In this episode of Out of the Clouds, Anne Muhlethaler speaks to Sri Ganesh Santhiram, a digital marketing and e-commerce leader with a passion for putting customer experience and message first.
Ganesh shares his journey from being a football-loving kid growing up in Brighton to his MBA in Malaysia and how being at the forefront of data and insights offered him a way into digital and e-commerce. As someone focused on creating data-driven, consumer-centric strategies to drive digital growth, he goes over the challenges and opportunities for brands around digital transformation. Anne and Ganesh also discuss what they see as some of the roadblocks that hinder digital success for most businesses: from the roles people play in organisations, misalignment, a lack of empathy towards the client, poor creative messaging or lack of understanding of the digital environment at the leadership level. They also exchange and celebrate the brands and creatives that are able to translate or transcend the retail store experience to offer immersive online experiences.
The two end on Ganesh’s sporting passions, how football taught him to focus on a team’s common goal and his steps towards mindful mornings. A bright and insightful conversation.
Selected Links from Episode
You can find Ganesh on LinkedIn
Article by Ganesh for Luxury Society
And this one on Data as guiding light for brands
The Social Dilemma on Netflix
Chef Massimo Bottura on Instagram
Fierce Conversations book by Susan Scott
The Who, the A Method for hiring
Oasis ‘Wonderwall’
Manchester United football team
Brighton & Hove Albion Football team
Creativity Inc the book
Patagonia, Argentina
Full Episode Transcript
Anne Muhlethaler:
Hi, hello, bonjour, Grutzi! This is Out of the Clouds, a podcast at the crossroads between business and mindfulness. And I am your host Anne Muhlethaler. Today, I am really happy to welcome a guest who has very strong and proven expertise in e-commerce and digital marketing, subjects that I explore really often in my day job as a consultant. Sri Ganesh Santhiram and I share a passion for putting the customer or the human being really first or at the center of the retail experience, whether we talk about online or offline. And so we explore in this conversation a lot of what are the real challenges that companies face when they talk about digital transformation. We had a great time discussing all things digital and social media. Ganesh also offered his advice for brands and marketers who are hoping to make a difference. And that’s before we touched on his passion for sports, and we also explore his early steps into meditation and mindfulness. So I am delighted to bring you my very wide ranging conversation with Ganesh Santhiram, enjoy.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Ganesh, welcome to Out of the Clouds. It’s nice to see you.
Sri Ganesh Santhiram:
Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here. I feel very honored to have this opportunity to chat with you.
Anne Muhlethaler:
It’s a pleasure that I share absolutely. So happy Friday first of all.
Sri Ganesh Santhiram:
Thank you.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Thanks for making the time after I hope what was a long week of fruitful work?
Sri Ganesh Santhiram:
It has been, yes. And the only regret is I haven’t got my glass of wine right in front of me yet, but I will survive.
Anne Muhlethaler:
So I know a few things about your passions and I know quite a bit about what you do in your day job. So I thought I would first give you the opportunity to tell us your story freely, and then we’ll dig into the questions after I have heard from you.
Sri Ganesh Santhiram:
Yeah, I’m happy to do that. So I’ve been in Switzerland now for about 16 years nearly, and I’m originally from Malaysia, but actually I grew up in the UK in Brighton. I went to school in Brighton when my dad was doing his PhD in the South and I was pretty much raised in the UK and went to school there, but we went back to Malaysia because my dad’s when he finished his studies and PhD, he wanted to go back to Malaysia and he wanted to kind of work there. And I have an older brother, he was just getting into university and I was kind of eight years behind him. And my parents kind of experienced him in the UK, in university, A levels. And having their quasi-hedonistic lifestyle and they went not with this young kids, he’s coming back to Malaysia, living the kind of monk lifestyle at home and going to a Malaysian university and suffering because of the lack of any social life within university life in general. During my time in university, it’s one of those things where I see a lot of young people now.
Sri Ganesh Santhiram:
I had no idea what I wanted to do or what I wanted to be. Being in an Indian family if you’re not a doctor or an engineer or a lawyer, you’re basically a failure. And unfortunately for me I didn’t want to be any of those three. Although my brother was a lawyer, studied law, not a practicing lawyer. I on the other hand decided that I couldn’t hack any of those three things. So I went into the next easiest course I could find, which was business. I don’t know if that’s easier or not, but I just went what doesn’t involve too many technical subjects and business without finance, but was kind of attractive and marketing came up. So I went, okay, I can do that. And decided to go into university doing that. And I did my bachelor’s in Malaysia and I was doing my masters, my MBA.
Sri Ganesh Santhiram:
And again this is kind of Indian family thing is a thread. My dad being a university professor went after your bachelor’s, you’ve got to go and do your masters and then [inaudible 00:04:10] this PhD. So he thought I’d probably want to do that. And I went, okay, how do I get out of it? So I couldn’t get out of the master’s, I had to do it. So basically he decided that, and at that point when I still don’t know what I want to do. I’m like I did the business degree, came into MBA and that’s when I think in my head it kind of clicked. And I went, what am I passionate about? What do I really like? What do I enjoy?
Sri Ganesh Santhiram:
And I had to be kind of serious and be a bit more grown up about it. And I went, I like sports. I play a lot of sports, I play football. I liked tennis. I did a lot of things, I cycled. And I went, what could I do? I think at that point in time that propelled me in my career and everything that I then went on to do for the next 10 years, which was quite an interesting thing. I think just for me from kind of reflecting back through the journey.
Anne Muhlethaler:
That’s amazing. It’s so funny because I know you haven’t seen my newsletter for today because I’m late in putting it out. But I circled back to the things that I loved, that I didn’t study or get into my life when I was 20. And it turns out that it was English, philosophy and psychology, all threads that I am now pulling out in writing and in podcasting and in coaching.
Sri Ganesh Santhiram:
It’s quite amazing and fascinating for me too, because at that time it was such a difficult moment for me growing up and just trying to figure it out what next you’re going to be getting out into the big world. And haven’t got parents behind you paying for everything and all the travels and gap years as they will finance it. And you ended up doing what are you really interested in? And football was a big part of it. And I think it kind of got me focused on just trying to figure out things that could help me in my career and put that into perspective. And it’s the first time I think I specialized in sports marketing in my MBA. I did a thing around profiling football and sports fan in the Asia Pacific region. And kind of just by chance I got data points from a research agency based in Germany who in the mid to late 90s, looking at the popularity of European football in Asia.
Sri Ganesh Santhiram:
And they wanted someone in Asia to kind of do a few surveys for them. And meanwhile, they’re looking at university and MBA students. I reached out to them. They were quite happy. They gave me a lot of the data and gave me a lot of support in doing my final thesis. And when I finished my MBA, they gave me an internship in Germany because I’d done this little piece in Asia and they kind of brought me in as the token Asian and the agency who knew what was happening out in Asia. I had no idea. I was just watching football on TV. That’s the only thing I liked.
Anne Muhlethaler:
I see that. And I think that’s super resourceful of you. I’m actually a little bit jealous and in awe. I never managed to transfer music into my career yet. Maybe one day. I mean, you never know.
Sri Ganesh Santhiram:
It’s such a weird thing because I never in my mind it wasn’t a calculated process. All of a sudden I found this random research agency and when I arrived then in Germany to do that internship, it turns out that they were working with some of the best football clubs, working with UEFA the governing body and FIFA and everyone else. And it was just a dream come true from me sitting in Malaysia watching European football at 3:00 in the morning. And all of a sudden I’m propelling into this agency who basically doing the entire research work, working with the marketing team of UEFA to do all these amazing, cool things. And I went, wow, this is like I felt almost as good as being a professional footballer. I don’t know who was happier myself or my family because they were like, oh anything to do with football. They were proud than me, I think.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Oh, that’s amazing. And so how did that evolve into you getting into digital marketing and the job you do today? I was trying to think of how to introduce what you do. And one of the things that came up for me is do you remember Chandler from Friends that no one ever can tell what it is that he does? And even though I can name your position, I’m not always sure what it entails to be honest.
