Hi, good afternoon everyone. My name is Meraj Ahmed. And today I'm gonna be talking to you guys about how growing up around women sparked the urge to solve problems and be realistic. And this was an approach that I kind of picked up when I was age 10.And ever since I was a kid, I always had a lot of ideas and a lot of uh solutions that I was, you know, conceptualizing in my mind, I was kind of lost in my own thoughts. And that's when a lot of things that happened during my growing up period that made me realize a lot of things I come from a town called Mysore City called Mysore. It's an education town and a heritage city. And I've lived around Bangalore, which is an it city as well as currently reside in Berlin. And everywhere I realized that um the world today is changing towards the youth uh amplification and empowerment most importantly. And uh that's where I come from a family which was, I was mostly inspired by my family. You know, we have doctors, engineers and bankers and different things. And uh of course, um a lot of them have been very instrumental in my, in inspiring me. But however, I was different. I never played by the book. I was a dreamer and I set out to achieve uh things that I aspire to do on, on different ways. My name is Meraj. I'm a brand marketing specialist, as well as the chief marketing officer at Flax.

It's an application where you can coordinate activities with your friends. I made a very strong when I was 10, I was committed to help people and what I do majorly and why that all of that started was what I grew up seeing. I saw a lot of fights happening, I saw a lot of war happening. I saw a lot of, you know, societal grievances which was being pushed under the mat and avoided in general, right? And of course, you know, with climate change and everything that's happening in terms of food shortage violence, all of this had to stop. And uh also in in India, specifically, there was this sudden sudden rise in urban population growth where everybody wanted to study, just get out of all these societal problems that we we all have faced over the years. And with this, like the the youth that are today are users are target audiences for different markets. All we just wanted to do was to do better and you know, to study, to learn, but you know, to help make the world a better place honestly. If you look at it, a lot of millennials, a lot of generation Z or even, even the previous generations have done a lot of action towards, you know, different initiatives or different causes.

However, the current generation, the generation Z and the generation alpha are more impactful because they don't just talk like they don't just believe in creating action but they do action. And that's something that I want to also, you know, bring in and bring in as, as light to you. And of course, we got a lot of people who are doctors who are engineers, people of science, who've got a lot of things sorted and there are certain people who are, you know, just rich or, you know, some are just potentially dumb, you know, who have their own thought process.

But most of us, if you look at it, most of the participants of this brilliant conference, uh women tech Global Network conference, we all have had this one thing where we wanted to do something from our passion, something that you know, makes us feel good. And also it comes down from motivation and a simple question that each one of us wants to be asked is what do you desire? What do you want to do? You know, as a purpose statement for yourself and the millennials or generation Z as well as you know, the the confluence of different generations today are focused towards sustainable goals because very we are very committed towards conscious initiatives. And we believe somehow we can, you know, actually amplify our uh potential through it. And that's where I met Aurora and uh one such millennial who's standing for the UN Secretary General candidacy. And I, I decided I wanted to help people with my skills and people such as this is where I really put myself into. Uh specifically Aurora is a 34 year old millennial who's currently, you know, like uh standing up to, you know, bring the power to people as a process. And I'm supporting her with her campaign direction and branding collaterals as well.

I find it hard to believe that, you know, people say that the world can't be a peaceful place. And I believe that initiatives, ideas can make it a peaceful place. As simple as when I was a kid, I wanted to start by sharing uh what I, what I've learned over the way I grew up in a hostel that my mom used to. My mom used to run, we had like 50 close to 50 plus uh women, working women and students who were residing in a house. Now, my mom had created a very diverse atmosphere for me. And I also got a chance to learn about different perspectives and not just resort to uh the typical societal colors that you they were assigned for blue for boys or pink, for girls. And that's where it started my Creative, my Creative Center started from there, I got into a lot of debates and essays. I wanted to make a point and started writing a lot of poetry, a lot of lyrics and started working with a lot of bands as well from there, got into youth empowerment, did a lot of artistic event promotion for under uh underachieving or, you know, under potential uh artists then got into filmmaking.

And uh I also did some civil engineering but then I dropped out and uh got into animation, started doing a lot of youtube content and uh learned a lot of different Softwares. And from there onwards, my journey went into just accelerating with different responsibilities. And today, I'm the chief marketing officer of uh a platform, as well as simulation working with different brands for solution based products. Like I said, um I'm a brand specialist. I work with a lot of uh brand start ups and leaders mostly towards uh brand development, marketing, communications.

And that's something that we're gonna be discussing in our session today. Um And most of these campaigns have been, you know, like from 360 brand property creation or asset creation. These are a few clients I worked with in the past I must start start up. Some are brands as well. Um Most importantly, I'm very passionate about a few businesses that I'm FF in future. Gonna invest my time and effort in. One is uh buzz A I which is to develop conversational A is for people to get access A I technology and say, learn how to, you know, upgrade their business, personal development, etcetera. I'm also very passionate about climate change and how fashion technology has to be evolved.

