The Digital Seeker With Raj De Datta

Posted by John Livesay in podcast0 comments

The eCommerce world teaches companies to look for customers but what they’re missing out on is attracting digital seekers. As Raj De Datta would say, there is a difference between serving a seeker VS serving a customer, and it is a vital factor in creating a whole new experience for your audience. Raj is the co-founder and CEO of Bloomreach, the leading digital experience platform for eCommerce in the US and the UK. He joins John Livesay to talk all about digital and how it transforms the lives of both people and businesses. According to Raj, a seeker is someone who is looking for a quality experience, that magical experience that most companies fail to offer. Creating that magical experience is more than just selling a product or service; it is about building a new world of emotions that are tied to your product or service. Build a winning experience when you learn to focus on serving a seeker over-serving a customer. 

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Listen to the podcast here

The Digital Seeker With Raj De Datta

Our guest on the show is Raj, the CEO of Bloomreach and the author of The Digital Seeker. We talk about the difference between being a seeker versus a customer and how winners are the ones that offer magical experiences. Find out what he means. Enjoy the episode.

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Our guest is Raj De Datta who is the co-Founder and CEO of Bloomreach which is the leading digital experience platform for eCommerce that powers brands, representing 25% of retail eCommerce in both the US and the UK. He’s a multiple-time entrepreneur before launching Bloomreach. He was the entrepreneur in residence and also served as Cisco’s Director of Product Marketing and on the founding team of Telecom Company, Firstmark Communications. He worked in Tech Investment Banking. He also serves on the Council for the Player Development for the US Tennis Association and has been involved with over twenty Silicon Valley Startups. He holds a BS in Electrical Engineering with a Public Policy Certificate from Princeton and an MBA with no less than Harvard Business School. He has a book out called The Digital Seeker which we’re going to be doing a big deep dive in. Welcome to the show, Raj.

It’s great to be with you, John. I’m excited to be here.

What a fascinating career you have had, taking everything from artificial intelligence, technology and applying all these things together. I would like you to take us back to your own little story of origin. In other words, in childhood or school. You had an engineering focus at one point but even before that, if you want, give us a sense of who you were that you’re like, “I like to take things apart as a kid. I always knew I wanted to have my own company.” Anything along those lines.

I wish I could tell you that I was quite so intentional. Like most of us in life, find our way. Interestingly, I grew up in the Philippines. I spent most of my childhood in the Philippines. I lived there for seventeen years back and forth between the Philippines and spent a number of months in India as well, almost every year. I grew up as an international nomad. My family was not in business in any way. My father is a well-known agricultural scientist. He helped bend a lot of the varieties of rice that we all eat. My mother was an actress and a dancer. I have nothing in my background that would suggest that I should be a Silicon Valley entrepreneur except that I was good at asking questions and good at challenging people and their hypotheses. At the age of seventeen, I came to the US for the first time and went to Princeton, which was the first place I went to and then understood what it meant to live in cold weather and started college.

You took a break from undergrad before he decided to go to Harvard?

[bctt tweet=”Do you have seekers or customers? Go from transactional experiences to magical experiences.” username=”John_Livesay”]

That’s right. I finished up at Princeton. I studied Electrical Engineering. I was always interested in policy and public policy. I was an engineer early on at a pretty well-known lab called Bell Labs in New Jersey. I’ll tell you a funny story about that. In my first project because I was the newbie, the youngest engineer on the team, they were like, “We’re having this problem with processing this thing. This data stuff that’s going through our networks. It’s this thing called the internet but nobody cares about it. We mostly make our money with phone calls. Why don’t you figure it out and everybody else?” I went there, worked on it, came back with a solution. They were like, “We’re over budget. We’re not going to resource this thing. We do a great job making money, selling phone calls.” That was my first job out of college.

