NewsX was recently joined by Mr Piyush Gupta, the president of Kestone Global for an exclusive conversation as a part of its special series, NewsX A-List where he shared about his journey with Kestone.
Introducing the platform, Mr Piyush Gupta said, “Virtual platform has been very close to us, we launched it in April and since then it’s been a great learning experience for us. When we started off we just focused on a set of clients, it was absolutely new for us but then we decided that let’s open up for everyone, let’s make it more experiential. So what we did was, we brought about 3 years of on-ground experience, marketing experience to the virtual platform that we had built.”
Mr Gupta added, “Now if someone jumps in and looks at it, we have been doing it across the globe. The experiential part, the data part, the whole interactivity piece of it is what excites everyone when they jump in and look at the platform.”
Kestone, during the pandemic, educated people on the virtual space. According to Piyush, when they started off, they were the only ones in India to have launched a virtual platform. They started off by educating people first and selling later, they educated a number of organizations and agencies on the concept of ‘virtual.’
Addressing the pandemic, Mr Gupta said that the pandemic has shown the importance of virtual marketing because everyone has now been pushed to adapt content virtually, hence, people are looking at connecting with customers, clients and consumers virtually, and vice versa.
“We have had events, gatherings where we had 20-25,000 people coming in to very focused group discussions where you are actually connecting with a CEO, with a set of 10 people and trying to solve a business problem. So we have had all of that and people are adapting to it very well,” said Mr Gupta.
What puts Kestone above their competition is that they are the only integrated marketing platform and they have also developed the platform. According to Mr Gupta, “From a service point of view, we are a full-service agency and then the platform comes in. So, for example, a brand comes to us and asks us about connecting to a fixed set of customers and asks us how to go about it, so it’s not just the platform that we deliver, we also deliver the telemarketing piece of it, the digital marketing piece of it, the content marketing piece of it and then getting the consumers on the platform and then generating leads. So, we kind of complete the whole cycle of it, so for us, a platform is a tool to achieve the end result rather than just the product.”
Talking about their future plans, Mr Gupta said, “We have kind of made a five-year goal where we say that we put digital first and data first, these are two bigger pillars for us saying that can we solve sales and marketing problems with digital as a tool and data as a whole process and then be one of those leaders across the globe who are a full-service provider in this space and solving the problem. The US is doing very well for us, India has been a big market for us and Singapore and the Middle East is shaping up.”
Mr Piyush Gupta further said, “Before the pandemic, we started saying that let’s not work for survival and let’s look at it as an aggressive strategy to grow and can we be those elephants in the room which is kind of changing the way marketing is done.”