With 22 years of experience, working across industries and roles, Priya started her comms journey by working for the Times of India before moving over to the corporate side, working remotely for a few years since 2005, and being on video calls even before the pandemic. She’s now leading comms at PhonePe.

Check out Priya’s story:

Introduction

0:30 I think in terms of my background, I’ve been working for over two decades now, it’s going to be 22 years pretty soon have worked across industries, even across rules actually, while currently, I’m heading PR and Corp Comms for PhonePe.

0:49 My journey actually started with times of India where I worked for approximately six months.

0:55 and that was my first experience of working In an office had just passed out and that’s where I learned my writing, that’s how I think of it was there for a couple of months and then moved to the corporate side of things for a few years. I’ve actually worked in telecom companies handling. So when I started in 2000, you know, we were not marketing communications as a function had not been formally set up in a lot of entities. PR team sort of both the marketing communications had when needed. Internal and external communication lines were blurred. If you were a corp comm professional, you were expected to do more.

1:34 So I think the advantage, especially when you’re a young person in an environment like this is you pretty much pick up everything in a more structured environment while it has its advantages later in your career, I’ve been as a younger person, the skill of figuring things out, picking things, newer things is something which a more, you know, probably a more open environment allows you. I was very lucky that way.

2:03 I think four years of doing that and I pretty much knew the entire marketing communication comp internal coms landscape after which I actually worked in a pharma company where I was doing in turn comes for a couple of years. then went through this phase in which I was a young mother who couldn’t get back to a formal office 9 to 6 environment. we’re lucky that way because now hybrid and remote work is, is ext Extremely, it’s almost ubiquitous. It’s done, it’s not something which is unusual, but when I was trying to do that in 2005 it was just unheard of, you know, and I was fortunate I actually got an employer like Mr, who let me work remotely for a few years. I’ve been on zoom calls since 2005, so I think I can maybe make that my bio muting and muting myself for four years now. I’ve had, I mean completely as a young parent taking calls with a screaming toddler, I’ve been through that, and then the rest of your colleagues are probably in an office because now it’s very normalized. So I think I’ve been through that journey very Early in my life. Eventually, once the kid was older, I got back to more. I was dying to get back to the office. Of course, was happy to be back meeting more people and doing what I like.

3:37 I don’t join the role which involved demand generation for a B2B company. Again, very different from what I had done in the past, you know, and demand generation was just about numbers, making sure there is, there are leads which can tangible leads which the sales team and business development team can work towards. And the interesting thing is you can actually see what you’re doing come to life, you’re seeing millions of dollars worth of sort of being translated and you guys are ready to be placed. You would know it’s hard, a lot of it is content marketing, deep content marketing, thinking about what the customer problem is, and designing a campaign because it’s just so many emails and so much junk you tend to get, you would ignore that.

4:24 I was in a very similar role in CRM inFlipkart where I had the opportunity of being a part of two big billion days, an extremely exciting time. I think in 2016 November, when monetization happened I came to know a PhonePe through one of my ex-managers who had moved here. I hadn’t heard of them and but I had seen the impact monetization had in terms of how digital payments were perceived and how they just overnight became a part of our vocabulary and essential to our lives. It seemed a great time to actually move a new joint. Okay, which is what I did in 2017 I was employed in one and a bunch of functions first, pr person, first content person, and first-person doing CRM here. So we were just 40 people when I joined their 5000 now. So I have just seen the entire journey. It’s been exciting because I’ve literally set up seems grounds up, some of which I have retained. For instance, I continued to do Pr and some parts of the content, some of which I’ve transitioned out because they just became CRM was one of which, so, I think it’s just been it’s been a very exciting journey. I mean, I still feel like getting up and coming to work every day after 22 years, which I see people, a lot of people burn out. So I would credit that to great managers in the fact that none of them ever tried to box me.

6:02 I know even at, well we transition and progress to a certain extent, if there’s a role, I am passionate about taking people here would be happy and supportive.

First experience with data

6:17 Even when I started doing internal comms and pr earlier on in my career, one of the things I noticed was we were very anal about things being measurable. So I think it was not never a very output-driven play. I’ll give you examples when I was doing internal comms, it was very strongly linked to some of the employer-employee services. We would do right. People stated a certain thing about the organization, which needed to change.