Eventually, I spent a few years after that on Wall Street as well, worked in investment banking. I learned about business and then decided I love tech. I loved the idea of creating something. That then took me down the road of my first entrepreneurial endeavor, which was in Europe. After I come to the US for the first time, I picked up and moved to Europe. I was setting up a telecom company over there. It’s selling broadband high-speed internet access. The funders and my cofounders were like, “Raj, you can move anywhere in Europe. Where would you like to go? I was like, “How about Paris?” I picked Paris. I was like, “There’s going to be beautiful women in there.” I moved to Paris then I went and tried to get a cell phone and they were like, “You need a bank account.” I went to try to get a bank account, then they were like, “You need an apartment.” To get an apartment they said you needed a cell phone. I got on the train and moved to London and set up the company in London. Lot’s changed since those days. There’s an entrepreneurial culture there as well but the most important thing which I think is the most formative experience of my career as I got to be an entrepreneur. I stumbled into entrepreneurship at the age of 23. That was before I went to Harvard and then never looked back because I loved it.

A lot of people are always fascinated by A) the people who get to go to Harvard then B) I know it’s probably a little bit impossible. If you had to sum up, what is your big takeaway from going to Harvard and getting your Master’s? Do you have a big insight? Was it the connections you made? Did they teach you something that you think was unique to Harvard for the MBA program?

Harvard is no different than any other university and other than the fact that it was started in the 1600s and had some pretty smart people, free education and lots of workplaces, as I tell my kids. The starting point is, there isn’t anything all that special about Harvard, except for the fact that you’ve got pretty accomplished, motivated individuals who come to try to learn something. For me, the biggest benefit of going and getting an MBA was I learned about business from its academic roots. Most importantly, it’s a very application-oriented school. It didn’t feel theoretical. It was every day you’re reading about actual real-life cases of situations that people are confronting and having to figure out what to do so that one day like riding a bike a lot of times and eventually getting good at it. You hope that your judgment is good when you’re ever in that situation. That’s what I took away from all this.

Let’s go to the story of Bloomreach because it is so rich. Kudos to you and your team for creating in such a digestible format of milestones. I don’t know if that’s your Silicon Valley experience showing but I look at a lot of websites, pitch decks and presentations. What I think you do well is define who you help and what problems you solve. It sounds may be obvious to everyone reading but it’s much harder than you might think unless you’re in that yourself to do that even the choice of words that you use because you and I are both authors. We love words. This premise here is that Bloomreach is that laser-focused. Right off the get-go, I’m thinking, “They’re not trying to be all things to all people. That tells me they might have some expertise.”

The Digital Seeker: A Guide for Digital Teams to Build Winning Experiences

You are painting a picture about having an intersection of eCommerce of what Amazon is. I know what marketing is, promotion, advertising and artificial intelligence. Let’s think about that for a second. As a person stopping by your site for the very first time, people process things and go, ”I know a little bit about each of those things. I know that even Amazon uses some artificial intelligence. If you liked this, you might want to buy that.” I start to feel like, “ I understand a little bit about what you do but then you go on to go, ‘We’re the only ones that take this data with the product the way people behave in the data which you’re not just giving projections or ideas on how to get more people to buy, get stuck in the checkout or you’re trying to deliver an experience.’” I thought to myself, “That I haven’t seen before.” I’ve heard lots of people like, “We’ll help you close more sales at the checkout. We’ll get more sales and things like that.” You’re doing something that you literally say is a magical experience. Please explain what a magical experience is as we combine those intersections.

You said it well, which is we live at the intersection of AI, marketing and eCommerce. We think that this is a golden age of eCommerce in many ways. We come off the pandemic, still with lots of suffering but eCommerce has accelerated by five years. It almost doubled in one year. It became the way we live. You asked about the founding of Bloomreach in many ways. The core insight of the founding of Bloomreach was that the class of AI technology that I became familiar with was being applied to places like Google and Facebook. It was being applied years ago. Mostly, in advertising. I thought to myself, “Do you and I go online because we’re interested in ads?”