Sri Ganesh Santhiram:
It’s funny. Yeah. Sometimes I don’t know, too. I just kind of go into.
Anne Muhlethaler:
That’s reassuring.
Sri Ganesh Santhiram:
Let me perhaps answer the first part of the question, which is how did I get into digital marketing. And again it’s kind of the process of myself in university and doing sports marketing. When I was in the kind of research area, consumer insights in sports, I started being exposed to a lot of these big brands like Heineken and MasterCard and Ford. All these guys were spending big bucks on advertising, traditional advertising, TV spots, and doing a lot of this creative work at targeting a lot of football fans with their creative. And as the consumer started moving away from TV. So at one time TV viewership was to kind of be all end all for a lot of the advertisers and started transitioning away into digital kind of social channels and just the online world.
Sri Ganesh Santhiram:
The one area that helped me kind of navigate that space was the fact that I wasn’t afraid of data from the consumer insights and the research, but data was always the kind of foundation of what I was doing. And whether it was quantitative research or qualitative research, it always boiled down to the data piece. And I just had a natural affinity towards data. And I jumped onto that aspect of it on the digital side and tried to understand what worked, what didn’t work. And that’s how I moved into the digital media, digital marketing. How I ended up in e-commerce was a different story because from sports, I transitioned into sportswear brands that sold online. And again the fulcrum point was this brand Odlo. When I joined going through massive transformation, it’s a ski basically underwear kind of technical brand.
Sri Ganesh Santhiram:
And they were trying to be very lifestyle, more kind of big performance North face style brand. They had a small budget, they had a lot of data from consumers and they didn’t know how to build out a digital marketing and online marketing strategy. And they went, “You understand data, can you help us?” And I went, “I think I can.” So I kind of got into that and the more work I did on the digital side and understanding that they went, “Well, we have no one doing e-commerce, can you take it on?” And I went, “I’ve never actually built an e-commerce site or a shop, but hey I can figure that out. I can figure this out.” This was in 2012, 2013. And I built out the kind of e-commerce sites, six, seven markets rolled it out globally and it was thankfully a success and it worked well.
Sri Ganesh Santhiram:
And that kind of just got me in and coming to your question, what exactly I do. Whenever I go into kind of interviews or talking to people who want my help or to kind of help them with projects that they have. One thing I like using is I come in to fix stuff for them on the digital side. And then on the online e-commerce side, which is not always the case. I come in to the look at what the digital ecosystem is. So currently I am direct to consumer for Cricut, which is this a smart cutting machine brand. And essentially I’m responsible for rolling out direct to consumer website, which is the brand.com sites across all markets. And we have a team in HQ. So my boss is responsible for the whole of global HQ and I’m responsible for all of the emir and rolling it out across the region.
Sri Ganesh Santhiram:
So that is essentially my role. And that encompasses a lot of things in digital, it’s e-commerce, it’s merchandising, it’s digital marketing, it is tactics that come into play. So it’s a wide ranging thing. And I look at it from a broader perspective rather than just if you bring in someone who’s e-commerce driven, they come in and they want to just focus on e-commerce, which is the.com site. But my view has always been different because the entire journey is consumer facing rather than inward facing, which is if you have a brand website or if you have a retail partner selling a.com E retailer, all these different things play a different roles. So essentially I look at how to make sense of that puzzle.
Anne Muhlethaler:
That makes sense.
Sri Ganesh Santhiram:
You still have no idea what I do.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Yeah, I do. I think that it’s just really funny and timely that you should be talking about this because sometimes when we’re able to bring the breadth of our expertise to the table, depending on where people know you from, or which piece of your work they truly understand, they’ll want to describe you as that.
Sri Ganesh Santhiram:
Yes.
Anne Muhlethaler:
I would want to probably think of you as more a business development specialist who focuses on digital properties. You have the breadth of vision like you said, rather than just thinking of social media or just thinking about digital marketing campaigns or an eCom store.
Sri Ganesh Santhiram:
Yeah, I would agree. And I think a lot of it is down to how you utilize, I think utilizing the knowledge and the background that you have. And I think digital is quite a unique space still because if you look at let’s take a market us here in Switzerland, right? A lot of brands struggle to understand the role that they have in an organization with the talent that is out there and what can someone bring to the table. And a lot of the kind of digital types of people are candidates are broken into three buckets, which is you get the creative kind who can really make good storytelling and creative vision of what things should be on social media and how you kind of. And that’s their digital expertise. The second one is a purely technical perspective, which is IT-based, very solid and understanding the framework, the infrastructure, the security, and how everything works.
Sri Ganesh Santhiram:
And that person is charged with building a digital ecosystem for the brand. And the third one is someone who’s then purely commercial, which is a sales person. Who’s done a few sales, key account management and for big online accounts or these kinds of things. And they come in and they run a kind of a digital space.
Sri Ganesh Santhiram:
And I feel in a position where I have a unique perspective of all of these three different things, probably not as much on the creative side, if I’m honest with myself. I wouldn’t compare myself to someone who is really a creative storyteller or a designer. And by having this a lot of times when I talk to clients or to potential employees, they kind of look at it and they find it very difficult to kind of map what I do or what my skillset is until they really kind of see the bigger picture. And it takes a bit of convincing, right? It’s understanding not just e-commerce alone, I’m going to look at the bigger picture. There’s so much data and so much to do. And lot of times in organizations you don’t really have that person doing that. You have a sales team doing it. You have a bit of the marketing team doing it. You have some of the countries doing it. So all these different things kind of play a role.
Anne Muhlethaler:
That makes sense. I agree that the internal definition or the internal buckets that are created often dictate the success that brands will have with these projects. What I see though in your experience is that you are able to sort of try things rather than be recruited for a hard skill, right? And by being given this opportunity to experiment, you found your way around. And I don’t know about you, but I remember seeing this happen, not just work for myself, but for other people under me over the years. And sometimes it’s really helpful not to just focus on what the job spec is on paper, the job that HR is trying to fill and more trying to see, how is the person that you really like, that you think has the dynamism to join the company and the culture, how they fit into what you think should be done in that department. Does that resonate with you?
Sri Ganesh Santhiram:
Totally. And I see that a lot in my experience of going for interviews or talking to people or talking to HR, organizational leaders in organizations. I think we underestimate how important it is to find someone from within an organization, a person who can champion this type of thinking. It’s not easy. A lot of people when you’re looking at recruitment, you want to fill a role, you’re in a time pressure. You want to do certain things, you have deadlines and timelines that you want to hit. And a lot of times you don’t have that mindset where you kind of look at the person and you go, who is that person other than what does the paper say about the person? Right? So you come in, you’re already prejudged by a resume that everyone struggles to fill in or what your achievements are.
Sri Ganesh Santhiram:
So a lot of times it’s very difficult to kind of look at paper and judge someone based on what they’re telling you, and you don’t really get a full spectrum. One of the things I actually really enjoyed with Cricut in the interview process that I went through was that they do a session called the who. I think is quite a famous HR person who wrote that process of. It’s almost a two, two and a half hour process where you sit and you really kind of dive deep into a person in terms of what motivates them, how they reacted in certain situation. And it’s not this kind of typical HR type questions where tell me something from your past, how did you deal with a difficult situation, it’s very different. It’s almost like a very detailed way of working through your last two experiences and really nailing down you as a person. What made you react in certain situations? What made you do and then act in a certain way?