Like today, we've been wearing this shirts and jackets since God knows when. So I've been creating climate condition, body suit. It's more in research phase right now which provides protection against climate disaster and disease. Energizer is basically an augmented reality app which you know provides you energy seeking points as well. So this is something that I do. I'm currently working with flags as a marketing officer and I wanna do, it's a activity planning uh with a platform with a friend. I wanna do a lot of free workshops. So, you know, a lot of people can benefit from what I've learned with working with brands over the years. These are certain examples that I want to do. Hopefully, I will start doing it from this month onwards, which will do, I've been doing a lot of workshops and mostly in terms of brand development, supporting a lot of start ups and uh existing businesses. But the whole plan would be to, you know, like take this uh into, into, into the next level. Uh Most importantly, a lot of people talk to me about millennial branding, you know, Gen Z and millennial branding is something that's booming right now because of the fact that a lot of users need to tap into new technologies that engage our new users, right?

The new users that are there, OK? I'm gonna stop bragging. I'm gonna stop talking too much and just get to the point, right? This is what you all want to also listen to me. So we're going to talk about how to build a brand at different tools in the market. You have freelancers, you have agencies, but what I would specifically say is anything that you want to do, let's start doing it ourselves first and help will come on the way. And this is how I I launched my entire career based on the fact that II I did something I learned something and then I moved from there. We have easy Softwares. If, if you, if you say, hey, Miraj, I'm not good in technology or I don't know how to do things. You don't have to be an expert. You can be as bad as these animations over there. But still we are getting somewhere from there and remember it's always a fight with ideas in your mind designing or you know, coming building a brand. It's not about, you know, the end objective immediately, but it's about identifying the best possible solution, right? This is my life.

Every hour the phone rings. It's a typical chilling day with some pending work over their clients boss boxing, boxing me through my computer screen. But however, we all have to, you know, like also understand that, you know, pandemic has pushed a lot of people and a lot of people want to, you know, like now see the life that they want and obviously, you know, you'll have a lot of work from home sessions and clients are getting, you know, uh too pushy with their deadlines and deadlines are also getting hard.

This was my situation before COVID. I used to work from home or from, you know, uh remote offices locations. But even during COVID, it's just faster and 10 times more effective as well. So I'm gonna stop and get to the point. The point today is understanding people and how we can tap into them with the campaign with the branding idea or product or just marketing itself, right? And in order to do this, we will go through a few slides which will show you what would you or what would I do if I'm planning a brand and how would I, you know, develop a pitch and get into the market uh research part of it as well. So my simple target audience is the young because they like going bananas, they like crazy stuff. So let's bring something crazy for them as a as an initiative. They're very carefree, cool, uncommitted, but yet conscious and this is how we want to do. We want to challenge ourselves.

So today we are here a part of this such beautiful conference which you know, celebrates a lot of empowering individuals and women leaders that have been changing the face of our plan for a very long time. It's just a matter of, you know, engaging them, engaging our users or, you know, engaging future promoters and supporters of initiatives that we bring on. For. So most importantly, we need to activate a virtual companion to empower people. We want people to, you know, be able to access the best of best facilities to, you know, get better in their life. Now for one example, take a reference from this movie, her Joaquin Phoenix played a great role as a protagonist. So this was a excuse me for that technical problems. So let's take an example from her. This was a movie which basically created a scenario on how A I could become a companion to people and help them develop themselves like personal development, like business development, like you reach out to so many consultants or you know, freelancers today. Hey, can you make a pitch take?

Hey, can you make a marketing strategy, financial proposition? Imagine an application that you know, makes everything happen for you. So that is simply the concept that we are going to explore. And also because we have a lot of applications today, social media has not made it easy for us, right? And social competition is a thing that we want to also tackle and with this growing urge of becoming accomplished or becoming purposeful, we have to acknowledge all these are our servers and also social media today is the era of infinite finger where people have to just keep scrolling.

And how do we tap into that limited attention space is what we need to do. Sometimes it could be chat bots or sometimes it could be, you know, just engaging content that makes you stop and say, oh, this is interesting, right? It's more about psychology and also understanding the opportunities that technology has brought for us, right, this great conference with a lot of women technologists and you know, specific leaders who have brought a lot of beautiful technologies out into the world, like conversationally as avatars Gamification, us generated content.

This is what sells the youth, the cool is what they want. They've grown up to these kind of platforms very used to, you know, integrations in this matter. Now, when we look at social bonds, we all know that we all like social beings, right? We all want to create meaningful bonds with people from kids to all the way to be growing up. We've always had companionship and this is what communication mostly has to be when it comes to, you know, uh branding or marketing perspective as well. Now, in the simplest of words, like gaining perspective on the opportunities we have, we need to make our marketing more conversational, we need to ensure we're activating that intelligent friend of yours who's going to tell who's going to support your users, who's going to support you to get the best out of you itself, right?