I don’t think so. We go online because we’re interested in amazing experiences. We want shopping, reading, dating and all the things that make our life rich, just online. What if we could harness the power of AI and make it so that every webpage you see, email you open, SMS message you receive is exactly on point with what you’re seeking. In doing, the brands of when you over captured your hearts and you, on the other hand, found exactly what you’re looking for. If we can do that, if we can build the platform that made that possible, we touch the lives of seven billion people that all live with their lives online. The mission of Bloomreach was that magical experience. In 2021, many years later, we see those magical experiences. You asked, what do we mean by magical experience? At its core, the magical experience doesn’t just give you what you say you want. It knows what you seek but you haven’t yet set it and delivers that. That is the experience that’s magical.

Let’s get into that because that’s what great relationships do. When someone’s an active listener, they have any intuitive ability or a salesperson that shows some empathy to understand your pain points and can reframe what you are feeling. You haven’t even put it into words of, “That is my frustration.” My whole premise is that whoever describes someone’s problem is more likely to get a sale than someone who doesn’t because people think, “If you can describe my problem, you must have my solution.” This is completely relevant because everyone in retail is using eCommerce. It’s funny when I worked with the Banana Republic, they said to me, “We’re never going to be Neiman Marcus in terms of price point or perception of luxury but we would like to up our game.” We brainstormed about, “How do we define what luxury is beyond price?” We came up with this definition that sounds very close to what you described which is giving somebody something they need before they know they need it.

What’s cool is that we can go industry after industry. I can tell you who is serving the seeker and who is serving the customer. There’s a difference between those two things. To make that distinction clear, let’s imagine that as part of a relationship, you’re organizing a date. You might go out and book a restaurant. You’re a customer at that restaurant. That’s what you’re looking for at that moment as restaurant research but are you seeking a dinner or a great relationship for which the dinner is one step along that journey? You’re a seeker of a great relationship. You’re a customer of the restaurant. The key distinction between these two things, I often say the seeker is the person behind the customer. A higher level of motivation leads you to be a customer.

[bctt tweet=”We’re just coming off the pandemic, still with lots of suffering, but eCommerce has accelerated by five years.” username=”John_Livesay”]

The web is there for years and yet Amazon, for all of its glory, has transferred the work from you walking into the store, having a conversation and somebody recommending a book to read at a bookstore or a shirt to buy. Instead of that, they’ve turned the work and made it your problem to figure that out. You go to Amazon with your list. Like a grocery list you say, “I’m going to go buy this and that.” We used to have physical to-do lists. Now we have digital to-do lists. We go online and we say, “I got to do this.”

If I were out planning a vacation, I’m a customer of a rental car company, flight, hotel and all these different services but what I’m looking for is a memorable vacation with my family. That’s what I’m a seeker. What I have seen in industry after industry is that the winning digital experiences are built for the secret. They’re built for the person looking for a memorable vacation. They’re not built for somebody looking to expedite the car reservation.

I’ve never had somebody describe the difference between a seeker and a customer in such a clear way before because of the loop on that Banana Republic story. We’ll be able to compare that. What they decided was the 80/20 rule, “Twenty percent of our clients and the flagship stores in Manhattan, Banana and Union Square in San Francisco are giving us 80% of our sales. Let’s do something for those people.” They had somebody who walked in and said, “Would you like to charge your phone while you shop? We’ll hit. We have people here guarding it.” Unexpected luxury. They did that to up the experience. The outcome surprised them that sales went up 15% because you may not be surprised but they were. People kept shopping until the phone was fully charged. Not just half-charged, they would come back and go, “I’ll keep shopping.”

Luxury is great. The example you gave the Banana Republic, which is owned by a Gap. We work with so many of the Gap brands and Neiman Marcus is of the world. Behind every one of those shoppers is somebody looking for that quality of experience. Often, in luxury, it’s not about the clothing because everybody knows you can make that piece of fabric for much less money than you just pay for it. The question with the clothing is what it represents about yourself. There’s a reason why some people wear the Banana Republic and some people buy Chanel or Neiman. It represents something about themselves. It’s what they’re seeking at the end of the day.

