How brands can be ‘Purple Cow’ in a crowded market: Virat Khullar’s Martech mantras

Martech is rapidly transforming the marketing landscape in India, enabling brands to deliver hyper-personalized experiences while navigating evolving digital trends. As part of Adgully’s lead-up to the industry defining DIGIXX Summit and Awards 2025, we are exploring the innovations, challenges, and future of Martech through a special interview series with industry leaders.

In this exclusive conversation with Adgully, Virat Khullar, Head of Marketing, Hyundai Motor India Limited (HMIL), shares insights on the rise of social commerce, omnichannel experiences, and evolving CX trends in India—and the innovative strategies brands can implement to build genuine customer loyalty and engagement in a highly competitive digital landscape. He also discusses how brands can effectively measure essential Martech success metrics while ensuring best practices for data protection.

In today’s era, the highly exposed customers expect their brands to know them & their preferences for the brand’s products. The customers are also now very particular about their preferred communication channels, best time to communicate and even the choice of payment medium.

Brands should help consumers consume their products/ services with least friction (seamless user interface technology) and agility. Given the ample choice available in today’s competitive market and with customers growing impatience with loyalty, it is imperative for Brands to consistently offer seamless & personalized experience with latest technologies at every single point of the Customer Lifecycle journey with the Brand.

Lets understand a few areas that brands need to focus and implement effectively to clearly differentiate and be ‘Purple Cow’ in the crowded market:

• Customer Data Management: Every Brand knows the importance of clean & rich Customer Data. Hyundai’s being a B2B2C business, it’s a challenge to maintain clean Customer database. However with Apps like MyHyundai & BlueLink (Telematics) which facilitate Customers to interact with Brand directly, it is helping us build a clean and updated Customer Golden Record (1^st Party Data). Having a reliable ‘Single Source of Truth’ is key to building the foundation on which several innovative Customer Experience initiatives can be built to accelerate business. At Hyundai Motor India Limited (HMIL), we are building an Integrated Customer Data Base (ICDB) which collects Customer data from all sources, eliminates duplicates, organizes and maintains clean records based on pre-defined business rules and algorithms.
• Personalization at Scale: To make every Customer feel special in a unique way, Brands need to invest & maintain state-of-art CRM platform. On such platforms, Customer Lifecycle Journeys are built which bridges the backend Customer databases and the front-end Customer-facing apps/chatbots and delight every Customer. If done well, Brands can make strong exit barriers for competition and maintain high retention. Hyundai is building a robust global CX platform across all its subsidiaries to enhance Customer Experience to next level.
• Balancing Cost effective automations & Human interface: While automations drive efficiency & profitability for Brands, it’s important to respect Customer preference for the human interface. HMIL reduced its routine outbound agents by replacing with efficient bots & conversational channels like WhatsApp, but increased inbound agents and available time for Customers in need. To certain Customers and at emergency situations, human support stays relevant & provides that humane touch (empathy). We have a dedicated team at our Contact Centre in Noida, supporting our customers at all times.
• Measuring Customer Experience: What gets measured, gets managed. It’s important to measure all the Customer Experience initiatives, communication channel effectiveness and Customer satisfaction. Data integrity and accurate results are fundamental, yet it becomes challenging for large Organizations with multiple systems and interface failures. Reliable reports with great visualizations bring all teams together in monitoring Performance and take decisions/actions accordingly. Technology is further helping by generating insights from reports.
• Tools like Qliksense are being extensively used across our Organization. Apart from the customizations of MyReports, routine performance reports & escalations are auto-generated and get relayed to every single Dealer for their actions.
• Less is More: Large Organizations are realizing the challenge of multi-systems and teams working in silos. By consolidating multi-websites & many Apps to a mother website & one-App and transforming traditional Departments to agile teams, Organizations are reinventing & shaping themselves to be efficient & delivering Customer Experience as one-team.

At Hyundai, we have merged many websites under one and trying to encompass all prevailing mobile Apps under MyHyundai App. We believe, this will ease our customers to reach us through Website & App and at the same time help us to focus and better manage our Web & App asset.

Respecting Customers privacy & consent: All efforts are being put by the IT (Data Processors) & Biz Process owners (Data Fiduciaries) in ensuring that we protect Customers’ (Data Principal) data from potential hacking and respect their consent to promote or pause and capture only required data for business. Dealers, being the point of contact, are being sensitized about the requirements as per the latest government directives and plans. Hyundai Motor India Limited fully complies with the requirements of the Data Privacy standards and ensures to protect customer data.

At Hyundai Motor India Limited, customer-centricity remains a priority where we are constantly working towards promoting customer trust and build long-lasting relationships.