MAM
Rajesh Sawhney taps into $300 billion food retail market with Innerchef
MUMBAI: Tapping into the lucrative $300 billion food retailing market in India, former Reliance Entertainment president and GSF Accelerator founder Rajesh Sawhney has launched InnerChef.
InnerChef is an online food discovery and delivery platform, which is at the intersection of two global mega trends: eating different and eating better. The company will deliver great recipes in a box with all its ingredients, which are measured and prepped allowing one become a chef in 10-20 minutes.
While the food retailing market in India is pegged at $300 billion, the Indian restaurant market is pegged at $50 billion. The home food delivery market is growing at 40 per cent per annum and is expected to be $10 billion in size by 2016. While bulk of the business in this industry is in the unorganized sector, the share of the organized sector is increasing rapidly. With the advent of Internet and mobile, the combination of food and technology is disrupting old business models and is creating new paradigms. According to recent estimates, over $2.3 billion has been invested in “Food+Tech” businesses so far of which $1.2 billion was in 2014 alone. Innerchef’s mission is to provide a new kitchen experience that is in sync with the needs of a “globally-aware” yet “time-poor” consumer.
The company’s chefs shop for fresh ingredients, prepare exotic sauces and seasonings, package them to precise measurement with simple recipe instructions to follow. With InneChef, one can experience the thrill of cooking and plating a dish that’s fresh and tasty within minutes.
InnerChef currently offering 16 recipes and plans to take the number up to 25-30 recipes over the next one month, which will be refreshed on a weekly basis. While the launch menu is primarily western cuisine comprising salads, paninis, pastas and specials, InnerChef plans to add oriental and Indian cuisine in the coming weeks.
While InnerChef has commenced operations in Gurgaon, it plans to expand to three metros namely Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore in the coming quarter and cover the top 10 Indian cities with multiple kitchens within one year. Plans are afoot to have 100 kitchens in a span of two years.
Adopting the model of hyper local distribution, InnerChef will deliver fresh food twice in a day: lunch (11 am to 2 pm) and dinner (5 pm – 9 pm). Additionally, the company is also exploring options to provide on-demand service in the catchment areas.
Customers can order recipe boxes through a mobile responsive website and soon-to-be launched mobile app.
The four other co-founder of InnerChef along with Sawhney are DiGhent Cafe founder Bal, professional chef Heena Karia Thakkar, Skybulls founder Uday Bansal and former Barclays New York product manager Rahul Samat.
Brands
Creative Intelligence: Using AI to Predict Which Ads Will Actually Convert
Priyanka Aeron, Director & Co-founder of Thrive Global AI
MUMBAI: In a heavily populated digital landscape, simply being creative with your advertising will not guarantee that your ad will be successful. In fact, brands today are producing more content than ever. However, very little of that results in actual engagement or sales. However, Creative Intelligence, powered by AI, is fundamentally transforming the advertising industry.
Creative Intelligence utilizes data, machine learning, and statistical behavioral insights to analyze and predict how well a creative asset will perform prior to it being published. Therefore, marketers no longer have to rely on either their gut instincts or post-campaign analytics for making informed decisions before production. That said, AI-powered creative intelligence greatly improves results and decreases wasted dollars spent.
Moving Beyond Guesswork
In the past, making ads was a mix of gut feeling, experience, and A/B testing. These methods were useful, but reactive by nature. People have already spent their budgets by the time the results are looked at. AI models can find patterns that are linked to higher engagement and conversion rates by looking at huge datasets. These datasets can include things like past campaign performance, audience behavior, and visual elements like color, composition, and facial expressions. This helps marketers guess which ads will do well even before they go live.
Decoding What Truly Drives Conversions
AI-powered creative intelligence allows for an evaluation of advertisements that is not limited to the basic data but also explores the elements of an effective advertisement through subtle reactions; clarity and directness of the ad message and how well the ad captures audience’s attention in the first three seconds. AI can also provide insights into the successful use of advertisements directed to human faces, which connect through eye contact based on media channels, and how advertisements that utilize shorter but clear calls to action may produce more clicks from certain populations. The insights, provided through AI, provide marketers with the ability to think beyond creating more advertising material and additionally create more effective ad campaigns that actually convert.
Personalization at Scale
Consumers expect relevance more than ever. Irrelevant mass messaging is not going to work in a society inundated with information. Hyper-personalization, using AI, allows companies to create content that suits individual segments within their target markets based on their demographics, interests, and behaviors. Rather than having one single message that aims to reach everyone, brands can have many versions of their messages tailored to each segment within the market. Such flexibility is what makes campaigns successful nowadays.
Faster Iteration, Better Results
Another advantage to using AI in creative decision-making is speed. Companies must improvise because their campaign cycles are shorter than ever before, and having the ability to iterate rapidly is more important than it has ever been. There is no greater way to do this work than through AI, as new technologies give brands the ability to test multiple creative avenues and figure out which ones are working well. This reduces a lot of the testing that companies would otherwise have to do and makes the process faster.
With AI, brands can also make creative changes in real-time during a campaign, allowing the, to make vital decisions and adjust their creatives, rather than waiting out. This allows for faster adaptability, well-tested campaigns and reduced lost ad spend.
The Human-AI Collaboration
Even though AI is capable of performing certain tasks, its purpose is not to eliminate human creativity. Successful campaigns require human collaboration with computer intellect since both complement each other. While computers are capable of dealing with massive amounts of information, discovering patterns, and providing predictions, humans are the one to inject stories and emotions into campaigns.
The Future of Advertising
As the complexity of advertising becomes harder with the passage of time, Creative Intelligence will play a significant role in helping marketers formulate a strategic approach. The yardstick that will set standards for determining whether a marketing firm has fulfilled its responsibilities will be the forecasting of future outcomes, as well as personalized content and optimization of creative elements in real-time. In contrast to the existing scenario where the campaigns remain fixed, these campaigns will be capable of adjusting themselves according to the customer interacting with the brand, as well as other trends on social media channels. This will enable brands to offer customers an engaging experience that will exceed expectations. The biggest hurdle marketers will face will be finding ways to utilize these capabilities without compromising branding and enhancing the creativity of the team involved.