6:49 Now, if there are initiatives and interventions you’re putting in it’s a very high-level and simple example, you need to move that needle on those metrics, which you thought you were underperforming right? I think what people tend to neglect, especially with coms is it’s they look more at the output and the activity, they completely ignore What is the input which is coming in.

7:15 A lot of my life has been spent doing demand generation, which is extremely data. All you’re looking for is data. The signals, I mean I was doing CRM at strip card and even at phone pay, but the signals are very, very clear. If you’re setting up an onboarding program, it needs to be one, you have to have a before and after in terms of how your onboarding program has impacted what you’re doing And the second thing is each stage at the final has to move and there is data and metrics which gives you, there is a feedback loop which gives you indications on what is working. What is not, see sometimes what tends to happen is I’ll give you examples like a copy you think, okay, there are three types of copies which are great. The good thing is a function like CRM allows you to just A B C. D. Or whatever with a control, getting nothing and seeing which copy or which kind of format has worked better with beyond.

8:18 I think we’re finally coming to our stage in which people realize how important media is. they also have started realizing that it is, there is one good story that can make our big brands. We’ve seen that all the time. It is not about the volume, it is about the quality, it is about the tone, it is about the message you’re trying to push out. and those metrics matter, there are tools like yours which are great when it comes to analyzing sentiments, how is pushing out being perceived?

8:55 Social media has made the feedback loop so circular that the minute you share something you say, oh this is going viral. So I mean it’s I think the last in the last 22 years one pleasant change which i notices earlier. PR was not really digital-first and most of our communication also was not now you are thinking that if you’re sharing the news, it is likely to break immediately on Twitter.

9:21 I mean there are days you just send a press release to the media and 10 minutes later you see okay it’s everywhere. So the feedback loop and the way the world is connected has really, really changed. But okay, coming back to your question on data, I think in my current state there was this project I did which I’m extremely proud of, which is called people’s this is actually a website that shows trends on how India is transacting digitally. It’s shown on a map of India.

9:54 And if you actually go on that map, you’re able to see how your state is doing versus other states, this picks up, this is 4000 crores of phone pay transactions completely anonymized, which is more for showing you the pattern of transactions and how it’s going about now. The interesting thing here also is there is a report we did, where we’ve created with the story around what is happening in digital payments, Looking at data and the way this report used to be done and we were a bunch of writers would just get these 50 data points, for instance, X, Y, Z recharges our whatever 30 million for instance in a month.

10:37 So what we will try and do is we would try and sit with the data and tell them, Okay, tell us the story, try and explain to us what was it a year back. What was it two years back? Are there any patterns you see are people calling each other more around the valley of the shadow of festivals? Right? Because see each data always has an underlying story and storytellers. Our job is to look at that data in a format in which it starts making sense for all of us. And initially, I’ll be honest, it was pretty intimidating because it was just surrounded by these millions and billions of numbers. And we were trying to leave an interesting story that had a human being at the center of it. You know, people like humans maybe when it comes to payments. Also, all of us have, there is a payment behavior that we have and which we tend to follow.

11:26 We pay our drivers beginning of the month, and we send money boom, beginning of the month towards the end of the month. There are EMIs, We pay the SIPS We set each of those as a story. We can suddenly people start ordering and paying a lot more on Swiggy so you’ll see a spike in people going home.

11:45 I mean the interesting thing is our transactions spike in the evening when people are probably going home and sitting in a cab and have nothing to do. See each of these. If you just look at the data. Yeah. In isolation, there is no story here, but once you start looking at the pattern and you start talking and sort of explaining it to your audience, it just becomes very interesting.

12:07 So I think I’ve been fortunate because data seems to have been an important part of my life through my journey.

Role of PR in a business’ journey

12:17 PR needs to play a different role at each stage in a business’s journey.

12:24 I’ll give you an example when you’re launching a business, right? PR is probably the most credible and easy way to have to build customer rapport. it starts with that because customers don’t know of your earned media is still, it’s a very respected medium. Still, if you are able to get the right stories out there, it starts, I would say it’s a causey brand building effort when your journey starts Right right.

12:51 In our case, I’ll give you an example when we started was something even the media knew about, we were learning, it was so new because digital wallets were the favor of the season in 2017, very few people were using it. So, it was a journey of educating the customers in the market about what is to be a wallet, how is it different, better, or whatever. Right?

