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On Strategy Showcase
The story behind Indeed's Gold Effie-winning entrance into the Indian market
00:33:52
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- [00:00]
A
Welcome to OnStrategy Showcase. I'm Fergus O' Carroll in Chicago. You can connect with me on LinkedIn. And a couple of people have brought up the fact that we have OnStrategy Showcase as a page on LinkedIn and then we also have the page under my own personal name. The one with my personal name is the one to join. The other one we put up just as a kind of a placeholder so that nobody else would steal it. But I think a lot of people go there. I think there's maybe a thousand people who have followed us there. But the main body of our audience is going to my LinkedIn page. So that's the best way to connect with me. So go ahead and do that. You can also subscribe to our new YouTube channel. Most all of the shows, probably 90% of them are now being recorded on video. So we have them up on our YouTube channel, our on strategy showcase YouTube channel. You can subscribe there and see all of the content as well as on any podcast platform where you get your shows. Speaking of shows, some upcoming shows that are planned over the next couple of weeks. Goodyear, you may have noticed a great campaign from Goodyear that came out. BDH did the work. Working with the internal client. We recorded an episode a couple of weeks ago about that campaign. I thought it was incredibly impressive and not the interview but the actual campaign. So you can check that out. I think it ran. I can't remember the specific details of it, but you'll probably recognize it when you see that show. Also we did an episode with Amazon last week which was a terrific conversation with the internal strategists at Amazon that work on all of the seasonal work. So as seasonal meaning back to school, back to college, you know, the holiday ads, et cetera, two great guys that work on that strategy. We had that conversation that'll be out in the next. Hopefully get that out before Christmas.
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We also have our Live from London episode that's coming out. We also recorded just yesterday a conversation with Monzo, which is a Monzo bank. It's a UK UK bank that is now coming to the us. It's a digital bank, app based bank, Archer Meats. And we've also got Eat Big Fish is back on the show. We had a great conversation a couple of weeks ago. We're trying to get that episode out in the next few weeks to talk about Challenger brands and how Challenger brands in terms of how they're defined and how they go to market, has it shifted over the last number of decades since so Much has changed since that sort of term sort of enter the lexicon of marketing. So I'm excited about that. Talking about today, one of the things, you know, we are the official podcast of the FES and one of the things that I'm increasingly aware of is the fact that and it's not that we haven't known about this but many times it's difficult to make it happen because of language barriers, et cetera. But we do want to be featuring more international cases on the show. EFFIE award winning cases. The effies are in 130 plus markets around the world. And so we are going to do our best to begin to present a more broad representation of cases from around the world. When we're able to do that and today is an example of this. Indeed, the hiring platform that we're all familiar with is in India making some major inroads in the last couple of years. They've won gold EFFIE awards in their markets and also long term effectiveness awards through the EFFI organization. So it's a great case. We reached out, we managed to make this happen. I love the conversation. There is a lot that we can learn and a lot of things that seem very different about our market. When it's 1.6 billion people.
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Can you imagine the segmentation studies? So needless to say, a fun conversation. Very well worth listening to. I think you'll really enjoy this conversation. It's with Sanjana Chetan. She is senior strategist at DDB Mudra in India. Now I think probably this week they've been rolled up and probably part of the whole DDB worldwide shifts and changes but hopefully Sanjana will be okay in that whole conversation. And Owen Murphy is senior Global Marketing leader at Indeed. And we had a great conversation. Hope that you will enjoy it and I think you'll learn a lot from it. Enjoy. So we are excited to have this crew together, a gold EFFIE winner. I really like this work when we always, as regular listeners know we always do EFFIE award shows. We love to celebrate great EFFIE award winners and we want to make sure that we're getting representation from around the world because there's great work done. So we always tried to do that. So what we've done here is found a great case that originated and ran in India and we reached out to all these folks and we ended up getting an Irishman. Can you believe that? We were going for a case in India and we ended up getting an Irishman involved. That just doesn't seem fair. Owen.