Sri Ganesh Santhiram:
So it’s really two people almost bouncing off each other and really digging deep into you as a person. I felt that was one of the best processes where you get to know each other, because from type of questions that the person is asking, it’s almost giving you a position to understand what kind of challenges the company is going through as well. So you have both.
Anne Muhlethaler:
That sounds fascinating. I’ve just took a note of it. I’m going to check it out.
Sri Ganesh Santhiram:
I have the book actually, because after the interview process, I asked the interviewer to send me that link. And it’s a fascinating book, it’s basically called Who to kind of find out how, what it’s the interview.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Okay. So I wanted to talk to you a little bit about marketing, about digital marketing, because a couple of things. I think you know from previous conversations that oftentimes I see misunderstandings between clients and agencies or clients and freelancers as to the scope of the work, the type of results that can be expected and the budgets. And one of the reasons is because digital obviously evolves so fast. And I feel like there’s a lack of education at the client designer or executive level, which means that they’re never really au fait with what’s going on in the reality of the systems that we have to play with. But it’s interesting because I see the murkiness, right? So I wanted to ask you how you feel about this side of your work and where do you find the balance in order to support a business and respect the customer? Because I know your values. So I know that this is at the forefront of your mind and of the work that you put out.
Sri Ganesh Santhiram:
It’s an interesting area because if you break it down first and foremost, we’re in 2021. And essentially anyone who has a Facebook account or Instagram account or a TikTok account thinks they’re a digital expert, right? So out of the bat, purely boils down onto that. But on the other hand, you have all these agencies and people trying to sell you stuff on digital with fancy words and amazing looking creative and the bells and whistles and everything else. The way I look at it and the way I kind of work with some of my team or clients is to cut out a lot of the noise. Essentially, if you are looking to convince a consumer. If I had my own store, right. If I had a retail store and I’m selling something, whatever, a pen, anything. If someone walks through the door, I’m going to guide that person, right?
Sri Ganesh Santhiram:
I’m going to ask them why they’re there, what they’re looking for. And you go through a process where you nurture that initial relationship and you take them and guide them through to serve them the best that you can. The digital side is exactly the same. And I think a lot of the times in my experience, clients, and especially people working on the client side get so bogged down on the tactics and how are we going to target people? And who’s the audience and what kind of KPIs are we going to hit? And the agencies keep feeding that hype and that drive and that kind of thing where they’re saying, you give us 10, we’re going to give you 100 back in return. And we’re going to 10X this, and we’re going to 20X that. All these different things. But ultimately it’s about understanding what is the message that you’d like to tell to your consumer and what are the channels you feel that these messages can reach your consumer and how best do you think that creative can come in and tell that message.
Sri Ganesh Santhiram:
The other part of it in terms of the tactics and the kind of the nitty gritty, the details of everything else. I think agencies overplay the level of importance. It’s a very simple tactical process that you put together. And it’s a very simple thing that you can explain to a lot of people. And my feeling is always where I run into challenges on the client side is always within the clients. You’ll have a lot of people with different varied experience. Everyone wants to get into the detail to find out if they’re being shortchanged or they gave me get a bit better. What is the click-through rate in this versus that? And it’s guys just focus on the story and the message and whether you’re getting sales at the end, then you’re hitting some of the objectives that you are getting on or not. They are digital people, they’re experts, your team, the people who understand it and let them focus on the job to kind of execute and try that.
Anne Muhlethaler:
I love that analogy. And I think it’s super helpful because indeed the language itself, I think alienates a lot of people. You’ve mentioned channels and I’ve been sort of looking at the evolution of digital channels as most people rather closely. I was wondering, how do you feel about the options available for clients nowadays? I mean, this is a very personal sort of feelings, so it doesn’t need to be related necessarily to Cricut. Where do you see opportunity? Because obviously on social media and particularly on Facebook and on Instagram we know that there’s an enormous amount of money that needs to be spent to now get visibility in a space that’s just full of content. So where would you go next if you had a client ready to experiment?
Sri Ganesh Santhiram:
That’s a good question. I think they are opportunities still available within Facebook and Instagram to really stand out and make an impact. And again I think going back to my first point the message, the creative, the story that you’re going to say, I think a lot of clients should spend more time thinking about that and flushing that out much better than they do, rather than thinking we’ve got to put a ten second video out and play it on Instagram and play it on Facebook and play it on TikTok, and do the same thing everywhere. And I think what brands fail to do is to kind of curate that story across the different channels. Because me as a user, I’m not mutually exclusive to Facebook or Instagram. I have no loyalty to any platform. I go where my friends are. I go where I want to engage on, and then talk on.
Sri Ganesh Santhiram:
And a lot of the times what stands out is around the creative, the storytelling as a messaging, and that delivers and gunners more impact regardless of what the channel is. In of just opportunity wise, besides the kind of usual Facebook and Instagram within both those platforms and other platforms coming up, I think what will be interesting is kind of technologies that enhance the experience on these platforms. So augmented reality, for example, Facebook and Instagram have kind of a new or a special augmented reality feature called Spark AR I think is a new version where it allows you with different filters to create different types of experiences. A lot of it is just understanding who your target audience and consumer is, where are they? What are they interested in? And you will find that a lot of the times they will still navigate the same channels.
Sri Ganesh Santhiram:
The latest thing is Clubhouse, everyone wanted an invite to get onto Clubhouse immediately, and then look at what opportunities lie within Clubhouse. And how do you build that? And how do you build that into your new channel strategy? Again look at where are your consumers, have they all just left Instagram and Facebook and gone into Clubhouse overnight? No, they haven’t. They’re still everywhere. And they’re still engaging at the same rates and maybe slightly less, percentage point less. But again, think about the story and think about your creative and think about the message. Then look at how best you can reach out across all these different channels. And I think the opportunities lie when you tweak and really do strong creative and don’t focus too much on the channels yet. Channels will be the channels that will be there. There’s going to be more coming up every time.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Well, I see from the perspective of the clients or the companies I work with is these are companies that are not used to advertising. And so the clash comes when they want to have an impact online and they don’t have budgets for advertising. And this is just another form of, right. I think that this is where a lot of people got so lost or are still sort of floating around because it’s taking from money they wouldn’t have put in press because they had made a decision of not doing that and just funneling it somewhere else without fully having that in mind. And that’s something that really sort of popped for me.
Sri Ganesh Santhiram:
When you frame your question or your comment like that, what comes to mind for me is that let’s break it down again on the data points. So I think around data points, so let’s look at it this way, the cost of reaching 1000 people, so a CPM. The cost of reaching 1000 people on print or TV or whatever they were spending it before versus putting a really strong creative ad or image or a visual on Facebook and Instagram will still win 100 times now, even now. And you will still potentially reach that volume of people and have that similar type of impact. And the impact would be it’s a lot of noise because there’s a lot of brands on social and everything else. To stand out you need something that really resonates. And if I look at the Cricut example, we have some amazing cut through on Facebook and Instagram and even TikTok for the kind of campaigns that we are running, very, very generic, organic campaigns.
Sri Ganesh Santhiram:
And a lot of it is just around having the right type of creative that resonates with the audiences that we’re going after. So we know our consumer really well. We know the kind of personas, the kind of people who are interested in crafting, who like the kind of things that we do, and we know how to engage with them. We know how to talk to them, and we know what to give them in terms of content. All we’re doing is we’re taking the kind of things we know they like and packaging it in terms of how they want to hear it and see it on that platform. That’s kind of the thing with clients and stuff and especially new challenger brands when they come in or are really knew those luxury brands or anyone that’s challenging in the ecosystem in the marketplace.
