Harmony at Work

Lloyd Mathias, CMO Tata Teleservices

An interview with Lloyd Mathias, Chief Marketing Officer of Tata Teleservices

Can tell us about the journey from school and your previous positions?

I grew up in Bombay but lived the bulk of my life outside of Bombay, largely in Delhi and Gurgaon, with a couple of stints outside the country. I did my business school from Bombay and then got working. I spent most of my work life in the fast moving consumer goods business. I used to work with PepsiCo in the beverage business. That was interesting and exciting because it was around the time that Pepsi re-entered India, and it was the first of the global companies coming back into the country. When I joined the company it was under 30 people. Today it has more than 5,000.

What year was that?

This was 1994. So it was moving from a basic franchise company into a bottling company, and grew large. It was a time when beverages were new, and created a lot of news. Very exciting.

After having spent about 12 years with Pepsi, I worked with Motorola. This was different: a technology company with a strong technology focus. But obviously it was keen to make a mark in the consumer space, which is where mobile handsets were. It was a time when mobile handsets were growing at over 50% a year, so it was a good time to be in that industry.

When you were studying, were you always focused on marketing as a specialty? Or did that evolve for you?

I think it evolved. I actually did my bachelors in geology, which is as different from marketing as you can get—a completely different approach. But I think over time I found myself far more interested in people and issues like marketing. Then I went on to do a business major in marketing. But my basic graduation degree was in geology, because at that time I believed there was far more one could do with geology.

Is that an interest you’ll get back to one day?

Unlikely to get back to but I’m certainly interested. The good thing about doing geology was that it exposes you to different geographies. We actually had field trips that mattered. We actually went to different places. So I think there was an interesting learning. It’s a subject that I feel pretty deeply involved with. I still read up quite a bit in my spare time.

What were some of the lessons you learned at Pepsi that you were able to translate to Motorola?

In the beverage business, the core product hadn’t changed for over 100 years. Pepsi-Cola and Coca-Cola were invented in the 1890’s. The product still is the same. But every day was a new day in the market because you have to find a new way to entice consumers. It was like waking up in the morning and wooing the consumer—and more importantly, out-wooing your competitor. We would spend hours thinking through reasons to buy. Because truth be told, people wouldn’t miss not having a beverage a day and the world wouldn’t come to a halt. But it made you stay focused on the consumer and the competition.

Telecom in that sense was radically different because the product changed every day. Everyday somebody made a better cell phone, and somebody had a better tariff plan. With that pace of product change, it was difficult to keep your business moving. It was trying to keep pace with technology. In FMCG (fast moving consumer goods) or in the beverage business, you are trying to set the pace. So the challenges were entirely different.

Also, in technology, the consumer wasn’t necessarily the center of your existence. The guy within Motorola who is obviously the star is the guy who designed the RAZR, which changed the rules of the game, and suddenly made a simple gadget like a cell phone look cool, and edgy, and sexy. Therefore I think the focus was toward that. FMCG has a strong consumer orientation. You live by what the consumer tells you. In technology very often you’ve got to remind yourself that the consumer is who you exist for. So I think getting a consumer focus into telecom and technology is another part.

You achieved notable success in bringing Motorola’s visibility into India. What would you credit your success to?

I’m not sure I merit what you’re saying. But I think it’s really about wanting to do it differently. At Motorola there was an established norm of how it was done. It was a strong heritage brand but with very little presence. We said, “we have a good product portfolio, we’ve got a great brand name, we have great technology back up, but why aren’t we doing well?”

Motorola ad featuring Abhishek Bachchan

When you go back to the consumer, you realize that yeah, the heritage brand is fine, but it says nothing to me. We weren’t talking to our consumer in a manner that he would understand. That made us work backwards, and we realized that we needed to build a more Indian idiom into our communication. That made us go out and hire an Indian brand ambassador in Abhishek Bachchan. And suddenly people said, “Wow!”

I think the important thing is to really stay true to what you think the task is. The task at hand was how do we rejuvenate Motorola in this country. I think it’s important to stay true to what you want to do and what the objective is. Once you understand that, then most of the solutions slowly follow in place.

Can you describe your experience in transitioning to Tata Teleservices, which is of course another arena?

The move from Motorola to Tata was really moving from a device manufacturer to a service provider. I think the discriminator in the telecom business is the kind of quality of service you provide. But it is a pretty unique challenge, because a) the market is growing at a fever pitch—which is good—and b) the competition is intense. Today there are about 8 highly qualified big players, all with equally deep pockets. So I think your core differentiators are service and distribution.