- [05:15]
B
Yeah. This is it. Yeah. And plenty of Irish people involved too, because we have a large marketing contingent out of Dublin. So it's great. We do. We dual headquartered so in Austin and EMEA headquarters in Dublin, which kind of looks after rest of world markets. So, yeah, there's plenty of us, Fergus. Plenty of us.
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A
Indeed. And Sanjana is in ddb. She's a strategist at ddb Mudra Group. Great to have you.
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C
Thanks for having us here, Fergus. It's fantastic to be here. Longtime fan of the show.
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A
Thank you. Thank you. So, let's talk about this brand. Indeed. You know, we're familiar. Most of the listeners, particularly here in the US will be familiar with it. But Owen, tell us about the brand internationally. Is it represented, messaged, framed differently in different parts of the world?
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B
Yeah, it depends on, I guess, the market you're looking at.
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The thing about Indeed, it is the world's number one job site. It's the scale of it, right? It is absolutely massive. Someone is hired on indeed every two seconds. We've got 615 million profiles. It's huge with 1.1 billion company ratings. So it's really, you know, it's the scale of it.
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But how it shows up in different markets, as you say, is very different. So I'm lucky in that I look after Emea, Apac and US Jobseeker now, which is great. So you've got a real.
- [06:39]
View of the Indeed in the us, which is ubiquitous. It is the category, really. And then you're working in markets like India, as we'll talk about now, which is, you know, a bit more of a challenger, a bit more of a newer entrant. So how we show up is very different in, in each of our markets.
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A
So when you, when you say you're taking care of job seeker, what is job seeker that you're taking care of?
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B
Yeah, so we're effectively. We have two audiences, right? So we have job seeker, who we don't have a business if we don't have job seekers and we have employers who effectively pay our wages. So we're a marketplace brand, straddling both and we message to both in terms of mass comm. So for job seekers, where the brand shows up in a way that we're their career companion, helping them get to better work, whatever better work means to them. And then for employers, it's about being their trusted advisor, their talent agent, and connecting them to deliver quality candidates. And quality is something you'll see in our comms all the time.
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A
So let's talk about the challenge that you faced in India, what was the business challenge and what was the resulting marketing challenge that came out of that? Owen?
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B
Yes.
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A
Then I'll go to Sanjay.
- [07:55]
B
Yeah. And maybe some context before we get to that. So the challenge was really, we had been off and on in the market, so we went in in 2018 and we were kind of in and with kind of inconsistent investment. And the S and P sector at the time, it was largely untapped. So it had been neglected by us and the entire category, really. So with sporadic investment and then it was a fairly untapped market. And the brief to the agency was, how can we tap into this? How can we drive platform adoption and subscription and really cut through the noise in a market where SMBs were competing with large enterprises for talent? And we wanted to target SMB owners specifically and shift their hiring behavior. And I think Sanjana is going to talk to that a little bit in terms of how we went about that.
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A
Was that observation that SMBs were being somewhat neglected by the major players in India at the time? Was that an observation that came from the client or that came from you guys collectively working together?
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C
I think that was. It was a bit of both.
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Indeed. Came in with the brief, like Owen was saying about the fact that we wanted to make inroads with the SMB audience. And it was a conversation that was on the table. And I think what kind of nailed it down was the fact that when we went about doing our research, we realized that it's an extremely untapped market in India. If you essentially look at it, there's a bunch of different sectors that contribute to our economy. And a. A couple of them tend to be very informal, like the agricultural sector, of course, extremely informal, as is the SMB sector, which is why a majority of the competitors, or indeed in India, were not focusing on this audience at all. They were instead looking at, you know, the white collar jobs, the corporate sectors, the large enterprises, the manufacturers, the service sector, all of that. So the SMB audience was, yes, A, untapped, but also B, they were thriving in the post pandemic context at the time that the brief hit the table and we were figuring out the campaign, SMBs in India were actually contributing well over 2 million openings to the market every year. So that's a huge opportunity that was there for the team.