Luxury is one of those great categories where the distinction between customer and seeker is so clear whether it’s the Banana Republic, Neiman or even some of the modern examples. If we take another luxury example or fashion, a company like Stitch Fix promises you a personal stylist experience. They don’t just say, “You know what brand you’re interested in.” They say, “We know what brand you’re interested in before you even know it. You fill out a profile and we’ll tell you what you should wear to this occasion.”

Digital Seeker: The magical experience doesn’t just give you what you say you want. It knows what you seek, but you haven’t yet set it and delivers that.

That leads us into, I’m going to take a leap off and say, “This is what motivated you to buy the book, The Digital Seeker, which is a guide for digital teams to build winning experiences, AKA magical experiences.”

I have seen this in the 25% of eCommerce companies that we support. People would ask me all the time, “Raj, you see the winners, you see the losers. Tell us why the winners win and losers lose.” To put it simply, I decided to write this book to explain the answer to that question. The winners win because they build magical experiences fundamentally. Amazon happens to be one kind of magical experience. It’s a magical experience, grounded in incredible selection at affordable prices and incredible convenience. There are lots of kinds of magical experiences in the world. The winners win because they figure out what magic represents. They figure out that those experiences are built for the seeker, ultimately not the customer, then they figure out how to go about building those experiences. This is where the tools of AI, machine learning, different org structures and business models all come together to shepherd the building of a winning magical experience.

This is one of the reasons I was excited to get to have you on my show was when I work with the companies and introduce them to the concept of storytelling genres. We look at different genres of storytelling different movies and brands that use it. One of the genres is the choice to go on an adventure or stay home. The movie is The Wizard of Oz. If Dorothy had listened, there it wouldn’t be a story. Expedia uses this genre to not just book cheap flights and hotels but go on this amazing adventure as you were describing with your family, then come back and tell all your friends about it. Like Dorothy did at the end of the movie. It transcends much like a story does transactional experiences into an emotional connection that then makes you want to brag about the experience.

That leads me to my next question. If someone has someone as a customer, let’s go back to your restaurant example and let’s say they have the most amazing date and night. The service was incredible. They brought a little cake, candle and made it extra special. Does someone who goes from being a customer like, “I know this restaurant. I know the food is good but I’m seeking this wow experience.” Suddenly this restaurant gave me that wow experience. I’m now not just a customer but almost a brand ambassador. This restaurant has a meaning to us like if I ended up marrying this person. We’re going to go back on our anniversary and say, “This is where we met or had our first date.” Suddenly, I’m much more than just a customer. I’m seeking that same feeling of magic.

One of the other great points of contrast between being a customer and being a seeker is that being a customer is a left-brain pursuit. Being a seeker is the right brain to pursue this where one is much more rational. The other is much more emotional. If you’re a customer, you might say, “I’m going to count the Yelp Reviews. I’m going to go figure out what’s the lowest price, who has the cuisine I like.” You’ll analyze and figure it out. If you’re a seeker, there’s just going to be something about that experience that stays with you, remains memorable and draws you back. The rational, emotional spectrum is quite different between serving the seeker and serving the customer.

[bctt tweet=”We go online because we’re interested in amazing experiences. We want all the things that make our life rich, just online.” username=”John_Livesay”]

The one that people talk about the most is Apple which is that seeker-centric experience but they’re all over the place. What I love about this approach is it isn’t just about Silicon Valley Startups and incredible creativity on Madison Avenue in New York. Every domain of every business has the opportunity to serve the seeker and win digitally in ways that prior to digital might not have been possible because digital opens up a set of tools that allow you to redefine your business and your brand in ways that in the physical world are much more expensive and often not affordable. Let’s use an example of if we take something like Peloton, which many of us know for an exercise bike. Is Peloton an exercise bike, a spin class or sets of spin classes or is it just for somebody seeking fitness?”

The people who built Peloton said, “People might be customers of exercise bikes but what they’re seeking is a fitness lifestyle. I’m going to give them the full lifestyle, a bike, infinite classes, schedule, great reviews and track it, competitions, the whole thing and put it together.” The best thing about the seeker-centric experience is the magical ones, as you almost can’t put them in a category because you don’t know, “Is Peloton a gym? Is it a bike? Is that a spin class?” Kind of. It’s all of the above. That would have been very hard to do in a pre-digital era.