And that's something that we are going to identify with a lot of characterization like Avatar creation replica dot A I is something that you can push your users to, you know, understand what they want study about, you know, what their traits are as well. I do this, I use this to, you know, test users or audiences to understand what they simply want. And from that, you know, you can develop a specific case study or Gamification simply like put them in an engagement and uh get them to, you know, like tell you what they really need. So most important part of our presentation is going to brand evolution. This is something that I do mostly to ensure that hey, you're not building a brand, you're not just revisiting a business idea, but you're evolving a specific problem by solving it. And how do we do that? There's a list that we follow. It's basically brand assets as I call it. It's very simple. You've heard of this, everybody's told you, but today we are going to see easy solutions on the internet that you can just make it out in the next, we've got seven minutes in the next seven minutes. I'm gonna teach you how to make a brand right now. Specifically when it comes to branding, there are certain things that we want to identify identity. Most importantly, brand positioning is something that is handy and a lot of websites help you establish branding guidelines, communication strategies.

And these are a I powered tools. Now, when I say A I powered tools, we've got out ranking which is basically allows you to research, write and optimize your content. Now, you can always put your content in this platform and research the best keywords that will help you position your brand in a great way. There are different options of using it for sco as well as you know, other integrations as well. Executive summaries are very important take from Donald Trump to the brand Nike. They create executive summaries to sell a specific idea, one page or email start with that, throw your idea from there and then it makes happen. You have a lot of A I based platforms summarize bought is one such platform where it allows you to summarize your engagement. And from there you can always create, this is a Blockchain powered uh summarized bot as well. It allows you to summarize your executive summary and you know, make it more precise to the point color palettes. It's always great to have a lot of colors, food and diversity is a part about having a lot of colors, right? So you can use a lot of platforms. We have Adobe colors CC which is a library of colors. You've got coolers or you've got chroma, which also creates brand guidelines for you and it's all a matter of minutes because these are all A I powered platforms, right?

And the next step would be an elevator pitch would be to, you know, create something like the Dollar Shave Club experience where you know, they created like an elevator pit within their own resources. This always helps you to communicate your brand's objectives. You have an A I platform, which is called synthesia. Synthesia allows you to create your own A I video as simple as writing an email, just imagine putting script and then you know, sharing it out onto the platform and it creates, you know, a video which has your face, you know, probably has a voice and also talks to your consumers video marketing facilities where you can always use video marketing platform.

This is Lumen five. This is majorly a platform that allows you to create social video pla uh content. And it also gives you different uh strategies on why your content or how your content can be effective. Then we move to invest a pitch. This is very important, make it as simple as colorful as possible. And most importantly, start looking at it from a simple perspective. Don't have to go ahead, you know, creating a guy Kawasaki uh style of pitch deck right now, but start with skeleton pitch decks, start with skeleton presentation, just five slides of the problem you want to solve. And after that, obviously, you know, blow the presentation bubble and get into things that make it mad take a piece of paper, break it down into five slides. What is the first slide going to be about? It's about you break the ice, have some impactful stuff going slide to the impact wet their beak. What, what do investors or what do consultants? What do users want to see wet their beak with giving them something they want. Slide three the problems, talk about the current scenarios.

You are experiencing the positive change you're bringing with the next slide and then you get into strategies of evolution which is mostly the opportunities a potential partner would look into. There are different great websites. Deck robot is one such A I platform which lets you create beautiful slides in one minute. Then you have some other platforms like beautiful A I and pitch.com which allows you to again create automated presentation pitch decks then comes business model canvas, mirror.com is my go to platform.

It allows you to create a beautiful canvas model and then you can identify your immediate needs and monthly uh bifurcation of plans, brand guides is something that's very important. Colors, shapes, uh typography, et cetera is gonna be decided over here. You can always use your own traditional methods, Canva wix.com or uh Photoshop illustrator, or you can always start by sketching and then take it to a designer as well. Or you can always go to this specific website which is a brand builder and you know, you can always create your own brand guideline. Within a matter of minutes, it gives you all resources from website templates to other platforms. And then we move into web and mobile integrations.

How can you create a web application or a mobile application you can always use again A I based platforms like bubble where without code, you can always create your uh application or you can always look at editor X I love editor X. It's one of the best responsive websites and you can create some great, great websites without having to put in a lot of effort with this. We move forward to social. Social media is mostly important when it comes to, you know, like you want some great influence or marketing happen if fluence is a great platform where you don't have to worry about spending a lot of money and you can plan your campaigns based on uh the need like OK, just a tweet or just a specific post, et cetera, uh implement a social calendar, have the plan ready for the next three months and then plan integrate a social scheduling, do great posts like seven posts every day or 14 sorry, seven posts every week or 14 posts every week.

A lot of brands do this and schedule this across respected platforms and don't just use any random scheduling software. It's always bad influencer partnerships is something that you can always consider. But this, you can always use a lot of platforms that provide you this facility, online engagement.

My friend Jamal runs a lot of crazy online engagements. So you know, online engagements are great. You can always create some group events, engage your audience and this becomes a brand IP kind of perspective. Also for you in the future, I love COVID safe events. I want to implement a lot of these in the next few years and hopefully bring in my protect humanity, climate condition suits also in this and most importantly, what I wanted to do with this is I want to enable people to be more social, but you know, like even if it is going to be a roller coaster ride, I want to help them achieve different things.

I do a lot of workshops on uh brand evolution and how to build a sustainable business. So this was my pitch and this was my time. I hope you guys had a good session and would love, love to connect with you and share more details with you.