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A
Is that huge, though, with a population of what, 1. How many people is like 1 1/2 billion people in India? Was it that big?
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C
Well, at that time, considering how much of an economic slowdown there was you know, with the layoffs that were happening during the pandemic, the fact that the biggest job creators in India, which happens to be the information technology sector, they were the ones that were laying people off in hoards. So taking all of that into account, I think the number of openings that were coming out of the SMB sector was fairly significant.
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A
So one of the things that really struck me about this case is this idea of SMBs being less targeted by the larger current players in the marketplace. Then you guys come in and identify it as an opportunity. Why had they not been focused on SMBs, the existing key players that you were competing against?
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B
Yeah, I'm not entirely sure they had to, because Nakri at the time, Nakri are a bit of a. We were describing it as a bit of an 800lb gorilla. They were the market, so they didn't have to monster at the time, were kind of losing its way a little bit. They were Always second and LinkedIn hadn't quite turned their attention to it. And we had been off and on again in terms of investment from 2018, and we went in with a concerted effort from 22 onwards with dual audience messaging. So I think Nachri were in a place where they didn't. It wasn't that they neglected the market per se, it was they had the market and they didn't have to develop kind of huge comms around it.
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A
Yeah, this is the thing that's really interesting to me, Sanjana. It's the idea that indeed makes a decision to find a beachhead through SMEs because it was a strategic choice in order to get into the market. It wasn't necessarily large enough to be something you could scale up to, but it was a good, great foothold that took a lot of courage. And maybe it was just a super smart idea because going up against Nakri and others who were dominant players would have been an impossible task.
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C
Yeah, no, I mean, you're absolutely right because it was an extremely brave thing to do, but also, like you said, extremely strategic because indeed is essentially a job seeker first organization. And even from that lens, if you were to look at it, we had reports coming out at that point which said that a whopping majority of your job seekers were also interested in jobs in the SMB domain. In fact, there were reports published which said about 72% of them or more would prefer jobs in SMBs over large enterprises at that point in time. Things have changed since then, but that's really the market context that we were operating in.
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A
So the work that you do, Sanjana, is in terms of planning, tell us about what you did and what were a couple of the key learnings that came out of that that ultimately fed into the strategy.
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C
So I think once we decided that the SMB audience was really what we were going to hone in on.
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It became very evident that that's an audience that hires extremely informally. And what I mean by that is when they have an opening in a small or medium business, they typically tend to want to staff it with people from their own community. So they send out requests among their friends, their relatives, they ask around with their neighbors, and a majority of their hiring tends to happen from their social circles. And that sort of observation kind of led us to realize that that's a problem for us to figure out because indeed is about formal hiring. We want to get the right job seekers to the right role and ensure that there's a good fit there. But when you're hiring informally, that rarely ever happens. So that's what we kind of set out to resolve. And I think if you look at it in terms of what came out with the planning activities, we dove a little deeper into this whole problem and we realized that at face value, when you speak to the SMB folks, it's very easy to think that they're doing the informal hiring because it's faster or it's easier. But when you kind of dig deep, you realize that the motivations behind those choices are a little bit more complex. There's actually two fundamental problems when it comes to SMBs in India. One is a lot of them lack the know how. If you say SMBs, they're actually a lot of them are heavy on the size, they're very small organizations, they're tightly run ships and they have very small teams. A lot of the folks, double hat, maybe triple hat, they learn things on the go, right? So hiring and hiring as a formal, a streamlined process, it's not very easy to build into their pace and their style of working. Even if they were somehow motivated to do that, the world of hiring tends to be a little daunting, right, because you have to go up onto a portal, you have to make a listing, you have to build out a JD or a job description. You have to figure out what that role needs. All of that is very complex to do. It's a lot of effort, it's a lot of know how which they don't really have. So they tend to fall back on the the gut feeling hires that they do.