Sri Ganesh Santhiram:
The advantages that you have a story to tell that is different to the incumbent who are legacy brands. And so utilize that opportunity to be different than be a bit more creative and challenge the norms because you don’t have 20 different brand managers sitting at the table, having an opinion of what color ads should be. Or what type of word should be on, whether the image looks nice or it doesn’t look nice. You have the freedom to be creative, to test them, to get stuff out.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Now, just one more thing on the channels. I know that you are very concerned after you watched the Netflix documentary, The Social Dilemma. For someone who just plays in that field so much, plays I mean works. How does that sit with you as a consumer as much as a digital specialist?
Sri Ganesh Santhiram:
It’s a tough one because of my professional side, I need it. I need that information, that insight the data to be able to then tailer it. On the flip side as a consumer myself, I don’t like it. It is a situation that I think people in the industry have very concerned about the morality of a lot of those things that you see from the documentary. It’s nothing new, right? We all knew this. It wasn’t because of the Netflix documentary. There was an uproar about it, but it is a concern. I think as long as brands are doing it for the good reason in terms of how they utilize the data, they’re giving value to the consumers and they are not misusing that. And if it’s still the betterment of what their consumer is expecting and how they communicate, then I think it’s good. It’s when that gets out of hand. And how do you control and how do you shape that? I think it’s going to be interesting to see over the next next couple of months to a year.
Anne Muhlethaler:
So keeping to the theme of data. I re-read that piece that you wrote last year where you talked about data as a guide, and that really was helping you navigate the right decisions to make for the business that you’re in and you called it as well, a guiding light. Do you mind expanding on that? Do you feel like anything’s changed since last year in terms of how brands can use data as the right way to make decisions?
Sri Ganesh Santhiram:
Yeah, I mean, the piece you’re referring to, I wrote about it as a time when we were just kind of in the midst and sick of the pandemic. And I was working at the time for Victorinox, Swiss army knives very, very iconic brand, family-owned company. And a lot of the decisions at the time were very much inward focused still.
Sri Ganesh Santhiram:
So when you have a company that sells Sashimi knives, kitchen knives, traveler gear products, they’re all non-essentials ultimately. There were certain elements within our portfolio that were working really well. So all of a sudden people have more time to be at home and to cook, right? So they were buying a lot of knives. All of a sudden, obviously Victorinox makes amazing blade to knife. And we had a thing on our website that we were selling, which were the hairdressers scissors, because the hairdresser were all closed. That one particular product sold out within two weeks.
Sri Ganesh Santhiram:
And I think the article was born out of a bit of frustration from internal arbitrary discussions around the fact that we had a very cool and young creative team based in London who were really kind of wanting to do a play on the fact that we sold out on hairdressers, knives, and doing different types of things to show people how to cut your hair at home. People who live within the network who could help and show and do small lessons. The data shows that your consumer is doing something, but the brand, the essence of the company and the brand dictates that we should not be playing in that field because we don’t really want to sell hair dressers scissors. We want to sell kitchen knife, and we want to sell travel again, be this aspirational brand. But the whole essence of this kind of data as a guiding light is if you were serious as a brand to understand what your consumer was going through, then in the time of their biggest need, if you had the resources to support them, why are you not doing it?
Sri Ganesh Santhiram:
And what is that reason for not doing it? And does the brand values of saying that you can’t do this? Is that the be-all end-all for that discussion? And if I was in a startup brand, we would probably have tested something very small, very fast, very easy to see if it works. But in a bigger legacy brand, that’s also family owned it’s very difficult. We left that space open for other brands, challenger brands to take and have fun with and really make a nice play on it and help people. And that frustrated me because we were sitting in digital and e-commerce, we were the full front of the data. Hourly rates we were seeing what was being sold, what was being bought. What were people kind of buying from the time, shops closed to our complete retail stores kind of closing down. Online store hitting double digit conversion rates, like Black Friday, almost overnight.
Sri Ganesh Santhiram:
And we sat at the forefront of that data and we looked at it and we went, there’s a story here. We went to the brand and the creative team and said, hey guys, can you do something funny with this? Can we do something around cooking with all our influences at home? Can we empower them and mobilize them? And at that time you start talking about, well, what’s the quality as a video going to be like. I mean, does anyone really care in a bloody pandemic what the video is going to look like. And if it’s going to be a model and if the lighting is going to be great. I myself was watching all my favorite cooks and I think Massimo Bottura, the Italian Michelin star in his kitchen cooking and doing stuff. I learned so much from him when I was testing so many different things.
Sri Ganesh Santhiram:
And it was the highlight of my evening every night when he was putting his recipes out. And it was almost like watching football, live football. I had to watch it when he was on. I just had to kind of compare it to my football days where we were selling sponsorship and broadcast sponsorship rights for football matches based on the fact that it is a life event. It’s a non-missable event. Everyone’s able to, there’s got to be. This was a case on Instagram Live or whatever he was doing. And I think it was IGTV. His daughter was filming it, that to me was my life football every night. I had to watch that. And these are, I think, opportunities that being guided by the data and having a management or leadership team that empowers the team that sits on this data to come back and facilitate this discussion to support these discussions is the one that makes the difference between brands that will be successful in the long run than brands that will just be there.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Yeah. So at first, I want to joke about your hair. Did you buy the scissors?
Sri Ganesh Santhiram:
I did not. It was sold out I couldn’t get it.
Anne Muhlethaler:
There you go. Because for our listeners Ganesh is sporting a very long mane, which is very different from his previous look. So never gave that a try.
Sri Ganesh Santhiram:
No.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Do you know I feel so annoyed when I even consider the fun that you guys could have had around that. So I really feel for you there. I see this push pull from so many brands between what they would do maybe even in an event in store, or in an event with influencers and top clients and what they will do online. Do you see also a moment where they just stopped themselves? And for some reason, it doesn’t cross over because I feel like most people, again, more in the legacy brands, more people who are already established forget that the consumer on the other side is a normal human being. And sure they may have some expectations as to the level of what they’re going to see in terms of product collections turn a voice, et cetera, but that they’re still open to what the brand wants to put out there.
Sri Ganesh Santhiram:
That’s a good question. I look at it from my personal experiences in companies. I think it boils down to people in organizations. Every one of us has a role to play. A brand manager, director, e-commerce head, and each one, everyone is aligned on something completely different. Regardless of whether you work for the brand, you have your kind of values of the company and the goals of the company. Essentially everyone works for themselves, right? In an organization you have your goals. You’re measured by something completely different. You have different sales targets. Each one is measured by something else. And when you bring this kind of Motley crew of people together in an organization, you think they all kind of have a common goal, but let’s be honest. How many times have we all set it on meeting tables and boardrooms and whatever else, and you play a role, you play a role to kind of do certain things and get some outcomes and make some decisions.
Sri Ganesh Santhiram:
And ultimately the consumer is not at the forefront of those decisions regardless of how much they should be or people think they are. And that facilitates a lot of those decisions where from the outside it feels the brand is a name. It’s the people that make these decisions and the people that are in those positions and have the ability or the power or the influence to make things happen don’t, or don’t see it. But there isn’t a culture that facilitates this different things. Let’s take my example with the scissors example. I kind of let it go, again I’m talked to you about it.
Anne Muhlethaler:
No, it’s a really good one.
Sri Ganesh Santhiram:
I’m talking about it before. No, but just to bring that up again, you have multiple amounts of people sitting to discuss about opportunities and especially in the digital space, one day is too late.
