Episode 198 / Varun Ravichandran / Citi / AVP - Marketing
Unlocking the Power of Experiential Ecommerce
“Like most Indians,” Varun Ravichandran is a computer engineer by education. Through a series of twists and turns, he’s arrived in finance and is now AVP - Marketing at Citi and an accomplished marketing expert, too. In the latest podcast episode, he tells us why experiential ecommerce is the future of marketing.
Varun merges science, technology and finance with the “art of marketing.” This is why his Shiny New Object combines all these elements, too. He thinks that brands who embrace experiential marketing and boost it by using technology will be the most successful in the decade to come.
According to Varun, “experiential ecommerce is a recipe featuring a healthy serving of product mixed with just the right amount of emotion and garnished with innovation and technology through and through.” This offers brands the opportunity to engage with the end consumer, as opposed to simply putting out messages to a passive receiver.
By becoming part of the company’s marketing, the audience forges a relationship with the brand. However, to do this right, brands have to steer clear of a couple of obvious pitfalls. The first is being too salesy with this experience. Varun gives the example of Lenskart who allow consumers to try on their sunglasses and spectacles by posting their picture online and trying any design. This experiential ecommerce feature doesn’t “push” the product to the consumer, which helps avoid the overly pushy sales pitch.
Secondly, to win the experiential ecommerce game, brands need to move beyond the “gimmick” phase. Creating a unique experience is great, but it needs to go beyond making a PR splash. Brands need to think about how the experience connects with their consumer journey.
In the end, brands that embrace Varun’s Shiny New Object will become stronger storytellers and set up their environment for a bigger echo from their marketing campaigns.
Find out which brands are succeeding at the experiential ecommerce game in Varun’s opinion, as well as his own top marketing tips and why he thinks you can beat your email inbox like a horror movie villain, on the latest episode of the podcast.
Transcript
The following gives you a good idea of what was said, but it’s not 100% accurate.
Tom Ollerton 00:07
Hello, and welcome to the shiny new object podcast. My name is Tom Ollerton. I'm the founder of automated creative. And this is a regular podcast about the future of marketing where I get to interview one of our industry's leaders. And this week is absolutely no different. I'm on a call with Varun Ravichandran, who is a VP marketing at Citibank. So, Varun, for anyone who doesn't know who you are and what you do, could you give us a brief background?
Varun Ravichandran 00:37
Hi, everyone, my name is Varun. As Tom mentioned, I'm a marketing manager at Citibank. Now, that's a combination of marketing and finance. But like most Indians have appeared on the show... well done to you, by the way, Tom, approaching 200 episodes, or mostly, I'd encourage everybody to stream them, there are lots of nuggets of information from fellow folks in the industry. Back to me, like most Indians, I'm an engineer by education, a computer engineer, to be precise. But after a series of smooth, and maybe not so smooth lecterns of the past decade, I've ended up here in finance. It has to be pointed out that I did do an MBA in marketing before the pandemic prior to which I was working at a financial aggregator for the best better part of five years. So there's sufficient grounding in both of those fields, upfront that I mentioned, finance and marketing, overall, and from a mental approach perspective, and with the benefit of hindsight, I like my current vantage point, allowing me to merge science, technology and ultimately finance, along with the art of marketing as well.
Tom Ollerton 02:27
So in order to get to your position in your career, you've had to say yes to a lot of things and work very hard, and presumably put in some serious hours, whilst keeping on top of all the changes and trends and new technologies and behaviors that are happening in our industry. And that's a lot. So how do you deal with overwhelm? How do you deal when you've got too many inputs without enough time to process them?
Varun Ravichandran 02:54
In my book, being overwhelmed with just being confused with the tenses just being confused between the past and the present. To be specific. It's kind of like a horror movie, you aren't really scared at the ghosts popping out of the cupboard and screaming at you, you're scared of a ghost that might be hiding in the cupboard. Same thing here, if you're overwhelmed with your email inbox, a clogging up mail let it happen, let the ghosts jump out of the cupboard, let the base crash over you because after that, it's happened. It's in the past. And now the baseline is set and you're in the driving seat and in control of the future. I specifically brought up that email example because that tends to happen with me and nearly everybody else I know who works in any kind of marketing field. There's a point where a large campaign is in the works and it's easy to trip and fall somewhere in the middle when the pressure gets amped up, but just as much.