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A
Before we go further down that that conversation I wanted to understand Owen did indeed have a brand in, in India at the time. What our reputation, what was it and did you need to. Were the things that you knew you needed to change the perceptions of within the brand itself?
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B
Yeah, indeed. In terms of going back to 2022, we had done a lot of.
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Tech. We had focused on a lot of the urban metros which naturally would skew more tech. So indeed isn't as, say mass market as it is in the likes of the US.
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Or Germany. It is more.
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White collar as we said, or kind of, you know, degree plus in India. And that's how we activated previously. So it was around more of the metros, the likes of the likes of Mumbai, Bangalore, et cetera. So we would have strong considerations figures from, from those metros. But and in terms of what we had to change about it, it was, it was almost the reverse from other markets at the time where we were where we are markets known as, you know, real strength in, in blue collar mass market. And we have to go upstream in, in India at the time we were maybe more.
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White collar tech and had to go more, you know, expand and go more mass market.
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A
So let's, let's come back on before we go to talk about the actual idea. I'm super curious about that. What we're, what we're labeling here, although I hate the word courageous decision to target SMB. You, you said that you'd already been in India and you were looking at larger enterprise, you were sort of inconsistent with it. Then you decided to pull back and go after SMB. The plan. Obviously when I look at the work, the plan seemed to maybe be a couple of years of focusing on SMB. But then you seem to go into enterprise again.
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Was that the goal that you would spend the first few years establishing an SMB and then expand the brand? So was that sort of literally sort of a beachhead that you wanted to get a foothold in with? The ultimate goal was always about getting into the enterprise.
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B
In 2018, we'd grown among job seekers.
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Within these core metros. It was a revenue decision, of course, so that was why that was chosen and enterprise would have been big within these audiences. We had seen that there was an opportunity at the time with SMBs.
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From 2022 onwards. And it wasn't that this was a massively unique strategy.
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A
We.
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B
And if you're in the US for us, you'd be very used to our I need indeed SMB comms, which is on really high frequency, particularly around live sports.
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So we've done mass comms around S and P globally as well. And it is proven to to grow both SMB metrics and job seeker metrics as well, because they're seeing similar messages in mass channels.
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A
Yeah. And so let's talk about where the idea comes from. Sanjana.
- [19:40]
You brief creative, they begin to come up with ideas. First of all, what's the brief or what's at the heart of the brief? And then talk us through the journey of getting to the idea you ultimately produce.
- [19:54]
C
Yeah. So I think, like we were talking about a little bit earlier, at the heart of the brief was there was two parts to it. One was the problem that we were setting out to solve, which was the whole fact that SMBs were hiring not in a way that would allow them to organically rely on a platform like. Indeed. And we dissected that a little bit, and we saw that it was the fact that they didn't have the knowledge on how to do it, but it was also the fact that there was a bit of an emotional angle to it. SMBs tend to have very strong ties with their community. Often if you speak to these folks, you realize that a lot of them tend to attribute their success to their people, to their community. And so, you know, there's a sense of gratefulness and this desire to give back. And that also contributes in a major part to their decision to hire from within those circles. So kind of shaking up that behavior, getting them to move away from that status quo, wasn't a very easy task. So that's really what we set out to get at and how we decided to do it was the rest of the pie. And I think there.
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Was a bit of the fact that you could hard sell the benefits of formal hiring. You could come at it in terms of fear tactics and get them to realize and wake up to the idea that they need a platform like. Indeed. But we realized that that might not do a lot of good when you're working against such deeply internalized ways of working.
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A
Did they feel, I love where you're going, but I want to just. You brought up an interesting point in my mind. Did they feel that it was a problem?
- [21:48]
C
Not at all. Not at all. They absolutely felt that it was perhaps the only way to hire, and they hadn't woken up to what the pitfalls of hiring in the ways that they were could be at all.