Sri Ganesh Santhiram:
You got to make decisions within hours if you wanted to get in the front of doing stuff. I’m not generalizing every brand in this space, but I think they are brands who do it really well. You can look within your own personal view of brands that you like and you can easily spot things, right? You can see which brands kind of stand out and do things differently. And even though they may be a legacy brand, and I think a lot of it is just free. It starts from the top of the leadership team that empowers the people and create smaller groups perhaps, and empowers them to go off and just do and try some things rather than false empowerment, which is making it sound like they are allowed to do it, but you still have to come back in go through certain approval hoops, which defeats the purpose of being empowered to do anything because.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Completely defeats the purpose. Yeah. I totally see that. It’s so funny that you would use this analogy at the beginning of your explanation, because I was reading this book last summer called Fierce Conversations by a lady called Susan Scott.
Sri Ganesh Santhiram:
I have the audio book. I love it. I absolutely love it. Yeah.
Anne Muhlethaler:
It’s so good. I thought it was so impressive and powerful because clearly what we’re talking about is misalignment literally. Everybody is in their lane and everyone thinks that they are doing what they’re supposed to do. Right. But it doesn’t necessarily serve the customer. And the reality is they don’t see the importance of the other lanes.
Sri Ganesh Santhiram:
It is. Yeah. And you’re absolutely right, because as much as companies have all these things where everyone is striving towards a common goal, and we’re all believing in this goal and everybody’s in it to win it. And we’re together, each bollix at the end of the day, everyone’s going to be, you’re going to be sitting in your meetings, come Monday morning. You’re going to be there. And you come in and you look at your colleagues and you go, I really like you, but ultimately you’re an idiot. Sorry. If any of my colleagues are listening, no, I do not think that. Sorry.
Anne Muhlethaler:
I’m rereading this book. And it’s a book by a couple of Harvard professors called Thanks for the Feedback and I have to be honest, it is so mind-blowing because they rely on so much data and so many studies to explain how we understand each other and very much to the same point about the misalignment anyways, really recommend that.
Anne Muhlethaler:
So you’ve just mentioned the customer and I think this is the perfect transition for my next question. I think, as you were talking about before the store experience can get sort of enhanced and translated or transformed, you can imagine in the digital space. Can you talk to me a little bit about that specialization or how you work on the user experience.
Sri Ganesh Santhiram:
The first spot in terms of in-store experiences and how that kind of the digital space is going to help transition or evolve that. I think retail is such an interesting topic because it’s two fold. One of the things that we keep hearing, especially me being on the digital e-commerce side is how retail is dying and everything is going to shut down and everything is going to change. But in the times of a pandemic with people staying home, everybody’s just waiting to get out and go into a retail store, go into a store and get into an experience or just go out and do other things. What I think is going to be quite unique is brands that bring a certain type of shopping experience into a retail environment, rather than just putting products up and having window merchandising, visual merchandising.
Sri Ganesh Santhiram:
I think that element of it is going to be crucial to update and change, and I’m not referring to it as having so many different screens in the retail store that you can touch and get yourself immersed into a retail environment. I think it’s more around how do you bring clever, unique little pieces of information that’s going to help a consumer make a decision to buy something in store. Retail experiences can learn from the online experiences that you would have for your online store. And if you think about it on the e-commerce side of the business, you have featured products, which is the same as when you go into a retail environment, you’ll have your little islands that feature the main products. You have things that are labeled as best sellers. Typically those will be the ones that are front of the store and kind of featured some way.
Sri Ganesh Santhiram:
Then you have the kind of discount pieces, which will be somewhere right in the back of the store hidden you don’t want to be seen. And this is a different tab on the e-commerce navigation. And essentially if you take that and you then tweak it with other things like ratings and reviews. So if I go into a store, what would be an easy way for me to kind of evaluate between so many different products and rather than having sales associate stand right next to me and bother me. And obviously it’s different in a luxury retail environment. So because you get treated very differently. A bit of champagne always helps. A lot of the times you don’t have these kinds of elements where a bit of technology with augmented reality and these kinds of things will really help elevate that experience and make it a little more useful for the consumer.
Sri Ganesh Santhiram:
And that’s just beyond your own retail physical store. When I was at Victorinox, we were testing a thing with retail partners like Selfridges in the UK, where the travel gear category for Victorinox is a very good category, but very small compared to the likes of Remover or to me on all these other slightly more luxurious brands out there. If you can remember in Selfridges the ground floor well, the travel bag section is every little island looks almost similar. It’s just a lot of colorful bags, black bags, kind of silver bags. But essentially they all look pretty much the same. You walk down inside the black, gray and some will have colorful little displays in the middle stand out of it.
Sri Ganesh Santhiram:
For Victorinox we worked with our local team to kind of create an augmented reality experience where you don’t have to put every single piece of luggage out. You put one feature, one color, and that have this unique experience where if you want to check other aspects of other colors of it, you could just look at taking a snap of the QR code, and then you have this immersive experience and you can then interact with it. And that allows them more data. You could see where there are people really interested in the red bag or the orange bag that’s there. Are they looking for other colors?
Sri Ganesh Santhiram:
And that’s on a real-time perspective that you can then swap out the bags that is out in front of the storefront with other colors, and you just keep testing different things. You can also change that immersive experience. And you can just remove the back completely and just have a big visual to kind of showcase what the product is. And so there’s all these different elements that you try and create a kind of a wholesale retail experience versus install experience as well.
Anne Muhlethaler:
That’s so cool. It’s interesting. As you’re speaking, I was visualizing the website and tabs at the top, and it was considering, as you were talking about that space, I was suddenly propelled in Mount Street in London and the big flagship store that I opened for Louboutin years ago.
Anne Muhlethaler:
I was almost visually imagining how we could be telling different stories. I remember recently I went to the Cartier website and on a regular basis I’ve been back to look at them and I’ve been in a Cartier store only the one time in Geneva I want to say, because I’m familiar with them more in Selfridges wonder room and stuff like that. And the experience could not be further apart, being on that website, whereas being in the store.
Sri Ganesh Santhiram:
It’s really interesting you bring up the Cartier experience because I every so often scan on different kinds of luxury websites and kind of looking at what the competition is doing, the new trends and websites, and it feels like all these luxury brands have listened to someone in the organization to say that we need to sell online. We need to sell e-commerce and we’ve got to be on e-commerce and we’ve got to make money online. And they’ve forgotten about that kind of in store experience that they give to someone walking through, where you’re waiting in line outside and coming in slowly and get the champagne. And they’ve gone on and created a website that has, this is what’s going to convert the most. This is where you get the most clicks. And this is how we’re going to channel rather than thinking about the experience.
Sri Ganesh Santhiram:
And I think for brands like Cartier and stuff, just having a beautiful picture or a video on the front of the page, that’s not going to cut them and that’s not going to tell stories. And to your point, how do you bring that to life? Again, this is me personally my personal opinion. I still feel you should go back into the organization and look at the teams that make all these decisions. On one hand, you will have the e-commerce digital team that is measured on sales only. On the other hand you have the marketing team that is broadly responsible for storytelling and marketing activities. And these two teams interact in a very different way. The e-commerce team thinks of any content and things that come onto the site as a distraction from the final sale. And the marketing team thinks that anything that’s going to be on the website to sell is not selling the right thing, because it’s not that black shoe that is telling a story and it’s going to sell, it’s going to be this big piece.