Varun Ravichandran 03:39
Different strokes for different folks, of course, but what I personally do, as I let the email inbox plugged in that example is to slow down to a crawl. You needn't reply to Rahul as soon as he usually replies to you, if a to do list pops up on a Friday afternoon, you needn't get it done before the end of the day, because even if you say in the next week is just one and a half working days away. Slow down see the bigger picture. Nobody has died here. There's no need to give people the impression that you're always on. Unfortunately, since the internet and channels like smartphones and WhatsApp have become ubiquitous, they've also become the most abused medium to have your mind share more at work than home or play. So another thing I do quite often especially since COVID is to get to a spot where there is no phone signal. Living in India I can climb the Himalayas and scuba dive in the seas in the same country and did that over the past year or two when I couldn't get out of the country. Guess what's common between both: there's no phone signal there's no phone full stop and you're underwater. And when you're back at work after a few days of that, surprise, the sky hasn't fallen and that's when you tend to enjoy work more, when I'm back from such escapades. It gives a lot more meaning to my day and my work
Tom Ollerton 04:46
Right, really want to talk about this so... you just let shit happen. You just like stuff comes in your inbox seemingly important, seemingly interesting and the end you just don't deal with it until like, it's all red flagged to hell. And you have to like, I love that idea. I find that quite freeing to even hear, let alone try, but specifically help me understand how that works. So yeah. So you've got, let me just clarify this. So you've got, I don't know, maybe got like one massive launch happening. And then you've got always on in the background. And then you've got responsibilities across different markets, for example, that you're already full, and yet something else comes in, and then someone else comes in, and then something else comes in. How do you, how does that actually work? How do you make that happen?
Varun Ravichandran 05:32
That works because you have an ally in the room that you always tend to underestimate. And that is time. You have plenty of time or you have enough time to juggle all of those things and get it accomplished over, say a week or more. The mental pressure that you put on yourself can be easily released if you just plan your day better. And take an hour out at the start of each day to make sure you know what's happening and budget time enough to do everything. So it's easy not to get overwhelmed if you're in that mindset.
Tom Ollerton 06:03
So how do you plan your day? What are the steps you go through to make sure that you're doing the right things at the right?
Varun Ravichandran 06:09
At the start of the previous night, in fact, especially if it's a busy work day or work week coming up, I plan the day in broad strokes, so I don't individually look at each hour and think of what I'm going to do next, I leave a lot of flexibility for that but I plan the first half of each day, two or three things that have to be accomplished there. Tthe little parts will take care of themselves. So on and so forth. That's the style I like to work with.
Tom Ollerton 06:35
I'm impressed and I going to follow up with you on this because I'm really struggling with that at this point in time. CO running a business and you know growing the team and offices whilst trying to do everything I'm supposed to do I find that very difficult. So that's been an inspiration. Thank you. So let's move away from the doing the day to day and I want to know more about your advice for marketers: do you have a tip, a top marketing tip that you share with your teams most often.
Varun Ravichandran 07:08
I'll keep it simple and also close to the industry where I work, finance, which as you know is not the most fun arena for any kind of brand manager. It's hardly like selling a burger or a car or a holiday destination. BFSI products are fairly commoditized across the world. With that said, since I've been around the retail side of banking products and services, there's a lot more b2c than other areas of a bank or a FinTech company. Yet people don't wake up in the morning and say to themselves, I want to go to the bank today or I want to apply for a loan or insurance. My tip therefore, as a marketeer in any field is that you have to start from the customer and work backwards, but particularly in finance, realize that the customer may fear the loan as a product. But what he or she will enjoy and aspire towards is that the loan will get them say a car or a vacation, see what I did there. So it pays to be a true student of the customer. And the reason for this layering in finance is because personal finance, as the name suggests, is a lot more personal to people than other customer or consumer products. As a marketer, your relationship should be longer term than other verticals. And with the greatest respect to the other verticals. Of course. My tip if you want me to condense it is to realize that the customer in question is evolving, and you can't go back to past templates and put them in practice today. Always realize what he or she wants as of this moment, and keep the finger on the pulse and constantly tune your thought process in such a way.
Tom Ollerton 08:33
So how do you balance the need to be customer first, customer centric, customer focused with the reality that customer centricity is going to end up being between five and 10 personas in an agency deck somewhere with a picture of that person or persona, doing something like holding their mobile phone whilst sitting on a beach something was some kind of fairly meaningless name for that persona. Because I get the theory, I get the idea that you've got to be laser focused. But my experience with that when I used to work at agencies, was that it boils down to quite broad and bland segments of consumers that are completely irrecognizable as human beings.
