the purpose is to dramatise the real-world moments such as bulk buying, sourcing something unique, affordable prices, and showing how with one click at IndiaMART, you get reliable quotes, honest reviews, and fast responses.
Q. How do you walk the line between being product-led and insight-led when designing a brand campaign?
At IndiaMART, customer centricity is the core of everything we do. We see 20 Crore+ registered buyers interact with 80+ lakh sellers on our platform. So, our insight comes from these customer interactions.
In addition, we meet 10 lakh+ business owners every year to educate them about new ways of doing business. So, for a brand campaign too, we start with customer insights (buyers and sellers), better understand their thought process on what makes them revisit the platform, or maintain a long-term relationship with us, and then tie it back to the platform’s capabilities.
‘Kaam Yahin Banta Hai’ weaves each wide catalogue, competitive pricing, vetted and trusted suppliers, into short, relatable films. So, while it feels product-led, every message is rooted in real user need.
Q. What challenges do you see when trying to shift 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?
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 the demands of a buyer through a single window.
During the pandemic, many 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.
Q. How are you measuring the emotional and behavioral response to a campaign like this — beyond just views and reach?
At IndiaMART, we remain committed to improving the experience of our buyers and sellers via multiple product and tech innovations. From investment in AI/ML to improve matchmaking to further penetration in vernacular, image, and voice-related search and hyperlocalisation, our objective remains to build IndiaMART into a one-stop solution for all business-related needs.
We are already seeing a healthy response to our product and tech-led innovations. The campaign will further help us affirm our commitment to our buyers and brand promise by reiterating – Kaam Yahin Banta Hai.
To understand the impact, we are looking at engagement in the campaign, repeat customer visits, increase/decrease in average time spent on the platform to explore products, buyer registrations, etc. as some of the KPIs. In addition to this, we also look at any search uplift and our offline research studies to understand how strongly they believe in the campaign’s thought.
Q. What are the other marketing campaigns and innovations that we can expect from IndiaMART? How do you see conversational commerce changing the landscape?
Conversational commerce empowers consumers to make shopping decisions, purchases, and transactions through messaging apps and other conversational technology. At IndiaMART, our lead manager, an integrated CRM platform, allows sellers to manage all their conversations with buyers in one place efficiently.
It uses AI-driven suggested replies, significantly reducing response times, supporting personalised interactions and creating a virtual environment that mimics human interactions, and providing personal conversation. We also support WhatsApp integration, such that the buyers have to do minimal clicks to make their journey on IndiaMART faster and better.
Additionally, we understand that voice commerce has the potential to lead to hyper-personalisation, the removal of language and geographical barriers, enabling millions of businesses. Thus, we have been supporting vernacular and voice-based search for six years and Hinglish search. We currently allow users to navigate the entire website in English and Hindi while supporting searches in 243 languages.
Additionally, voice search is available in nine languages: English, Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, Kannada, Telugu, Gujarati, Bangla, and Malayalam. We remain at the forefront of the B2B revolution in India and are committed to our vision of empowering businesses.
Q. Could you talk about how IndiaMART has evolved into a platform that is not just a B2B marketplace, and which now looks to serve any business need?
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, centered around innovation, trust building, and customer-centricity.
Today, MSMEs face four major challenges – access to the market, access to technology, access to people, and access to finance, 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 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. In the coming couple of years, what is going to be the strategy to further make good on the company’s vision of ‘Make Doing Business Easy’? In 2025, how is the company building on the focus areas of improving customer experience and growing its presence across cities?
Improvement in CX (customer experience) remains a top priority for us. From enhancing search capabilities to better product offerings (WhatsApp integration, seamless use of LMS, security solutions for advanced threat detection, and keeping the data safe) and integration of AI, we continue to innovate and make our platform better for both buyers and sellers.
By keeping customers at the center of every process, we identify their key problems, based on their feedback and journey on the platform, simplify those issues to see how they can be resolved, and re-engineer the existing processes using technology to better serve the customer.
