Setia, Head of Marketing and Social Commerce, Myntra, shares insights on social commerce, influencer marketing endeavours, evolving brand proposition & the road ahead Big brands usually opt for the usual influencer marketing strategy of putting their money on macro and celebrity influencers. However, Myntra has launched its own Style Squad comprising of creators from the grassroots. With an aim to strengthen its influencer marketing and social commerce footing, the squad comprises creators that are performing well on the Myntra app. This helps in showing the potential to drive engagement and conversions. Achint Setia, Head of Marketing and Social Commerce at Myntra, talks about the intent and insight behind the property, content-to-commerce strategy, evolving proposition and much more. Edited Excerpts

Myntra Style Squad is our endeavour to strengthen our creative economy investments. This is central to our social commerce business which is led through influencers and an engagement-to-commerce business model. Over the last couple of years, we have worked with thousands of influencers for a variety of contexts. We have identified a set of people who have performed very well on the platform, who were able to build deeply engaged communities and drive commerce outcomes with Myntra customers. We want to invest further in this set by giving them the right support in terms of resources, deeper insights into trends and customer behaviours as well as training programs to become better at their craft. The style squad will in a way be the ambassadors of Myntra’s social commerce play, conversations on social media and will represent the platform in its entirety. We have a mix of creators from different geographics, age groups and other demographics and their expertise is also varied from folks who are deep into a bunch of categories. We understand beauty and personal care very well as we operate in these categories on the platform and this is our endeavour to strengthen our footing in that area. What model will the Style Squad follow in order to drive conversions for Myntra? What were the challenges in executing this idea end-to-end? The model is a combination of on-demand content and Live commerce content. In the on-demand case, the influencers ideate a set of formats and topics around which they want to build content. There is a monthly calendar on which we align these topics basis what is trending and where lies the consumers’ intent. They then create their own curations basis their own fashion and beauty prowess. Live commerce is a more immersive content experience. It's 45 minutes to 1-hour long show per live event. The influencers go through the depths of a set of curations, trying to explain to users all the aspects of a particular product or brand. Because it is a live interaction, consumers can ask questions around the fitment of that particular product for their own behaviour, and needs and then shopping can happen. Both are very different models and have their unique set of challenges. Live is more challenging than on-demand because it requires investment on the influencers’ part to be able to engage and hold the audience's attention for long and to be able to answer audience questions with expertise. To overcome that challenge, we invest a lot in training these influencers. How does social commerce or content-to-commerce fit the larger brand and marketing strategy for Myntra? Can you give us a sense of the scale of social commerce for you? From a marketing perspective, social commerce provides this influencer ecosystem that represents the brand's voice on external platforms as well as on Myntra. It's an extension in terms of tonality, industry, talking to customers. Myntra has always stood for empowering people, diversity and inclusion as a fashion brand. We pride ourselves in coming across as enablers versus somebody who positions as someone more powerful than the consumer. Today, influencers come across as friends, peers and folks who are relatable and hence it's an extension from that standpoint of brand principles. From a platform standpoint, it is very critical in terms of driving new shopping experiences for our customers, giving them new reasons to come back to the platform, driving stickiness, and over a period of time, upgrading them and increasing their share of wallet. Close to 20% of our monthly active users engage with social commerce. The majority are our regular customers on the platform who understand fashion very well. Social commerce happens to talk to a lot of our premium customers. It's a fairly large base and this number is growing very fast. We aspire to take this number to close to 50% of our user base in the next couple of years. For a consumer coming to your platform, what does Style Squad offer differently that Fashion Superstar or Myntra Studio haven't already? Style Squad isn’t at the same level as other properties. It is our endeavour to go deeper with a certain set of creators who do well on the platform and help them do better. What changes for the consumers is one, while there'll be many other influences on the platform, the share of voice that the Style Squad generates will go up. Secondly, over a period of time, with the training and the investment behind the style squad, the quality of content and the knowledge they impart on fashion and beauty will dial-up and consumers will benefit from that. Thirdly, they will have more opportunities to talk one-on-one with these Style Squad members which would be very gratifying to consumers and build trust and affinity towards this pool. While most D2C commerce channels are pivoting to be content-commerce, how has Myntra's proposition evolved over time? Myntra has always been ahead of the curve in terms of using content smartly. Fashion offers us that opportunity and Myntra took a headstart. As a platform, we have understood how to leverage content to drive conversations on trends, new brands, adoption of new styles and looks and how to use them on different occasions and settings. It is the deeper understanding of building the right fashion content with the right set of influences is where we have evolved significantly through all our experiments over the years. Myntra’s consumers are slightly more fashion-forward than the average consumer in the country who are looking for a more nuanced experience in fashion and beauty and we have tried to crack our own model of what works better for this consumer. The content economy has boomed manifold over the last few years but lacks standardization. What are the synergies here for brands as well as creators in terms of monetization? By bringing the influencers on board and offering their services to our brands in a platformed manner, brands don't need to worry about which influencers to work with, as we've already built that army. We have also built the right experience for the brands, they just have to come up with the objective and how they want to engage with the consumer and then cherry-pick from the wide pool that we have created for them. This also creates a lot of monetization opportunities for the influencers because Myntra has already established credibility for them. Influencers can now earn a more regular income through the Myntra Style Squad. Myntra social commerce business is one of our critical success metrics and we will be only successful when we pick up these influencers from the grassroots. These people have grown with us and as they become bigger and start earning reasonable money, they can make influencing a full-time profession. This will encourage a lot more people in the country to pick up this as a profession as it becomes more organized. Going ahead, what new can we expect from Myntra both in the content and business expansion front? This is a core part of our experience proposition to our consumers. We continue to bring cutting edge tech-enabled content and shopping experiences. Consumers will see the evolution of both Live and Myntra studio in terms of the product investments we've put into immersive experiences. There will be new experiences being brought in, in terms of getting creators on board and ensuring seamless participation of brands. Myntra will bring new content formats this year, given the power of the technology. We have a new format coming alive on the live streaming space as we are experimenting a lot with formats that are typically done well in the offline ecosystem.