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A
So continue on where you were going there. Sorry to have interrupted you, but you were talking about. So you have this behavioral change you've got to enact. How do you You. How do you discover the best way to do that?
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C
Yeah, so I think the biggest task, therefore, was how do we get them to realize that there's a problem with the way that they're currently hiring? And the thing is, the problem comes from the fact that a lot of the hires that they're doing informally, they don't come with the necessary skill set or the necessary experience that's essential for the role of that they're being picked for. And so that was actually costing a lot of the SMBs significantly. It was a major pitfall. It was an actual business liability, but these people weren't realizing it.
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A
There's a lot of different ways you could have gone at that, and the direction that you chose to go at it through was the use of humor, because you don't want to come across as preachy or to suggest that the person is kind of dumb for not doing it this way. How did you get to that?
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C
If you essentially, you know, take a step back and look at B2B advertising in general, I'd say a lot of it, for lack of a better word, tends to be fairly drab. You know, you have a lot of stock imagery, led work. You have a lot of straightforward storytelling. It's not very engaging. It's. It tends to be fairly sterile.
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A
Yeah.
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C
And we knew from the outset that that's not the kind of work we wanted to do. We wanted to kind of get this aud. If, like you were saying, behavior change was the intent that we were working towards, it would need them to, you know, sit up and take note of the work that we were putting out. So it had to kind of go against the grain of the category. So we knew that from the outset, humor would be a good way to do it because we were taking on something that would be a fairly delicate task. You're essentially trying to get them to see that. They've been watching up the hiring so far. So humor, we realized, would be a good way to do it. It would soften the blow. It would also, at the same time, allow.
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The SMB owners and entrepreneurs to essentially look at the spots that we put out and in some sense, put themselves in the shoes of the characters in those films. It wouldn't offend anybody. So that really is what led us on the path of humor. And I think it was that from the get go.
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A
So let's play a couple of the spots here, and then I want to go to Owen. Here's two spots. This is Warehouse is the first one. And for those of you watching this on YouTube, you'll see the spot. And for others, I think they're pretty explanatory. The context is that you're seeing two individuals in each of these spots. One is the boss and one of them is a sort of a. Maybe a junior manager. And they're reflecting on the mistake they just made by hiring this person because the person has just screwed something up royally and the implication is clear in the film. So here's two spots.
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B
Nicer.
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I think for a long time in Indeed we we would speak about jobs as being a serious business. And it was always something where. And when I joined Indeed in 2018, humor was almost somewhat off limits. I think we had been qu of an earnest brand up until that point and for a period thereafter we'd proven in other markets that humor can really drive significant business outcomes. And Germany was probably the best case in point of that, where we had. We developed a character there called Ingrid. She is now synonymous with the brand. You would get in a taxi in 2018, 2017 and you would say you work in broken German and they would respond with invas. And now it's. We're at a stage where three out of four.
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A
What is in vos? Is that.
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B
In what? In what? Whereas the character.
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A
Oh, right, right, right.
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B
The character.
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A
Yeah.
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B
The character that we've created is now very ubiquitously known as indeed Ingrid. She has appeared on Saturday night TV shows. She's been on the. The COVID of the. The national newspaper of. Of record. Not paid. Not paid at all. She icon. And we have effectively in Germany, using humor with a level of humanity, we've taken the brand from zero to effective market leader using humor. So while DDB really fervently believed in it, we were in a good place in terms of. We had a bit of a proof of concept from other markets and understood that it is the most significant.
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Emotion and tool as it were, that we have at our disposal in terms of effective cons. What thing. I think the two things that we got right with it.
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And it wasn't perfect, but I think the two things that we got right were simplicity of message. We talked about using humor, but we hadn't been on in the market in a long time. And I think when you're out of market for a significant period, there is a, a. There's a tendency and a knee jerk to want to say more and want the cons to do more. And I think we, to TDB's credit, they, they were fervent in that in terms of stop you Know, being really clear in terms of you're trying to do too much, you're trying to say too much. And I think that was really brilliant.