Varun Ravichandran 09:21
That's a very good question. And that's something that I tackled at one of my previous organizations by building something called the aspiration index, which is while your regular campaigns are going on, and while you're pushing out collaterals day to day, in the background over the course of a financial year, you're building another product called an aspiration index, which is a huge survey that was done countrywide to identify customers' financial habits, like what did they aspire for? What kind of house do they aspire for? What are their targets for savings of the next three years? What kind of car do they envy on the streets today? So once that was done over a period of many, many months, once those personas are predefined, they're based on real world data, and were a lot broader than what an agency usually comes up with on the fly at most times prior to the launch of a campaign. And that was used as a baseline as a foundation for diversifying the audience set that you targeted - aspiration index.
Tom Ollerton 10:20
So we're now going to move on to your shiny new object, which is experiential e-commerce. So that sounds like two marketing buzzwords squished together, but I sort of know what it means. But can you explain what experiential e commerce is?
Varun Ravichandran 10:36
Experiential ecommerce, in my book is a recipe featuring a healthy serving of product mixed with just the right amount of emotion and garnished with innovation and technology through and through. In general, experiential marketing is the foundation of this and it engages customers to their participatory experiences allowing them an avenue where they can participate in a brand's experience. This differs from traditional marketing where customer is seen as a more passive receiver of a company's message or service or product. So experiential marketing and ecommerce in a nutshell allows a business to forge a relationship with the customer by allowing them to be both a part of and see the heart of the campaign. The first time I heard of this concept and the way that impacted me was a T Mobile advert years ago, 10 years ago, where they collaborated with the popular mobile game Angry Birds. This was in Barcelona, Spain, participants would walk up to an innocent looking T Mobile counter, like a set and they'll have a go at the game on a phone placed there. The moment they let go of the catapult boom, a giant stuffed toy version of the red bird would fly in real life in the distance and hit a target and more or less the same way that was happening on the device. I hadn't even heard about this game and I saw this advert and I downloaded it right away, played it for months. And then that's it. We all saw the movie when it came out and so on. A few years later, I spotted a Coca Cola vending machine in Singapore, which was dispensing free cans of cola when you hugged the thing. Pretty cute, but there were TV cameras recording it. And the key point is these two examples, among others, were one offs, concepts, not gimmicks per se, but generated some kind of PR for the brand in the market in question, giving the audience free samples or offers, but experiential e commerce is the result of this thought process when channeled correctly by a large institution, this could work well. In my opinion, for a lot of industries that amount of trust and peak at the moment, for example, the music industry, artists spend years composing and perfecting the music only for the album itself to barely create a ripple these days, and maybe have in the best case scenario, a single tune becoming a popular weekly download or a Spotify play. It needn't be that way. Like I said, up front, it's a marriage between product, technology and emotion. But the album was created in a moment in time, why not introduce the listener to that moment by every time he plays it, use innovation to get the listener out of a pair of innocent headphones, have a plug in VR glasses or the technology at the time to make him live the music almost as if he or she is walking through a music video? That captures the essence of the artist's efforts and, in marketing terms, minimizes drop off and engages the user for longer than a run of the mill internet stream. I don't know how many years away something like this is but I hope it's sooner rather than later.
Tom Ollerton 13:19
Experiential ecommerce, having a different experience of the product that could be real world could be digital. Is that, have I got that, right, that it's an extra version of ecomm, where a different sense or a different emotion is triggered?
Varun Ravichandran 13:37
Correct. Yeah, at the heart, I would argue the principles of marketing are still abundant, the customer comes first, the brand is still trying to achieve that perfect trifecta of perception, awareness and value. The advantage is that the brand has sharper tools at its disposal, allowing them to be a stronger storyteller and set up the environment for a louder echo, which in other words as word of mouth but the customer has heard the story.
Tom Ollerton 13:59
So who's doing this well? You gave the the example of Coke and T Mobile but they seem highly geographically specific, right? Ultimately, you're gonna get like a cool PR-y video that you can share around but that's going to touch a very, very small number of Coca Cola potential consumers who are putting Coke in their basket on wherever shopping site or Amazon or they are you know, just walking down a supermarket and it's going to decide between own brand or Coke or Pepsi or whatever it is. How does experiential ecomm work for a larger group of people?