13:12 So at that point, the purpose of PR was really to serve as education and recall once a business starts growing, there are different objectives. I mean, PR can sometimes it is the business is at an inflection point where it is looking at reaching out to more and more partners.

13:33 So then your PR sort of PR narrative shifts and starts talking a little more about your product depth or possibly some of your existing partnerships, which you used to attract more partners and, you know, grow the business when the business is at a mature stage, it has reached a certain scale, you’re looking at probably communicating a little more about milestones because at that point, what you’re trying to also signal is heavy arrived.

14:00 This category is fairly well settled. It’s well respected as it’s very high on customer record and at that stage of the journey, you’re a little more driven in terms of milestones. So I think the PR plan has to sort of mimic where your business is in each stage in terms of recall, see while you do have a v in some of the usual metrics, I think in the PR world, the biggest win for me is when, a lot of it is, of course, anecdotal, you can’t quantify it, but I’ve had business folks tell me that you put out a pr and we got a lot more inbounds.

14:39 So that is, how do you measure it? I mean, it’s hard, right? It’s hard to measure, but that shows that it’s working. And at the same time, the audience you wanted to meet the intent of that PR was to get more BD inbounds for the ecosystem to notice. So that is, I don’t take that feedback loop actually very seriously if you’re doing a subsequent set of PRs that have to be very similar in nature. It’s good to see what worked the last time I have some kind of playbook in place.

15:10 If there was a distribution strategy followed, which was different. Make sure you keep that down. See, unfortunately sometimes we just don’t learn from our winds. We think, okay happened. It’s a fluke.

15:22 Let’s, it’s important to institutionalize that learning in some way and make sure you have a playbook, which you can work with. So I think that’s really important.

Favourite campaign

15:33 So I mean, I’ll go back to talking about first if you guys haven’t gotten bored with it because the thing is, you know why it was also unusual is that ask our corp comm professionals, we’re not probably, we don’t get an opportunity to do something, which is so unique and different.

15:54 I mean sure there are, you have press launches, you have press releases, you’re launching businesses, but to have something like this. And incidentally, this website is not in some ways, also seen as a reflection of how digital payments and Is going because we’re almost 47% of the market when it comes to being. So, it’s very significantly representative of India’s digital payment story. Right?

16:20 So when we started working on it, I think we didn’t imagine it would become what it did. We’ve had multiple stories of folks who are researchers, students, and media, and a lot of people actually refer to it and use it as a definite guide when it comes to digital payments.

16:40 The other interesting thing I see. Unfortunately most corp comm professionals are seen as people who, who just good with words and don’t understand them at all. So I think in our case it was also about trying to change that perception since we worked on it and when, and we sat with each of our data science and analytics counterparts and got them to explain to us what each data point actually means and then create a story around it.

17:11 I’ll give you an interesting example. One of the stories we had done,, there was, there was actually a user who was refueling in petrol pumps across the country and he had probably covered 13 or 14 or probably, I mean there was a significant number of petrol pumps where he had refueled.

17:33 So after it was just strange behavior because he would be in one city or state on a day and then in a very, very different city a few days later. So he actually spoke to him and it turns out he’s actually a truck driver who was refueling in different states because that was what his profession was because what was it was even, he was in Jaipur one day and then two days later you see he’s a couple of days later he’s in Gujarat and then he was like, okay, looks like somebody’s on India trip but turned out that he was actually a truck driver who was just refueling because that’s what his job was.

18:15 It was a pretty interesting conversation we had and we had actually featured his stories and one of the data pieces we had done, which was so many interesting inside that way. I mean gold has very sick significant spikes around festivals. You know, people buy gold around the diwali.

18:35 You do see a spike, not just that they insist on deliveries before that. So I think lots of interesting insights and digital payments became very real for us. I mean personally we were actually able to see the people behind those payments which we are enabling,

North star PR metric

18:54 see what I don’t look at the tallest quantity of coverage.

19:01 I mean I hope my team is not listening to this and doesn’t end up taking that. Sure it matters. But I don’t think I see that is something which can pardon my saying and be given the point is you can always show quantity if you want.