- [28:32]
A
So how did they make that case to you? How was the.
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B
That I think we. So we had, we're just two people talking for an entire team. So even within, Indeed we had 10, 10 or so folks on the project team, all of whom understood what good work looked like. And so they were, they were effectively pushing an open door with really experienced folks outside of me and really experienced folks who knew what they were doing. So we had a really strong director who had a very clear vision and it was challenging first, I'll be honest at times, but I think the work stands up and it was really robust discussions around what good looks like and simplicity. And we'd made the mistakes before as well in terms of overloading messages. Too rational. And I think this was really single minded in a way that just stands up.
- [29:30]
A
You mentioned knowing that you guys are a data driven organization. Obviously, obviously you guys won an EFFIE award based upon performance in one year.
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But my question is do you think longer term than one year, does something have to perform in all of the ways possible in the first year or do you take even a longer term approach?
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B
I think we are a data driven organization but I think we try and where we've gotten really right we to try. Do we believe strongly in distinctive assets consistently deployed over time that are creating real memory structures? And I think a great example of that is the German work which I think it won a long term fe. Sorry, won a couple of regional fes and then the long term FE in terms of long term effectiveness. So distinctive assets deployed consistently over time. I think the Koch example, I know it's getting a lot of discussion online but what it is is it's consistent and yeah, we absolutely look at the long term in everything that we do.
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A
This is the coca, the new Christmas advocate. Yeah. So Sanjana, you then there's been a follow up campaign since that in my mind seems to go to a broader. The implication is that the work could work in a broader audience than SMBs, which I don't know how to label it but the line that's used is better jobs begin here. Yep. And tell me about that. Is that the realization that SM, you've made Bchat and SMBs, now it's time to expand on or is that still considered small to medium sized business? This is the delivery guy showing up. This is the woman who's seen working in an office environment.
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C
Yeah. Internally, we refer to that campaign as Let Jobs Find you and it was essentially a follow up to this work. However, that one was the focus shifted to the job seeker. Now, I will say that the domains that we explored within.
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The job seeker campaign could be either SMBs, it could be larger enterprises. We were, you know, agnostic in that sense. But the focus of Let Jobs Find you'd was to build on the traction that indeed had gotten with this work and really make inroads with our core audience, which happens to be job seekers. So the intent of that one was to say, you know, at that time, there was also a pickup, like I was mentioning, in the market of new jobs coming out from the SMB domain. So we were trying to encourage people who are looking for jobs to not sell, settle, and not, you know, just go with the first offer that comes their way in a. In a bit of desperation and to rather hold on and to rely and fall back on a platform like indeed, because we take you to the job that's the best fit for you. So we were trying to extend and speak to that audience in that way.
- [32:46]
A
What do you think, Owen? How would you build on that?
- [32:48]
B
Yeah, I think it's. That work is some of the work that I think I'm most proud of in Indeed. It effectively.
- [33:00]
Builds on the simplicity of the SMB work, but it does it in a very clear way for the job seeker. Same humor throughout and just clear in what it's trying to say and not overloading the message again, too much.
- [33:16]
A
It is Sanjana Chetan. She's senior strategist, DDB Mudra Group in India. And it is Owen Murphy, senior global business lead for Indeed. He's sitting today in Dublin or not in Dublin. Are you in Dublin or in Dublin?
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B
Just outside. Just outside Dublin.
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A
Just outside Dublin. So great to have you both. Thank you. Thank you indeed. Thank you for coming.
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B
Thanks very much.
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A
Did you see how I slid that in there? Thank you for coming up.
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I tell you, dude, that was not even intentional. Just came out.
- [33:48]
Thanks so much. And we'll see everyone on the next episode.