Sri Ganesh Santhiram:
So that in essence is dysfunctional. The other aspect of it is you have a company or a brand that doesn’t really understand what the website’s functional rule is. Do you sell, do you tell stories? Can you do both, do you want to do both? Is there room for you to do both? Do you have the resources to do both? And these are all practical decisions that you need to ask, and then you need to go out and build that experience of what the website could look like. And if you take the case of Cartier or any other luxury brand, my thinking would be that they would have looked at it and went, we’ve got great pictures. This is going to be an amazing website because we’ve gone with one of these big e-commerce providers like Salesforce cloud, or Adobe or whoever else. And they’re going to be amazing.
Sri Ganesh Santhiram:
And they’re going to tell us how we’re going to convert really well. And the marketing team is given amazing flurry of video assets and amazing imagery, and they went, stick it on the website, and this is going to be great. We’re going to drive more traffic, and that’s not how you did the retail store. You think about it it’s like you have different people standing there talking and giving you different experiences, and these are all very different things. I don’t know there’s an answer. I think the answer would be each and every brand has to take stock. And I think one of the things I put in my article back in the pandemic was this is the opportunity for brands to kind of stop pause. Think again, things that you’ve learned over the last 30 years, do they still apply? Do you need to follow these rules of engagement on e-commerce and online?
Sri Ganesh Santhiram:
Why should the navigation be on the top? What is that user experience like? Are all users like that? We’d be just trained like that, can we be retrained? Are you worried about conversion rate? Is that why you’re doing it? And I don’t know whether they have time that it’s easy for me here to sit and talk to you on a Friday night without any wine and discuss these things.
Sri Ganesh Santhiram:
But for a brand that has serious implications in terms of revenue, are we going to hit our numbers? Are we going to be able to survive and pay everyone’s salaries? But essentially I think you can manage both. And I think you can do it really well. And I think you can tell stories and I think you can bring them in via an engagement piece, rather than just putting a visual up to say, hey, this is a way better shoe, click here. This is the price, convert, put it in your basket and get the hell out. That’s essentially what e-commerce is. You bring them in. You want them to go as fast as he can to check out and leave and get the next person and I’ll come back and buy more. But that’s not the experience, really is it?
Anne Muhlethaler:
Yeah. I agree. My friends at The Akin, they are a trend forecasting agency. And one of the things that came up in a client research piece that they did a couple of years ago, is that what they’re were seeing as an extra element of qualitative engagement for what they call the changemakers, which is the top of the pyramid, the innovator type clients was actually adding friction to the path to purchase because they wanted to feel more connected to the brand.
Anne Muhlethaler:
I don’t know if it’s on every page of her website, but the designer, Hannah Fiedler, who I interviewed on the podcast a couple of weeks ago, she did a beautiful job for certain items in the range to… I like the crystal ball coat to add pictures, the drawings, how she came to see it. It’s probably quite a long product page for a brand that wants to convert fast. Probably would want to put it somewhere else or play with it, but I loved the thought behind it because suddenly you’re not going to ever think of that coat without knowing about why it’s the price it is. And yeah, that’s kind of cool.
Sri Ganesh Santhiram:
Yeah, I totally agree. I think essentially it’s the product detail page, right? You land on the page where the product is before you convert. On that page if you think of a fragrance, and this is really truly a discussion that I had at Victorinox in terms of Victorinox sells fragrances, surprise, surprise. The whole kind of discussion was that you land on a product detail page for a fragrance that has five bullets that tells you the size of the bottle, the packaging that is coming in, and basically a sentence to say it has floral notes to the fragrance.
Sri Ganesh Santhiram:
But when you were in a store and selling fragrance, what does a sales associate tell you? You get invoked so much, you’re passionate, invoke so many different things. And I don’t know whether a product detailed page for a fragrance gunners the same type of thing if you’re going to buy batteries or toilet paper from Amazon Prime, but it works. People still land on the page, they buy, it’s converting. Brands still just continue doing it because consumers do it. They just buy, you’d come on. If you like the product you like the brand, you’re converting, and if the price is good.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Yeah, of course. There’s always that, the price resistance is always an interesting concept because I work with so many businesses who don’t actually apply discounts.
Anne Muhlethaler:
When I was considering who was doing a good job of telling the story and selling lots of stuff I was thinking of Patagonia because I’m kind of in love with them, even though I am not a very sporty person. And I love them so much that I actually bought myself a couple of gifts from them for Christmas.
Sri Ganesh Santhiram:
Brilliant.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Because I’ve been back in Switzerland for a while. It’s bloody effing cold in December, January. And I do think that they do a better job than most. I’d love to know who do you admire or enjoy as a consumer?
Sri Ganesh Santhiram:
If I look at my own personal buying habits and how I shop online. I mean, Patagonia they’re kind of for me one of the best sites. And it’s also a very unique experience where you have a shop and you have the kind of stories and the lead with the stories and what they stand for as a brand and the ambassadors that works really well. I love MR PORTER for whatever reason within the kind of brand and experience and stuff that comes in. I think they do a really good job on the storytelling and I think they get their consumer, they get the kind of male demographic. And I think they do a really solid job in bringing to life the brand stories and showcasing the journey’s something. I have to the MR PORTER post that I also received.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Oh, that’s awesome.
Sri Ganesh Santhiram:
You have all these different things and it gives you that experience on the site, but also they’re very functional. They have sales, they drive the kinds of tactics and a really, really good job.
Anne Muhlethaler:
on MR PORTER. I love their site. I really do. And first of all, I need to say their home buying selection is fantastic. So I’d happily go there rather than other websites for gifting, for example, they really do blend the editorial aspect much better than most sites. It’s a great business.
Sri Ganesh Santhiram:
This is a brilliant website, brilliant kind of… The other brand actually that comes to mind is because of my love and passion for cycling Rapha, which is a UK based brand. They do really good storytelling and also get the kind of piece around conversions and driving sales on the e-commerce channel. But again, they lead heavily with that kind of storytelling aspect of it. At least how it comes across to consumers, whether it’s the team internally, whether they’re doing it online, I don’t know. I don’t really want to work for Rapha. So yes.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Go on, admit it, you’re also buying from the site. Yeah.
Sri Ganesh Santhiram:
I do buy a lot of stuff.
Anne Muhlethaler:
There you go.
Sri Ganesh Santhiram:
Unnecessary stuff that does not make me cycle any faster. So that’s my one complaint to Rapha, I don’t look or cycle as fast as any of their videos.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Oops. So I wanted to ask you, if you could pinpoint what would be a value that you think is under represented in the companies that wants to become more digitally fluent, whether it’s a legacy brand, whether it’s a very established brand that wants to become more nimble, what would be a value that you think needs to be considered in the business to help this transition?
Sri Ganesh Santhiram:
I think it’s going to be very focused around empowering the right people to make those decisions. And if you look at starting from hiring the right kind of mindset of people to come in, who have that experience and who can take them on that journey. A lot of times I think they are empowering people within the organization that they trust, who’ve been there for a long time to then help them.
Sri Ganesh Santhiram:
Many a time I don’t think that’s the right way to do it. And one of the offsets to the whole digital marketing or e-commerce topic is digital transformation, right? Digital transformation is this big buzzword and everyone’s going through a digital transformation. What does that all mean? I think if you ask 20 people, no one really knows what the hell digital transformation means, but essentially it’s changing the entire organization and the mindset and the processes within an organization.
Sri Ganesh Santhiram:
And a lot of that starts with the mindset first. And that has to be from the leadership team and the CEO and the board in order to facilitate and empower the right people and give them the freedom within a framework for them to operate and show within a timeframe those successes and giving them the owners to fail within a framework that they cannot feel they’re going to bring the company down or lose themselves, but have that opportunity to really drive change within the company and feel like they have that support. I think that’s something that, which is not really common and something that I haven’t seen in a long time. And I’ll give you an example too. When I started at Victorinox, right? So it’s a legacy brand, very, very focused on Switzerland, very focused on hiring people from the region in Switzerland in the area where the company is based.