You’ve tapped into my songbook here where you’re talking about left brain, right brain because the biggest mistake I see people when they’re selling anything whether it’s in person or online is, “I got to get people to know, like and trust me so let me push out a bunch of information.” That left-brain transactional customer thing do you know enough now to buy in how many Yelp Reviews. People buy emotionally then back it up with logic, whether it’s a luxury product, sports car or even a business purchase. Most of the people I have worked with are not aware of that. They don’t lead with stories. They lead with facts and figures and they’re like, “This makes the surgeries go 30% faster. Do you want one?” They wonder why they’re not winning sales.

It’s that ability to make the doctor using the equipment a hero that makes the doctor go, “This is how I see myself now. You reminded me of why I became a doctor for moments like this,” and all of those stories that make people resonate. The other thing that’s taken off is online courses. I’m thinking of talking about the range of Harvard all the way down to community colleges, then everything in between including online course experiences and options that are available to people. People are like, “Am I seeking a solution to a problem I have? Am I seeking a skill to improve myself? Maybe it’s both.” It becomes a whole different framework.

Education is interesting and we talked about how it’s hard to categorize things. Take something like a Coursera or Khan Academy which are online educational tools. What’s interesting is when you go to college or to a university, the question is the one you asked is, “What are you seeking?” If I gave you an option, I said, “John, I’m going to give you two choices. I’m going to either give you a great education on one side or a great credential that gets you a job on the other side but you can’t have the other one. If you pick A, you don’t get B. If you pick B, you don’t get A.”

Digital Seeker: The winners win because they build magical experiences fundamentally, figure out what magic represents, and then go about building those experiences.

It’s behind door number 1 or door number 2.

The interesting thing about identifying the seeker and the underlying motivation is sometimes people want things to cross boundaries. Sometimes people want to break things up. The reason I say that is we all lament in America how expensive college education has become. Many young students are in student debt because of it. Some of that is because universities are an unholy marriage between education on one side, research on another side, credentialing on a third side because if all you wanted to do was put coursework online. Coursera and Khan Academy have shown us that for free. You can create a website with all the knowledge and videos of the world without needing to go to Harvard and pay them $50,000 a year. What you’re paying for there is a fuller experience. It’s the environment, teaching, research, culture, conversations, knowledge and credential. What’s been very interesting about thinking about the world in this way education is a good example is it’s pretty clear you can dis-aggregate universities into the learning and the credentialing in different ways. It’s going to be pretty disruptive for education.

I remember when I was working with Lexus in LA when they were launching. The ad agency had said, “Our target audience is people who buy BMWs and Mercedes.” We have identified two different kinds of people that the behavior looks the same. They buy the BMW or the Mercedes but some people are buying it for external motivation. The same thing I’m sure it’s true of Harvard. I want to say I graduated from Harvard. Some people say, “I need that BMW logo when I pull up to the country club. I want to tell people I drive it.” If you’re an agent in Hollywood, back in the day, that all the agents at CA drove BMWs. It was part of the Armani uniform. It is all that outside motivation to fit in. I’ve arrived at all those statements but then there’s a whole group of people buying Mercedes and BMW that have don’t care about what other people think.

They’re internally motivated instead of externally. They are into the craftsmanship, workmanship and the way it feels, driving it for them is the motivation. That’s who we’re targeting because we can not compete with X number of years of history and branding as we’re launching a new thing. It was a fascinating conversation of the same thing is true of people who buy Gucci or Chanel products. In the fashion magazine, I was representing and saying, “The reason someone’s buying something is either they are trying to impress other people or they feel good in it they like the craft.” That’s another version of seeker versus customer in another lens that allows readers to start thinking of themselves of, “I need to take a look at my languaging on my landing page and the experience I’m giving people,” because there’s a reason why you have such a large percentage of market share. Twenty-five percent is huge.