Varun Ravichandran 14:38
So here in India, there's a popular eyewear brand called lenskart. You can have your laptop or tablet or phone that can take a photo of your face at a few angles and it generates a 3d model for you. And after that point, you can just use that 3d model on the database to try on all the pairs of spectacles or sunglasses that are available at this company's website. Well, it gives you a reasonable accurate picture of how you look with one or the other pair. Obviously, that is far less effort than going to a store and doing this physically and it's given this particular brand a head start over its competitors, at least in urban centers. So that is one good example. Of course, I want to qualify this by pointing out the pitfalls which are inevitable in this industry. The biggest one is to not make this experience too salesy. Today's customer, as we know already fast forwards through commercials, has ad blockers in their browser, he or she does not want to be part of a sales pitch, if you make it too salesy, you'll turn them off, or worse, have them state that they've had a negative experience. Second, the brands that will win this game like lenskart, will be the first one that grew up beyond the gimmicky phase, like T Mobile and Coca Cola examples that I pointed out. Those examples were pretty cool. But at the end of the day, they existed just to create a splash in the media in some way, shape, or form. Another brand I can give you that are probably going to do this well is Airbnb, they seem to be at the forefront of grasping this concept of folks wanting to read more about this Google App: Airbnb lived by some, experienced by many.
Tom Ollerton 16:12
Can you tell me more about that?
Varun Ravichandran 16:14
Okay, Airbnb is not a typical hotel room, you can live in a nice cabin by the forest, or a little shack by the sea. But you don't know what you're going to get. Unlike a hotel room, which has plenty of pictures, plenty of word of mouth, plenty of reviews. So Airbnb is going to put out a sort of hologram version of the experience, the hologram version of the amenities you get, the environment you get at each of them, you select locations and a few select countries, and setting up offline stores where you can walk into that kind of like a 4D theater experience. But this is still in the works.
Tom Ollerton 16:58
I'm googling it, what's it called Airbnb?
Varun Ravichandran 17:01
The campaign will be called Lived by some experienced by many.
Tom Ollerton 17:16
Right. Okay, I'll check that out. Okay, so I'm dying to know how does this work in financial services?
Varun Ravichandran 17:23
So financial services, it's a challenge to begin with. But obviously, I cannot not give a financial example knowing my background. Contrary to popular belief, the emotion is pretty strong in this industry. Like I said, the person does not wake up in the morning that he's going to go to the bank or is excited to pick up insurance. But the financial industry will enter a space where it will recognize itself as a prominent stakeholder in say, car buying process, and that we'll be able to advertise with the customer. Giving him a means to an end saying that you're saving a particular amount of money every month and tying that particular amount of money to his aspiration say, that sum of money has allowed him to buy a chassis of a BMW X1 and 12 months later, well, the car has taken shape in front of them, allows the finance industry in short to connect the dots.
Tom Ollerton 18:22
And so who do you really look up to in the experiential ecomm space? You've given some really strong examples of that. But who do you think's running away with this right now?
Varun Ravichandran 18:35
I would like to stick with that example I gave lenskart is the one that as a user, I quite enjoyed it. All my pairs of spectacles, sunglasses have gone directly to that one person. And it's more of a space where instead of picking out names right now I like to watch the space over the coming decade, I think technology will arrive at a particular junction where it'll take off, say in the middle part of this decade, and onwards.
Tom Ollerton 19:01
Because that I think where I'm struggling with is that the lenskart example is great. And what they've really done is leveraged augmented reality, which was a shiny new object when I sort of came into the industry like 10-15 years ago, but really the output is kind of user experience, right? So you go to a website, and you have a slightly better user experience because you're trying on different items and so on. But what I'm struggling with is that that just feels like a UX play like it doesn't... experiential ecommerce for me sounds bigger than that. And when you talked about the Angry Birds example, when you talked about T Mobile that was really super creative, whereas the lenskart example is very functional. So is experiential e commerce leaning more one way than the other? Is experiential e commerce anything that's just better than clicking on an image and buying that thing, or does it extend all the way through to real world experiences? Help me understand where you think the sweet spot is.
Varun Ravichandran 20:03
So depends on the industry and depends on the brand that has first mover advantage in the respective segments, the T Mobile and the Coca Cola adverts just from creating a new story or effect. But the lenskart example that I provided was for its business, that's the best they can achieve with today's technology. And that generates a lot of money for them a lot of revenue for them. So, once again, I'll watch the space and whoever comes up with something creative in the experiential space, works for them. And we will see what technology develops in the years ahead.
Tom Ollerton 20:37
Varun, you really got me thinking here so if anyone wants to get in touch with you to talk about experiential e comm or anything else we've discussed on the podcast today, how would you like them to get in touch? What makes a good outreach message to you and where do you want them to get in touch with you?
Varun Ravichandran 20:54
I think LinkedIn is a good place to start. You can drop me a line over there, and I'll be happy to chat.
Tom Ollerton 21:00
Fantastic. All right. Varun, thank you so much for your time.
Varun Ravichandran 21:03
Sure. Thank you.
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