WOOT FACTOR

THE NAYI SOCH FOR NAYA BHARAT, BUILDING AFFORDABLE LUXURY EXPERIENTIAL MARKETING IN THE BFSI SECTOR

The Indian market is a fast changing with more and more millennials taking over. Brands are bending over to create experiences for the consumers to create loyalty and higher recall. The market and brand consultants are geared up to innovate to help brands reach out to their consumers in new ways.

India inc, as of today is the fifth largest growing economy and with start ups and bootstraps, India is becoming a fast paced economy and market place. Brands and service providers are bending over to reach out to the consumers in order to sustain the business. With continuously rising competition, every brand is looking forward to become innovative in order to communicate and stand out as unique.

With Amit Relan in the lead who is also donning the role of CEO and co producer, WOOT factor – Brand Architects is creating larger than life and consumer friendly experiences that are spoon scooped from the luxury buckets generally offered to the crème de la crème. But when the Middle class Indians get to experience luxury and pampering by different brands, it means, India is no more a third world country. Amit Relan, truly believes that every consumer, no matter the monetary status, can and are entitled to some level of luxury experiences. With this thought, WOOT Factor has gradually injected the concept within the BFSI market by carefully stitching the high market’s experience at an affordable cost. Something that a lot of brands are wanting to offer to the Indian consumers like how Redme and Oppo are providing features that an iphone might have been the leader of, or the Nexon that offers the best in class comfort with luxury and many such more. This paradigm shift gave Woot Factor the push of how the same can be translated into the service industry by just innovating the re-inventing BTL and experiential marketing routes.

With 13 years of WOOT experience in being brand consultants, experiential marketers and event managers, WOOT Factor has set a strong foothold within the BFSI sector, real estate and pharma sector. The only USP that kept WOOT Factor growing and thriving, was to treat every smallest size of brief equally and treating each with care. To innovate, ideate and deliver each and every brief to make them experientially large is the motto of WOOT Factor. The vision and energy that Amit Relan has, gets translated to the entire team to work towards a single manifested goal, to make GREAT EXPERIENCES. Let us hear it from the man himself.

Personalization Made Profession

WOOT Factor first began in 2009 with a bootstrapped and modest capital. At the time, Mr Relan had 10 years of IT and sales services experience under his mentor Mr Puri. His partner and co producer of WOOT Factor, Ms Smita Jadhav Shah, was a veteran from the financial services arena. They began with a vision for serving only the B2B market and have retained that vision so far.

At the inception of WOOT Factor, Mr Relan stood at 28 years of age facing a formidable climb. Unlike many fortunate entrepreneurs, he did not have a direct mentor but took life as a learning experience. That is why he ties-in his personal life with his professional one and pours all his zeal into his company’s work culture, colleagues and subordinates.

With no external investment or funding, the company has managed to secure a professional regard and business volume of major BFSI brands. These include prestigious names in BFSI like Aditya Birla Health Insurance, ICICI bank, Axis Bank, Standard Chartered Bank, HDFC bank, TATA Asset Management and Real Estate like Godrej properties, K Raheja Group and in healthcare sector, Abbott. More recently, they have inducted Adani group and Godrej Capital into their list of prominent clients as well. They served as important contributors to the brand’s launch story including the brand development process and business value creation.

The Dynamics of a Dynamo

As mentioned before, while retaining a relatively modest capital investment without any funding rounds from external investors, WOOT Factor managed to create a sizeable market presence for itself. Their winning formula is simple but effective – they believe in being proactive in using BTL media to promote products. This means consistent output across all key marketing channels like direct mail campaigns, trade shows, catalogs and targeted search engine marketing. They also take the point of being responsive to market trends and capitalizing on them in the strongest market domain for clients.

Aside from being brand story developers, Mr Relan and his business partner, Smita Jadhav Shah, also strive to be thought leaders. They utilize their extensive insights derived from the international market and build conversations around trends and the development of product promotion verticals. He believes market awareness is key to understanding what technologies are best used for forward-leaning event marketing. Mr Relan often has to balance the delicate margins of keeping up with the latest developments without alienating clients or their target audiences.

Competition without Compromise

When it comes to making their own space in a rather crowded marketspace, WOOT Factor is all about niche marketing tactics.

Mr Relan’s primary approach of dedicated working with gusto and enthusiasm also has him attending large-scale events to ensure their brand development stories matter. This is also an opportunity to learn from competitors and peers while ensuring there is enough uniqueness in their own stories to make WOOT Factor’s market proposition a unique affair.

He is a strong believer in collaboration both inside and outside the organization when prudent. Rather than being a highlight among his industry peers, he prefers to keep a keen eagle-eye view on the market competition in his industry. At the same time, he has a cloistered approach to ensure WOOT Factor always offers a niche brand story development and event management value proposition. In fact, Mr Relan feels elated and blessed that the all employees united during pandemic and served nearly all clients despite the shortfall because of their adaptive brand promotion practices. Above all else, the pandemic showed him that employee loyalty and retention is the strongest asset of any company. He counts that as a central pillar of WOOT Factor as an organization and places it above revenue generation.

Practices Make Personages

As an entrepreneur and business leader, Mr Relan takes inspiration from names like Sachin Tendulkar, Priyanka Chopra and Aamir Khan. He highlights their passion and hard work as key points of invigoration for his personal self. In his personal life, he gives his success’ credit to Mr. Puri of Abyss and Horizon company, an IT recruitment firm he started his career with. He would say his own work ethic career choices, dynamism and versatility have come through this person’s mentorship when he was a novice business developer.

He also believes CEOs must earn their title rather than anoint themselves. A startup culture with proof of work is far more than any grassroots high-investment venture. He believes investors should walk the talk, lead by example, mentor by choice and work deliberately to add brand values to markets and market value to brands. He counts awards and accolades as a distant second compared to dedicated work, client happiness and team development.

Recent Accomplishments and Future Goals

At present, the company is focused on aggressive but sustainable expansion. They will be taking home a bigger slice of the BFSI experiential market through their RoI-based BTL brand promotion strategies. Of course MICE and basic events will never be out of the WOOT DNA and as masterful brand architects, they want to make an escalating investment in portfolio diversification to include ultrahigh net individuals and offer market-wide luxury experience events. Mr Relan is also carefully constructing a strategic plan to enter the international market by 2025 or thereafter.

The accolades WOOT Factor and Mr Relan’s team including himself have earned give testament to their rapidly growing excellence and expertise. These include Leader of Tomorrow, 20 Best Places to Work in Event Management, 20 Most Trusted Event Management Companies in India and many others. The company also plans to expand its CSR activities from donating significant amounts to animal welfare charities to working with the Robin Hood Army. This is a food salvage charity focussing on preserving leftover catering foods from events and distributing it among the most underprivileged populations in their areas of operation.

Advice for Aspiring Entrepreneurs

Mr Relan’s years as a bootstrapped entrepreneur have wizened to the daily grind as it takes so to be a successful one. He recommends every budding entrepreneur should introspect deeply before making a deliberate investment in entrepreneurship. For this, he also urges experienced entrepreneurs to emerge from their lion’s den and offer budding entrepreneurs much-needed business insights.

While glamorous, entrepreneurship is not for the risk-averse and requires much sacrifice on many occasions. Not everyone can make prudent decisions when people’s livelihoods are at stake. He advises new entrepreneurs to research thoroughly and find sustainable and scalable niches they can work in for at least 10 to 20 years. His final words on keeping the entrepreneur fire going say “Do only that which you can wake up every morning and love to do and love yourself for doing it after you get done with it.”