We’re fortunate to power some of the best brands on the planet. The reason they work with us is it unlocks growth for them but it also allows them to reach customers in a much deeper way than ever before. I don’t want to send a message that analytics, data and math aren’t important in the digital era because it is. It’s not enough. It’s the beginning of reconstituting a magical experience. We have many more signals available to us to understand our consumers than we ever had before. We used to rely on surveys, focus groups and that’s how we would understand. Every click, every purchase and importantly, every non-click and every non-purchase is a yay or nay vote on what you just did online. Intelligent digital marketers are extracting those data points, leveraging the power of AI, figuring that out and then adding creativity and storytelling on top to reach people deeply.

[bctt tweet=”Digital allows you to redefine your business and your brand in ways that in the physical world are much more expensive.” username=”John_Livesay”]

This is the marriage. That is why you’re so successful and why this book is so needed now. I remember when it went from being sell ads in a magazine to a brand like Lexus or Neiman Marcus was all about brand awareness, feeling and the luxury of the magazine would be true. The feeling that someone has as they’re in that mode would be transferred to your ad. The measurability was brand awareness. It wasn’t anything about sales tracking, then it went digital. Now we want to track how many people are buying from the digital ad to programmatic where it’s like, “We don’t even care what the environment is.” One extreme or the other is probably not great, all gut or all numbers.

When you can integrate that final icing on the cake, if we just relied on AI, who’s clicking and who’s not clicking, then you’re just competing with somebody on pricing and technology. What you’ve done and what your book allows other people to do as a digital seeker is to figure out, “How I am going to add in this very important element of emotion and a magical experience to this process, knowing that that’s shifting somebody from just a customer who could be gone tomorrow if they get a better deal to someone who’s seeking an experience and is more likely to not only return but tell their friends about it?”

Sometimes people tend to think that data and technology are the enemies of emotion, humans and the light. I don’t believe that. I think that one is key to the other. If you were to have gone on that Peloton experience and can’t find a spin class, it could be the most emotionally resonant experience in the world. You still won’t like the surface. Technology still has to play its role. When we go on Spotify and it recommends a song to us because it just feels like it knows us. That’s technology reaching us emotionally in ways that are very deep because it knows, “I like this particular band or that genre of music.” No human being could probably figure that out correctly. Technology and AI can play a critical role in reaching us emotionally if we harness them well.

Like a good friend putting something in front of us that we didn’t even know existed or that we didn’t even know we needed, like the phone charging at the Banana Republic. Our brain is constantly craving new things to learn, see, do and experience. That’s what keeps things fresh. If someone wants to buy the book, the title is The Digital Seeker: A Guide for Digital Teams to Build Winning Experiences. If someone is interested in finding out more beyond the book of what Bloomreach can do, they can go to Bloomreach.com. Any last thoughts or quotes you might or a story you want to leave us with?

I think the story I’d leave you with is that all of this, that we’ve talked about. The Digital Seeker, the changing nature of how digital can transform, business life and people’s lives got a lot more interesting after the pandemic. As I say in the book, they are not which is what people talk about, the rate of spread of COVID, the infection rate and how it goes. The rate of spread of digital has just become explosive. I believe we’re almost an economic boom that comes from digital being in the center of a lot of our lives and inventing a lot of things to serve them and in happiness boom because if we do this right then maybe we’re commuting a little less. We’re randomly going on plane journeys a little less. Maybe we’re doing fewer things in the real world that we didn’t enjoy doing. We’re getting a lot more done digitally because the experiences are speaking to us so directly. With all the extra time that we have, we’re enjoying our friends and family that much more, hanging out at local restaurants, going on more pleasure trips if we can afford it, helping more people, transforming education and healthcare in the process. There is a potential happiness boom that I think is that.

Here is a cheer to not only an economic boom but a happiness boom that goes along with it. Raj, thank you for sharing your insights, tips on how we can all become better at giving magical experiences.

Thanks, John.

Important Links

• Bloomreach
  
• The Digital Seeker
  
• Coursera
  
• Khan Academy
• Better Selling Through Storytelling Method Online Course

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