Sri Ganesh Santhiram:
And it’s hard to find digital talent to come and work in where the company is based, which is in canton Schwyz, in the middle of nowhere. Beautiful, amazing view, amazing scenery, but nobody wants to come. So then you go and look at where the opportunities and the next special opportunity was either Zurich or we had an office in London, let’s build a team in London. And the initial mindset was, oh no, we can’t do that. We’re a Swiss company. We’ve got to be here. They’ve got to be in the office. And there’s got to be all these different things, but it gives that time, the family and the leadership because it’s family run and they understood the vision and they went, okay, let’s get the right people with the right mindset to help propel, change the way we were doing things and take that risk. And they’ve built out an amazing team based in London who was driving a lot of their digital tactics and e-commerce tactics. And also a lot of the change that the brand is going through.
Anne Muhlethaler:
That’s such a great example to lean on. As you were saying these words, I could feel the fact that the people in power want to feel safe. So I think is just leaning on people who offer security rather than actually delivering on the vision that is talked about. I understand it’s a natural human needs. Change could potentially mean death in our ancient limbic brain. So that’s why so few of us are actually interested in change in general.
Sri Ganesh Santhiram:
That’s actually a very good point because again you go back to the makeup of an organization and the people who are working in organizations, nobody wants change. And how many people do you think if you went through an organization and talked to different people, how many in isolation, not in a group, if you went and talked to individual people in an organization, how many people would have a vision for that company or for the role that they’re doing? I don’t think many people would, they would not have a vision of what the role and what they think. It’s always very few people typically at the top who have that vision and who’re thinking and whether these people are the right people.
Anne Muhlethaler:
That’s super cool because you’re bringing that back to the point about Susan Scott and her book. I think a lot of people don’t understand the point of doing presentations about the company vision, whether it’s quarterly, yearly, or whatever. In order for everyone to actually be aligned, they need to be aware. And I think that the transmission of knowledge, the giving of context, I know that you and I talked about the importance of context in the case of storytelling, which I think is just so important for brands as well. Because if people don’t understand where you come from, what is your story? Why are you here is true and timely as well. And without that, I can’t imagine the depth of loyalty or a development of talents internally for many brands.
Sri Ganesh Santhiram:
I agree.
Anne Muhlethaler:
If you could just give one piece of advice, anything that you feel super strongly about to companies out there who are trying to make the mark, what would it be?
Sri Ganesh Santhiram:
One piece of advice? I think be bold, take risks, calculated risks, but be bold and try different things. Don’t fall back on what you know what is safe. If you have a story to tell, bring it to life, be bold in what you say, what you share, don’t hide behind corporate jargon and corporate kind of structures that are other tree to a certain extent to do, use the opportunity now where we are in such a turmoil generally with the way we are living and how people are and what the consumer is facing and going through.
Sri Ganesh Santhiram:
Use this opportunity to be a bit more human, but also try different things, be open, be responsive to what the opportunities lie. And don’t take an inward view on how things should be. And again if you look at the creative aspect, if you look at this design by committee, I think just before we got onto the call, I shared some creatives with you and you could see arbitrarily between me and you. There’s so many differences. I find something very, very appealing to some extent, and you find something else appealing, but ultimately we don’t decide, the consumer is the one that decides, and they’re the ones who interact and try different things. So I think that would be my one piece of advice.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Thanks. So let’s move to a few of the questions I like to ask all of my guests. So Ganesh, I’d love to know what song best represents you. I find that generally with these questions it’s best to go with whatever pops in your head. Generally, that’s the right answer.
Sri Ganesh Santhiram:
Generally that’s the right answer. One song that best represents me. So my favorite song of all time, I liked the Oasis growing up. So wonder World my favorite song, whether that represents me or not, I don’t think so, but it’s my favorite song.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Yeah. That’s awesome. It’s a really great tune.
Sri Ganesh Santhiram:
Yeah. The worst thing about them is that I think they Manchester City fans and I don’t like Manchester City.
Anne Muhlethaler:
I know, that’s true actually.
Sri Ganesh Santhiram:
[crosstalk 00:59:45] fan.
Anne Muhlethaler:
That’s true actually. Who do you support? Go on. Let’s talk about football for a second.
Sri Ganesh Santhiram:
Well football. Well, I am a true Malaysian. You either are a Liverpool fan or Man United fan. But my big brother was a Man United fan. So he bullied me when I was a little kid to be a Man United fan and I haven’t changed. I haven’t regretted it. So it was very good.
Anne Muhlethaler:
You’re just reminding me, I wanted to ask you a question and I think I switched the order in my notes. So I wanted to know this actually, you’re a big football fan. You’re a very keen cyclist, even though apparently you say you’re not very fast, although I’m sure you’re much faster than me and you are a very keen tennis player, ranked somehow says Google
Anne Muhlethaler:
Now, sports has played a really large role in your life. So you played football when you were in Brighton?
Sri Ganesh Santhiram:
Yeah.
Anne Muhlethaler:
This is something that came up in my conversation with Andrea last week, because she was saying that she was a competitive figure skater, which is so Canadian of her. And she sees now with her teenage kids, what they’re getting out of being in a team sport, because I think it’s quite an interesting aspect of someone’s life. What has sport brought to you?
Sri Ganesh Santhiram:
It’s funny that you mentioned that Andrea said that you wanted a team sports because growing up, I played a lot of football, not at a very high level or a very good level, but competitively in a club, in a league. And recently I play a lot of tennis, which is myself, me against myself, most of the time. And it’s such a mental sport, mentally draining as well, because that aspect of it is such a strong thing. And cycling where again, you’re fighting yourself, obviously you’re climbing hills and mountains and whatever else, but essentially it’s you yourself and how you perform. What sports has brought to men and what I’ve learned is especially football to be a team player. And I think some of the things that I take into my work environment in a team, you don’t play for yourself. In football, you’re one of 11 on a pitch and you play five or six times in a competition.
Sri Ganesh Santhiram:
You’re not going to play at a level of 10 out of 10 or nine out of 10 or eight out of 10. It’s you’re going to have ups and downs and you’re going to be unfit. You don’t want to run, you’ve had a bad day, whatever. You can always hide and you can always do things, but ultimately that owned within the team drives everyone together. And that’s one of the things that I learned within sports that either no matter what everyone is feeling, when you come together, that common understanding, that common goal is so clear. It’s so simple. The common goal is to go out and win. How you win is irrelevant because we weren’t really professional. We are going to win. And that was such a simple thing. You came in every day, regardless of how bad everyone was doing a training or whatever, when the whistle blows you stand there and everyone knew what they had to do which was win at all costs, whether you’re playing well, you didn’t play well, try and do everything you can to win.
Sri Ganesh Santhiram:
Learning about that and just that discipline, turning up for training, turning up and doing things right, and bringing your best that you can. And on the other hand with tennis, when you’re playing the solo spot, it’s so difficult. I find it so difficult to concentrate in. Especially now I’m slightly older, not very athletic overall, but trying to keep up with people who are a lot younger and stronger and fitter. I find myself losing concentration really fast. And then so fast you loose the point that you’re out, it’s kind of difficult to kind of get that focus back in. And it helps me train that focus to kind of cut out the noise, cut out the noise around you and just focus on the game for that time.