19:19 So therefore the number of pickups is something I’m not, not too worried about. The quality of the output and the pickup does matter. We do look at it so we do have a basic categorization of whether the publication is one, it needs to be relevant in my space. It needs to make sense for the kind of news and pushing out. We do look at, we do look at the social media chatter. We do find out whether that news is generating enough conversations, whether there are enough shares etcetera because as I said, we now we actually tend to think digital first. So while Print is still absolutely the North Star news does tend to break in digital mediums first. We also look at, I’ve also started looking at what are the follow-up stories, some of the PR we push out to get, for instance, if there is PR you’ve pushed out around digital acceptance in a certain state, I think a mark of good PR is not one and done, there has to be some follow up you, for instance, if there is a story which is being done on digital payments and the subsequent stories, you have an outreach which proactively or even reactively happens and people recall that it does help we need to stop thinking of pr as a one-off campaign, that this is one press release done in that state.

20:49 I think there needs, it needs to link back to whatever is your quarterly and overall objective, and then it has to sort of map to it. That’s one thing I think very strongly about, we need to get out of Again, the output needs to stop being that important. You need to also look at how this is tied to your overall strategy and where your business is headed.

Dream Metric

21:15 I think any insight which has, which gives me a deeper understanding of customers will help because finally, we are a large B2C play and getting more insights on what customers are doing, what they like, what it is like it does help you see as customers?

21:39 If there is a preference for a certain category with the other or if you have very strong signals which indicate that some of your communication is just not working. For instance if I launch a new product and I have some tangible, magically have some tangible signals on you know the business messages too complicated for customers happens all the time by the way because whenever you’re putting out something in pr it’s very consensus-driven.

22:07 Our job is to make it sellable, We know what the media wants. But at the end of the day there is also an audience. People like you and me who are reading that news, who will form an opinion, who will probably at some stage also decide whether they want to go with this product or not. It is finally a marketing and sales job that you’re doing with the PR. It is not just a one-way information dissemination.

22:30 So I think deeper customer insights will help because what I’ve noticed is that tend to get input from business teams who have their view on how this product should sound and how they sell it. They’re also the closest to the product. They also think this is the best thing since sliced bread and whatever message they are pushing out will just certainly resonate getting deeper customer inside is being able to talk to them help.

23:01 funnily enough, whenever I’m interviewing somebody for a job, I try and pick their brains on, what they like about the R.F. What do they make of a pr what is the message they take away from it? Because that is what the audience has done some research on and come and at the same time it’s not in the ecosystem.

23:19 So I don’t ask this question what is about our pr that they notice, it gives me a pretty good insight. And in general, also when I meet people and they say they know of us, I try and use that as a session to find out, you know, what about us? Do they know what part of us they know most? And sometimes it’s very startling, you know, some of the insights you get.

23:43 my Uber drivers when something when I used to take cabs, I would, a lot of them would actually be phonePe users, so I would try and find out from them that was the if they ever had a bad experience, how quickly were we able to resolve it? What did they make of our notifications? What if it came in another language?

24:02 So I would just use this as a session to find out more. See, I think that the feedback loop is extremely important. Dot com professionals are even more important because the world we’re talking towards the media, but at the same time we are pitching a story to them and they’re writing it for the, for our own consumption. That’s something we should never forget and try and get as much data and insights push the business change. Also to try and give us as many insights as they can

My two cents

24:31 Build up a portfolio of skills. Don’t just focus on the spoken part. I’ve seen so many professionals very good when it comes to speaking, they don’t focus on the writing, but at for a lot of them, it’s also an afterthought or it will happen. No, make sure you’re able to actually write a compelling story.

24:53 I’ve seen a lot of not very persuasive talkers also do extremely well because They’re able to think deeply and right, well, I think to focus on both aspects is extremely important.

25:05 The second thing is, I think this is more for the younger folks, be a little patient work on work on building the right skills.

25:15 Don’t have slightly unfair expectations by 23, I need to be here by 26, it’s absolutely great to have goals but be patient, and give yourself time to build the right skills. That is very important.

25:28 If you have to set stages on goals for yourself, do that about, you know, we were discussing press releases. I’m going to write the perfect press releases, which will need no edits still this age, make it more about skills and less about designations and I’d say, enjoy the journey.

25:45 I mean, I don’t understand what is this obsession of just achieving everything by 30 and, you know, doing God knows what the rest of our lives, So enjoy the journey, space it out.It’s it’s a very competitive field. When I started out, there was digital hardly existed, and now I’ve had to adapt and down to this world. So enjoy the journey, enjoy the changes which come with it.