AgTalk | We are going to produce more digital asset: Wunderman's Daniel Morel

Daniel Morel, Chairman and CEO, Wunderman is a man who believes in retaining talent and knows the empowerment that comes with the application of technology. In an exclusive conversation with Adgully, Morel stresses on the importance of the Indian market in Wunderman's scheme of things. Excerpts:

Adgully: With the advent of technology how has Wunderman beefed up its working and operations?

Daniel Morel: If you look back at the basic essence of our working model, we wanted to do something very different from one-way broadcast communication. For one-way broadcast communication there is no other response but to gauge it through sales. But we thought won't it be interesting to know what people thought about the communication and what was there reaction. Hence to make the piece of communication more relevant to that target audience, we need insight and feedback from the consumer. Therefore it is also very important to engage your customers in a dialogue and keep the conversation alive. So we started talking about an assistant to gather response. In the beginning it would be a catalogue, a direct response television, a toll-free number etc that would help us gather feedback. So everytime a new technology appeared in the marketplace we used our learning from the previous one to quickly adopt to our method of communication. But at the roots of it, it is always a conversation and it is always about listening to the customer's input and reacting as fast as we can to modify our communication. With the advent of digital we did the same thing we adopted the technology very fast. It is a wonderful tool because now one can compress the time, we do not have to wait for a consumer to respond to our catalogue, by just going online you can identify from the cookie that which customers are interested in your communication and thus reach out to them. So the same 'coversation' is now happening on real-time.

AG: Has it become more of a response-driven business?

DM: It is indeed, because today people want to understand where they are spending their money and they want to know how productive that portion of their money is becoming. Earlier they could not have this information, but now they know it is possible and so they are asking for it. So one can really track a response and communicate it to the client and thus people are looking at accurately calculating the response to a communication.

AG: How do see India as a market in terms of your growth plans?

DM: India in the context of the emerging markets is a potential market. After the slowdown in 2009 every country is looking for growth, the North American markets are not showing any rapid growth and growth in Europe is also quite low. So if any company is looking for growth it has to go to the emerging markets like Brazil, Eastern Europe, Africa, China, Middle East, Indonesia, India etc. These markets are growing rapidly given the sheer size of their human resource and the way this human capital is being handled to accelerate growth. As a communication company our clients want to spread their wings in these markets and hence we are also trying to reach out extensively in these markets. For us we tend to focus on the largest markets of course which are China, India, Indonesia, Vietnam, Brazil and Russia. And as digital medium is becoming a norm it is easier for us to do business across Asia. In terms of size and human capital India is still an enormous market for us, we have close to 400 people in India.

AG: How important do you think is it to nurture talent?

DM: We believe in one important thing which is- we hate to fire people and we really look at retaining our staff. Firing people is the easiest thing but the difficulty is in recruiting smartly, training smartly, to offer the people the right kind of challenge and to accompany people though their life-cycle. And I think our ability to retain talent is better than most. We keep 10% of our employees on tracking mechanism and we have a personalised review every year on our employees. This is an important tool because when the next time the client comes you know how to utilize the pool of talent you have in the organisation. But in the emerging market it is not always possible to retain the talent, because although the available talent is in abundance but every company is eyeing it.

AG: What are some of the trends you foresee in direct-marketing in 2011?

DM: I think we are going to forget about direct marketing, I think people are going to jump directly from one-way communication to two-way communication on the digital media. They will use more and more digital devices, though it will be direct marketing it will slightly be more stylish. The trend I would say in India will be about rapid acceptance and adoption of social media. | By Prabha Hegde [prabha(at)adgully.com]