Anne Muhlethaler:
It’s great because it brings me to mindfulness because how you’re not super into meditation mindfulness is mind blowing for me because it’s one of the easiest or best in training to be present. But I know that a few weeks ago you tried a mindfulness exercise. Would you tell us what it was and how that worked for you?
Sri Ganesh Santhiram:
I did it slightly differently. So for me, it was kind of listening to a few prompts to help me focus on the now, focus on things that were present in me and walking myself through those aspects. And I think that helped me just sharpen my mind, just focusing on little things for a small moment of time and just being conscious of what I was doing and how I was doing it. And these kinds of things really triggered me to kind of think differently and just have that mental sharpness after doing it.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Because the podcast is about business and mindfulness. Apart from that one exercise or experiment that you’ve done. Where do you find, especially as we’re in the middle of a global pandemic, how do you find balance or grounding or stability? Because I do realize that not everyone needs to find meditation as their way into being present or mindful. And I was wondering if cycling was maybe potentially meditative for you apart from when it’s really hard to go up the hill.
Sri Ganesh Santhiram:
I actually find for me that period from the time I wake up, get out of bed and actively start working, I have evolved that period in time every day from having my phone next to my bed and checking emails, checking messages, and doing all these different things to really take at least 20 to 25 minutes for myself in the morning when I wake up and I don’t have the kind of verge that I need coffee immediately, or I need to do something. Having a moment to just be present and kind of just feel the day and how I feel and just be conscious of simple things that can just help my mind focus on and just giving myself that 15, 20 minutes grace period, before I start doing something.
Sri Ganesh Santhiram:
I call it my kind of baby steps to meditation, where I’m not so far into it, but still have a mindful of the day and mindful of my surroundings and mindful of just the fact that today, wake up, it’s a Friday. What am I grateful for? What did I do last night that I was grateful for again? And just having a recap and it’s not easy. It’s not easy from having that kind of initial phase when you automatically almost reach to your phone to kind of go, what has happened or what are the things that I want to catch up on?
Anne Muhlethaler:
That much is true. Okay. So what did you want to be when you were a kid?
Sri Ganesh Santhiram:
100% football, professional football player. When I was growing up in the UK, we lived in a place that the Brighton & Hove Albion football team. They’re currently in the Premier League. At that time, they were no where near the Premier League. They used to train in our backyard essentially because we were living on top of the sports complex in the field. And every day when I wasn’t in school, I was on the pitch with these professional footballers as a 10 year old kid picking balls to them, like ball boy.
Sri Ganesh Santhiram:
And this was in the late 80s and early 90s where you could just walk around anywhere and all these players were so open and gracious with their time with me. And I just wanted to be a footballer. I was never any good, but yeah.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Oh, that was so cool. What sound or noise you love?
Sri Ganesh Santhiram:
The sound of some food sizzling in the pan. I love that sound. That for me is just because I make good food, so.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Oh, I love that. Mic drop. That’s really nice because I make good food. What would you want to say to yourself if you could send your young self a message?
Sri Ganesh Santhiram:
Be a bit more… How should I put it? You got me on mindful and thinking about stuff already. So all of a sudden I’m like this little kid being back in Malaysia and I always felt like the underdog all the time. I don’t know why. I just felt I was everywhere and anything I did I was the underdog and now I would probably go back and just say, just enjoy it. Don’t think so much about anything and just enjoy your time. I grew up on an Island at the beach. I never really appreciated it. It was always sunny. Never really appreciated it. Just take it all in and just relax and enjoy it.
Anne Muhlethaler:
That’s awesome. What are you not very good at?
Sri Ganesh Santhiram:
I am not very good at, in the professional context I will not be someone who just turns 9:00 to 5:00 to take a salary and be in this massive company, fortune 500, one of a million doing something I hate. I can’t do that. And I don’t think am made for doing that.
Anne Muhlethaler:
What book is next to your bed or on your desk?
Sri Ganesh Santhiram:
It is Creativity, which is an amazing book that my current boss gave for Christmas. And it’s been an amazing read so far. I haven’t fully read it yet, but it’s highly, highly entertaining in terms of just looking at creativity as a process and having reading that, that’s quite fun.
Anne Muhlethaler:
That’s great.
Sri Ganesh Santhiram:
It’s quite up to some of the things we were talking about in terms of what stands in the way and what comes out through, what stops people from being creative.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Yeah, absolutely. If you could escape to anywhere right now where would you fly to?
Sri Ganesh Santhiram:
I would fly to Argentina, Patagonia to be out in the South. I was there just before the pandemic. So 2019, 2020 December, January. And it was one of the best experiences I’ve ever had in my life. Beautiful, beautiful place.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Sounds amazing.
Sri Ganesh Santhiram:
And being in hiking, amazing.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Who is one person you think we should all know about? So that could be a writer, a musician, a politician, a journalist, an artist?
Sri Ganesh Santhiram:
One person that everyone should know about? It’s a tough one. Yeah. I’m going to say a name which everyone knows and has a very different opinion of, but I like listening to Gary Vaynerchuk who is this really brash personality, either you love him or you hate him. And it’s unique for me to just to the kind of things he says and how he connects to his different types of audiences. And I just likes the way he brings certain contexts to discussions. And it’s not someone, I mean, you could think of people who are sophisticated in different kinds of fields and areas, but he’s just someone who embodies the person who understands his audience to such a strong extent of how he communicates and brings things. I just find it fascinating.
Anne Muhlethaler:
That’s great. I really appreciate that. And then my last question, which is my favorite question, what brings you happiness?
Sri Ganesh Santhiram:
A couple of things, a really good bottle of Italian wine, really good Italian food too, or just any kind of food brings me a lot of happiness, but in the broader sense, I think when I am at peace with myself and that comes in different ways, right? So things like when let’s say today Friday after a long, hard stressful week we have this really good conversation. I see you, we spend time together. It’s been a while since we spent an hour and a half or whenever it is that we’ve been talking. And this brings happiness and contentment to the end of a hard week. So things like that, simple things, just give a bit of pleasure.
Anne Muhlethaler:
That’s lovely. Thank you so much for all of the time that you’ve given me today, it was really fantastic.
Sri Ganesh Santhiram:
Thank you.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Where can people find you to come and ask you more questions about what it is that you do?
Sri Ganesh Santhiram:
You can find me on LinkedIn. I think they would probably be the best way to find me. So with my name Sri Ganesh Santhiram and I would be more than happy to connect. But I think one of the things that I learned from Massey my dad did this quite a lot, was to be gracious with your time for everyone. And just talk to people because you learn so much from different people, regardless of what it is, unless they’re trying to sell you something on LinkedIn, then it’s bloody annoying because they keep bombarding with stuff. But generally, if you’re not trying to sell me anything, then more than happy to connect on LinkedIn.
Anne Muhlethaler:
That’s awesome. Ganesh, thank you so much. And we’ll talk again soon.
Sri Ganesh Santhiram:
Thank you for your time.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Thanks again to Ganesh for being my guest on the show today, you can find him on LinkedIn, Sri Ganesh Santhiram. Links are of course included in the show notes, including many of the topics that we cover and the several books that we also mentioned. So that’s it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening and I hope you’ll join us again next time. Our theme music is by Connor Heffernan, artwork by Brian Ponto, special thanks to Pete and Joel for editing and sound.
Anne Muhlethaler:
You can soon find all of my episodes and find out more about my project at AnneVMuhlethaler.com. If you don’t know how to spell it, it’s also in the show notes. Yes, sign up to receive updates on all the fun things I am doing. Follow the show on Instagram @_OutoftheClouds. If you can, I’d love it if you would rate and review the show on iTunes. Until next time, be well, be safe. Remember the hand washing, the mask, all of that good stuff.