How World of Brands offering disruptive tech for alcobev biz

Gurpreet Singh, Rohan Patnaik, Nirmal Rajani, Raghunandan Balakrishna all co-founders and directors, and Ramesh Govindan the co-founder and CTO, who between them have nearly 100 years of rich, diverse and complimentary alcobev experience, have created World of Brands with a mission to empower alcobev consumers in making discerning brand choices. Gurpreet Singh in an interview with Bizz Buzz talks about the World of Brands."WoB's business principle is to positively impact all the key stakeholders of the category – the brand owners, the traders and the consumers. With the power of the consumer-tech and fintech platforms that we are creating, we are able to do this in a manner never done before," he says.

What led to the creation of World of Brands?

World of Brands (WoB) consists of five co-founders all with a strong association with the alcobev industry, which sparked the initial connections and friendship between us. We'd often asked "Why wasn't someone innovating a consumer-tech based solution to resolve these glaring gaps on consumer insights in the alcobev category?" A series of such conversations led us to state, "Why wait for someone else to innovate? Why not us? "If not now, when?" After all, among the five of us we had nearly 100 years of rich, diverse and complimentary alcobev experience. This simple statement sparked a series of conversations that eventually, in the year 2021, led to the creation of our company 'World of Brands' ('WoB' in short).

How is the World of Brands associated with the alcobev industry?

World of Brands' mission is to empower alcobev consumers in making discerning brand choices. Towards this, we are creating a community where consumers will build meaningful relationships with alcobev brands in the real and virtual worlds. We see technology as the key to enable this vision and we aspire to continuously innovate and be the partner of choice for our key stakeholders. To enable this vision, we have created three distinct but integrated business verticals all of which play distinct roles in easing the lives of the brand owner, the customer (trader) and the consumer.

What is the structure of World of Brands?

WoB consists of three key business verticals WoB-Tech (consumer-tech), WoB-Fin (fintech) andWoB-House of Brands (portfolio of brands).

What are your key technologies and services?

Wob-Tech: This is our consumer-tech vertical which is powered by our exclusively developed SaaS based point of sale software called 'WoB'.

Consumers get amazing offers in the form of discounts, cash-backs and reward-programs across various categories and typically these offers are customised to their buying behaviour. However, they rarely get such offers from their alcobev brands, even though they are deeply wedded to this category. Brand owners are very keen to spend a larger part of their marketing budgets towards making the kind of offers that the consumers are seeking.

However, they are concerned with issues of 'spillage' due to their dependence on the channel in executing these offers and also concerned about 'wastage' due to the absence of consumer segmentation available in this category. The lack of consumer insights in this category makes it very difficult for brand owners to segment consumers or calculate the RoI on their offers.

We endeavour to resolve the brand owner's need for consumer insights, by generating large scale data analytics built on consumer's buying behaviour. We are creating dynamic consumer segmentation which is driven by our artificial intelligence and machine learning engines. Powered by big data, we will provide brand owners segmented and accurate media and promotion analysis with clarity on RoI, while ensuring considerably reduced wastage and spillage, with real-time control on their spends.

The WoB platform can be used to increase awareness, consumer penetration, brand performance for existing and established brands as well as for new brand introductions which struggle in a media dark environment. Eventually, this will allow brand owners to create targeted communication, ensure an ongoing lifelong rewards program and build a strong relationship between the consumers and their brands.

WoB-Fin: This is our fintech vertical which the customers (the traders) can use to significantly improve their revenue and profit margins with access to dynamic and on-demand organised working capital at lower interest rates. As of now when they need additional working capital they have to go to the unorganised market and borrow from money lenders at a high interest rate. Now, the traders will be able to avail WoB's fintech as and when required to take advantage of purchase-linked schemes that companies offer regularly.

This access to finance can also allow them to stock a wider range of brands and pack sizes for their day-to-day requirements, improve their in-store experience or open an additional store which can help them grow their overall business. The entire process towards procuring the working capital loan is digital; from loan request, KYC documentation, loan sanction, re-payment, loan related reports, accessing MIS data, requesting an enhancement in the loan; everything is enabled by our embedded Fintech. The system is designed to create transparency and reduce the costs towards the loan.

WoB-House of Brands: The consumer is limited by the choices currently available to him and there are large gaps in the availability of good quality products at many price-points and different smaller taste-segments. All these opportunities are unlikely to be fulfilled by larger companies due to their industrial scale of operations. Across the category new-age entrepreneurs have shown some early signs of understanding and offering a wider choice, especially to smaller taste-segments. Our approach to this vertical will include creating our own brands, partnering and acquiring brands that are appropriately priced and crafted to different taste-segments.

Is your product and services unique in the market place and how?

Our consumer-tech vertical endeavours to fill a large gap that has been prevalent in the alcobev category. This gap which exists due to the absence of consumer segmentation and lack of consumer insights in this category makes it very difficult for brand owners to segment consumers or calculate the ROI on their offers.

With our exclusively developed SaaS based solution we are able to resolve these long-standing issues of the alcobev sector and offer consumers an ongoing lifelong rewards program and build a strong relationship between the consumers and their brands. Once fully implemented all the key stakeholders (the brand owners, the traders and the consumers) stand to benefit from this immensely.

Our fintech vertical assists the traders in solving for their on-going need for a quick and easy access to dynamic and on-demand organised working capital at lower interest rates. Once available the trader can improve their margins, improve the availability of stocks, create better shopping experience, all of which positively impacts the other stake holders – the brand owners and the consumers.

Financing solutions of this kind are difficult to procure from banks directly and the unorganised sector is expensive. WoB is the first in the fintech operations to specifically create these solutions for the alcobev sector in specific. Our unique ability to use data analytics allows us to create a market place for these fintech solutions.

Which are some of your key customers and what are the products and services you offer them?

WoB's business principle is to positively impact all the key stake holders of the category – the brand owners, the traders and the consumers. With the power of the consumer-tech and fintech platforms that we are creating, we are able to do this in a manner never done before. These positive changes have the potential to transform the entire industry over a period of time.

What is the evolution of the company and how has it grown?

We came together and formed our company 'World of Brands' in the year 2021, it's all still very new and we are discovering new opportunities every day. That I guess is the fun of an entrepreneurial and startup journey. We keep evaluating ways and means to improve our tech platforms and services so that once we are 'Live' with our services in a broader manner the experience of all the stakeholders is unhindered and rewarding.

The entire process of creation has been extremely collaborative and the discussions we have been having with leading brand owners, traders and industry experts has helped us get to the point where we can confidently deploy our platforms in the market.

What new products and services do you plan to introduce and will this have applications for the alcobev industry?

The fintech platform is at a fairly advanced stage of deployment and we should be able to start providing the traders access to dynamic and on-demand organised working capital at low interest rates by this July itself. Initially we are starting these services in Karnataka and will eventually scale this up to relevant key States across the country.

The consumer-tech platform has been thoroughly tested with a couple of partner outlets in Bengaluru and our initial market for deployment is Bengaluru itself. We are in talks with a few brand owners to use this platform during the pre-festive season period this year and therefore we are aiming to launch this in the broader sense in Sep-Oct 2022.