Tata’s are a well-established corporate group—over 100 years with a huge corporate reputation. So I think the challenge is, how do we take the high credibility that the Tata brand holds into the telecom arena? So I think that’s the first part.

The second part is, how do we lift our execution standards? As a group we are proud of the companies that do really well—Tata Steel, Tata Motors, Tata Consultancy Services, which are the flagships. I think in telecom our challenge is, “how can we be leaders? What are the things we need to discover?”

Another part is making consumers relook and say, “what’s new about the offering?” So what we’ve done over the last few months is relook at our entire product profile. We recently launched our GSM network, which we call Tata DoCoMo. We rolled that out in the end of June.

So our whole differentiator was: being part of the Tata group, how do I treat the consumer as a consumer and not a telecom subscriber? So we’ve moved out of the rules of having that permanent pulse. We said, as a consumer, you speak as long as you want. So we went to a per-second model. You pay as long as you talk. If you’re having a short call that is 3 seconds, then you end up paying 3 paise.

This was quite novel and changed the rules. It got us off to a great start. In less than 2 months we have 6 million subscribers, which is a record in this country.

The other part is our existing business. We have about 38 million subscribers already on our CDMA network, which is called Tata Indicom. We said, “we’ve got to do something different there.” So a couple of days ago we announced a pay-per-call. We tell the consumer, “you pay 1 rupee a call. It doesn’t matter how long the call is. It could be a minute. It could be an hour. It could be as long as you want.”

And it’s also simple because now, to a consumer, 500 calls a month means you pay a bill of 500 rupees. So it’s very easy to understand: the duration of the call doesn’t matter. This again has created a fair degree of news, but more importantly I think it’s just fair to a consumer. Right now you have a network that can cater to a lot of consumers, so that part of the cost is a fixed cost or a sunk cost. And offering this kind of tariff makes consumers reevaluate.

Coming from the house of Tata’s there is an element of trust. We believe we’ve altered our product profile. We’ve got a whole host of things to do—up our customer service, build our brand, build distribution, and a lot of other areas. But at some level we’ve hopefully got the consumers to stop and say, “let’s check this out.”

This amount of growth in the industry also requires endless energy output from everybody in the telecom world—and constant shifting. How do you motivate the troops to keep their energy and enthusiasm up in this relentless adventure?

I would say it’s a simple strategy. I think a lot of people recognize that you spend the bulk of your life at work. When you’re not asleep and not at home, you’re pretty much at work. I think the challenge is to give people something very substantive that they can actually own. I think the challenge in Tata Teleservices is: how do we become a clear leader?

Tata DoCoMo Ad

We have 2 big opportunities. One is that we are rolling out a new GSM network, so we can create a new brand from scratch. The other is that we have the strong corporate backing with the Tata name. So there is a certain credibility that’s given to you, and it’s much easier to get the door open.

Therefore I think we’re making people conscious of the fact that we belong to a huge group. So we need to bring ourselves to match the other gold standard companies. How do we get there? So I think that’s one part.

The other part is the sheer growth of telecom. If we just get people to believe that you need to get at least your fair share of it, I think that just creates a sense of motive. But I think the important piece also is that people want a sense that we’ve accomplished something. Everyone wants to win, and you can break it down into clearly manageable goals. So our first thing is: how do we change the pricing paradigm? I think people are slowly beginning to see that. Consumers have stopped and taken note. And when they take note of your products and they see things are working, it’s good for you—because you feel a part of that. The little bit of the halo rubs off on the individuals. It’s about getting these small wins. And just getting a sense to people that it’s nice to be working for a winning organization.

What would you say to someone graduating this year and looking at the job market that they’re facing now?

In the first 4-5 years I think the focus has to be on soaking in and learning. I think people should take something that gives them the opportunity to travel, to go into the interiors, to actually spend a lot of consumer face time. Everything else that you build up over your career has to be about really interacting with the front end, with the consumers, with the feet on street, the sales people who are actually in touch with the retailers, and the times you spend with the retailers and distributors. No matter what function you come from—even if you want to make a long time career in consulting—I still think that getting a sense of what the real issues are always helps. Then hopefully all of your 30’s and thereafter can build off real scenarios.

Also, I think the first 4-5 years should focus on learning to run even the smallest element of the business firsthand—whether you are managing a small sales territory or one single account. How do you understand the business literally from your consumer out? See it his way. That gives you a much better understanding of the business, as opposed to getting into a lot of office space stuff, which is what early job seekers—myself included—strive for. Try to get something in a brand, in a product role, and realize that opportunity will come. But the better your grounding in the real world in your first 4-5 years, the better for you.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 8th, 2009 at 9:41 pm and is filed under interviews, leadership. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.