NEW DELHI: Piyush Gupta, president of Kestone Global in an exclusive conversation with NewsX, as a part of its special series NewsX A-List, talked about his professional journey, virtual marketing and future plans. Introducing the platform, 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 we just focused on a set of clients, it was new for us but then we decided to open it up for everyone and make it more experiential. So we brought about three years of on-ground experience and marketing experience to the virtual platform that we had built.”
He added, “Now if someone jumps in and looks at it, we have been doing it across the globe. The experiential part, the data part and the whole interactivity part of it is something that excites everyone when they jump in and look at the platform.”
During the pandemic, Kestone Global educated people on the virtual space. According to Gupta, when they started they were the only ones in India to have launched a virtual platform. They started by educating people first and selling later. They educated several organisations and agencies about the concept of ‘virtual.’
Addressing the pandemic, he said that the pandemic has shown the importance of virtual marketing as it pushed everyone to adapt content virtually. Hence, people are looking at connecting with customers, clients and consumers virtually, and vice versa. “We have had events and gatherings with 20,000-25,000 people joining focused group discussions where you are connecting with a CEO, with a set of 10 people, and trying to solve a business problem. We have had all of that and people are adapting to it quite well,” said Gupta.
What gives Kestone Global an edge over their competition is that they are the only integrated marketing platform and have also developed the platform. He elaborated, “From a service point of view, we are a full-service agency and then the platform comes in. Case in point, a brand comes to us and asks about connecting to a fixed set of customers and how to go about it, it’s not just the platform that we deliver, we also deliver telemarketing, digital marketing and content marketing services as well as getting the consumers on the platform and generating leads. We complete the whole cycle as for us, a platform is a tool to achieve the end result rather than just the product.”
Talking about their future plans, Gupta said, “We have made a five-year goal where we put digital first and data first, these are two bigger pillars for us and we solve sales and marketing problems using digital as a tool and data as a whole process to be one of those leaders across the globe who are full-service providers in this space. The US is doing very well for us, India has been a big market for us whereas Singapore and the Middle East is shaping up.”
He further said, “Before the pandemic, our intent was not to work for survival but follow an aggressive strategy to grow so that we can be that elephant in the room which is changing the way marketing is done.”