Buildabazaar, A Mall in the Cloud: Brand Owner’s Summit - Infibeam founder and CEO Mr Vishal Mehta, one of the speakers at the two-day Brand Owner's Summit, shared his views and experience on what makes Infibeam and BuildaBazaar a hit among today’s online surfers, businesses and customers. The summit was a unique opportunity to observe, interact with, learn and seek directions from some of the most respected brand owners on a single platform.
It was all about ‘Branding Truth’ at the Brand Owner’s Summit, a multi-city event held on February 8-9 at Core-AMA Management House in Ahmedabad.
It was an ideal platform to spread the mantras of branding and exchanging of ideas, values and branding truths from the vast experiences and knowledge of the brand owners, experts and custodianswho have successfully added value to their respective ideas and business ventures through branding.
Day one saw panel talks from speakers like Anghshu Mallick of Adani Wilmar; Piruz Khambhatta of Rasna, Mr. Vishal Mehta of Infibeam, Mr Tushar Vyas from Group Mand Mr. Darshan Patel of Vini Cosmetics and more.
The topic of the days was “Building brands in digital world” - learning from the gurus who harnessed the power of branding to enhance the values of their ideas and created powerful brands that have stood the test of time.
Sharing his views on “Building Brands in Digital World” and interacting with the audience, Mr Mehta, CEO & founder, Infibeam, said, “The online world today is content driven and the amount of content used to promote a brand is immense. This was not the case 30 years ago, back then, people were seen talking about ‘Reach’ when the only way to measure the success of any business was to know ‘what’s your reach’. Cut to present, people do not have time. So how can you essentially make yourself visible to them or make them notice you and your brand and how to reach out to them? These were a few challenges in front of us when we started off five years ago. We realized that engaging your audiences is essential to connect to them. For me engaging with the customers is more important than content.”
Talking about what medium he prefers to connect - content or visuals, Mr. Mehta explained, “Content is crucial but visuals communication is more appealing. Creatives play a massive role in building up a brand. What is the first thing that comes to your mind when in say, for example, Parle biscuit? That girl holding a biscuit, right?! In this crowded and fast world, a visual stands more relevance than any content. Creative matters, they stay on people’s mind forever. Moreover, it’s easy to remember a picture then content. This comes natural to us humans. While experimenting, we decided to simply increase the size of our products on Infibeam. Surprisingly, we observed 20% rise in the number of visitors on the site.”
Day two witnessed the new age brand gurus sharing their experiences of how consistent efforts in branding spurred their ideas to create new brands. This section saw Mr. Mehta sharing his journey of building up such a strong venture like BuildaBazaar, a DIY ecommerce platform which caters to more than 18000 online businesses today. In such a short span of time.
“To be an entrepreneur was a lifestyle choice for me. I have always believed in the words of Steve jobs who once said: ‘People with lot of passion can only change the world’. If you do not have passion for something, you fall out! These five years has been a roller-coaster ride for us but worth spending every second. Coming back to the brand, I believe that by opening the assets to your audiences is the future of ecommerce. The success funda is very simple, if consumer and facilitator speak the same language, or are on the same page, the success is bound to happen to you.”
Inviting the audiences to try opening their own stores on www.buildabazaar.com, Mr. Mehta said, “At BuildaBazaar, we allowing our customers to use and experiment with its facilities, in turn the customers open up as well. It’s like the philosophy ‘the more you give, the more you get’. BuildaBazaar is like a mall in the ecommerce cloud where you can create your own online shopping store under your own URL within minutes. You do not necessarily have to be a software engineer to use this platform. The vision is to empower small and medium businesses, entrepreneurs and individuals to give their business a much needed online presence.
The Ahmedabad leg of the event was attended by established owners, upcoming businesses, CEOs, CMOs, marketing and advertising professionals, product managers, branding and planning experts, key stakeholders from the government, investors and entrepreneurs.
