Ecomm Blueprint: Bringing It All Together With Sri Rajagopalan - Episode 143

INTERVIEW WITH CPG LEADER SRI RAJAGOPALAN

 

DESCRIPTION

We are closing out today the CPG podcast series with Sri Rajagopalan. He is sharing his insights on how the consumer packaged goods companies should be evolving in this new digital world that we are in. With so much experience within large CPG companies such as Revlon, J&J, PepsiCo Frito-Lay, and with a perspective of launching his own start-up brand - Sri has the full picture and advice valuable for anyone in eCommerce.

Make sure to tune in for the last episode in the 4-part series!

Sri Rajagopalan is an experienced consumer packaged goods eCommerce leader who has been leading the industry in much needed digital transformation as retail shifts to adapt to the consumers changing shopping habits and the path to purchase.

He has most recently led Revlon’s growth in eCommerce in beauty as Senior Vice President, including direct to consumer leadership, incubated, and scaled digital eCommerce for Frito-Lay PepsiCo and Johnson & Johnson consumer Inc as Vice President of Digital.

His knowledge of Amazon business development, omnichannel needs across grocery retailers and direct to consumers are well known in the CPG industry. He is an active LinkedIn blogger, and you can find several of his featured podcast interviews on YouTube. He is a board advisor to several CPG startups and is focused currently on launching his own supplements startup – Zenfuel.

“The last three months are a Black Swan event, maybe not to the extent that the industry wants to call it a retail apocalypse, but you’ve got a certain percent of shoppers that are not going back to older models that they’ve used historically.”
— Sri Rajagopalan

KEY TAKEAWAYS

  • Sri explains what should be a brand’s strategy going forward in 2020.

  • What has changed and will change going forward is a certain percent of the shopping population for the first time had very limited choices outside going to eCommerce.

  • A brand should build a strategy using the discipline that already exists within a scaled brand, but focus on sending the consumer by looking at their path to purchase, their journey, and creating the right set of consumer cohorts that makes sense in 2020.

  • Being successful in the digital ecosystem is going to be slightly different and one solution is never going to be everything - brands need to accept the responsibility of doing the data integration and doing the analytics for themselves.

  • The innovation of the future is the innovation that can talk to the consumer one-on-one through a DTC model of some sort, which means that marketing has to morph, and most importantly, the supply chain has to morph because the brand has to be able to get the product to a consumer in a test and learn ecosystem.

  • Ecommerce retail or digital retail is an opportunity for IT in companies that have traditionally become service providers to business, to actually help with leadership.

  • Sri gives his insights on the vendor and retail partnerships.

MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

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