Lakshmanan “Lux” Narayan is an entrepreneur with a previous life in advertising and media planning. He is the CEO & co-founder of Unmetric Inc., a brand-focused social media intelligence platform. Before Unmetric, Lux was part of the founding team at Vembu Technologies, an online data backup company. Lux has a B. Tech. in Mechanical Engineering from IIT – Madras and and MBA in Marketing from IIM Calcutta. He spoke exclusively with Team Estrade during TEDxGateway 2016 – Mumbai. Following are the excerpts from the interview.
CEO & Co-Founder, Unmetric Inc
- Tell us about your journey so far and what led you to start Unmetric Inc.?
I used to work in advertising in mid-90s and at that time I used to work in this agency called Lintas. My team and I would pull our share of pen and share of voice reports, you know to help market…to figure out what should work with competition, for television and print. So, what we do at Unmetric is like a logical extension of that, because the battle for hearts and minds has moved on to the social network. That way it is almost a continuation of that, but, to be honest, I stumbled on Unmetric in some ways, because in the middle I was with another technology company called Vembu Technologies, a data back up software company. Over there, when I used the twitter handle and facebook page at Vemby, I just figured that I needed to see what other companies were doing. To get a handle of what we were doing was good enough. That really was the big impetus of starting Unmetric.com.
- How does Unmetric work? What is its USP and what is it key differentiator vis-à-vis competition?
Admittedly, the analytic phase, the social analytic phase, can seem sometimes to be a little confusing and crowded. But, if you take a 40,000 feet view of the entire analytics and social phases, then it is actually not so complicated, because, every market is worried about two things, the consumers (or customers) and the competition. Right! So, a lot of analytics tools you have in the market focus on what people are saying. What consumers are saying, how they think, buy and feel, etc.? What do they think of food? What do they think of Priyanka Chopra? What do they think of your brand? What do they think of your competition’s brand? Its all at length on what consumers think and feel. We differentiate ourselves by focusing not on consumers, but more on competition. Because when the battle for hearts and minds has moved on to social network and, you know, when brands are having conversations on a regular basis. If you are a brand that has invested in digital and social, and you are running a campaign from social, the first question, you should be asking yourself is, is it good? And there is no easy way to answer it, a simple question like that, unless you have context. So, that’s why we started like calling ourselves as the social media benchmarking company, that’s what is unique about us. We allow brands to benchmark and compare their channels, their campaigns and their content against any other brand. We are constantly pulling data over 60,000 brands and that’s a big USP. 60,000 brands, 500 million people of content over a trillion interactions. It is a lot of interesting data.
“You can build up a product for the world, from anywhere in the world!”
- Is the ecosystem in India ripe for the success of your work?
So, I will answer this question and you can be the judge of how relevant it is. I think that the way the world is right now, you can build up a product for the world, from anywhere in the world. And, that’s what we have done. I mean, our customer base is not in India, it is in the US. We work with big brands in the US – American Airlines, General Motors, lot of large FMCG brands. Most of my colleagues are based out of India, most of my team is in India. We have people in the US as well. Although we started the company in India, we built the product in India, it is a product that is used in 24 different countries. And one of the companies is in India. So, yes we have a market in India, it is an important market, but it is not the only market for us!
- Which region has the highest demand for IT solutions globally? And to which region do you cater to the most?
Every company, every domain is not a services or a solutions company. We are a product company! What we sell is a login ID and a password that our clients use to self service their requirement. In general, the US is the biggest market, the largest homogeneous, single technology driven country in the world. And, that’s the case for us, because the US is pretty strong on the marketing as well. There are a lot of large brands there, who converse in English and our platform is a perfect fit. So, our largest market is by far the US market.
- What is your strategy in terms of reducing the cost and making the key stake holders aware of your work?
I think reducing of cost is also a function of company focus. Our focus is profitability and therefore managing costs is an important part of that equation. I think it also stems from your own personal DNA. I mean, I am from Chennai, traditionally, I am an entrepreneur, and I think there is a fair amount of conservative bloodstream inside of me. Which also forces you to be conservative about how you handle money, so, it is a part of your upbringing. So, I think that has become a part of the company as well. WE are not very stingy, but we are very careful about where we spend our money.
With regards to keeping stake holders aware and happy, I think the customer is our most important stake holder. So, a lot of our energy goes into, everyone making sure that our customer is happy, from customer service perspective, account management perspective to, of course, the product itself.
The other important stake holders are obviously, my colleagues and employees. They are building something that is being used by major brands across the world. They need to feel challenged and happy. And, know that we are doing something good, interesting and relevant. That’s an important constituent that needs to be constantly updated and everything happening in the company so we do that every quarter, and we have internal updates to let people know what’s happening.
And of course, the most obvious stake holders are our investors on board. I am fortunate to have amazing investors, especially folks like Nexus Venture Partners and we have a very helpful and friendly board. That’s good because, having a board that is supportive, of course we have quarterly board meetings, so, a supportive board is helpful in making decisions for easy execution of strategies, so we are fortunate that way.
- What are the trends that will define the future of the industry over the next 5 years?
I think just the stuff about what’s possible out there. Because, the way market has approached it is all people are spending time on twitter, spending time of facebook. So, let’s serve them as on facebook and lets serve them as on twitter. Here is a free medium, let’s put content out there. Its translated into some kind of content pollution and infact a part of right of passage in terms of people and brands figuring out how to use a medium. And I think that there are still people ahead of us, because very fundamentally, you know there is a beautiful connect in a book called The Cluetrain Manifesto, that says 95 different things. The first of them, it says is that Markets are conversations! But if you think about it, marketing has not been a conversation so far, you know, more or less, from brands to consumers, on television or print or every other medium. This is the first time that a brand is having an actual dialogue with its consumers. It fundamentally changes the mechanics of communication, mechanics of marketing and you just need the people dialogue to understand what is possible. So, there is a lot more that can happen. Its not just about social network and advertising. It is changing the way marketing is done, changing the way people have conversations with brands. In a world where the brand affinity and brand loyalty are fast reducing, this digital aspect is becoming more and more important.
- What is vision for Unmetric Inc.? What is your roadmap for the next 5 years?
Everything is about data. We are focusing on helping marketers apply a rear view mirror to data and inform them about intelligent positions about the future. That could be very fundamentally about analytics to figure out, whether what you are doing compares with what your competition is doing…that’s what we started life with. But, going forward, extending that road map by pouring that data “oil” that we have. So, one of them is a product that is definitely data driven creativity, that we have, it’s called Discover, that allows brands to create and strategize around content. You can use historical data to create a campaign, create content, and I think that turns out to be interesting when data that turns from social informs others, outside of social. That’s what is very interesting – so, what data is capturable from what brands are doing on social, how this data can manifest itself at the other end. This is what we are constantly exploring.
“Markets are conversations!”, Lux Narayan, CEO – Unmetric Inc.
