marketer of the month

EPISODE 208: Marketer of the Month Podcast with Parag Parekh

Hey there! Welcome to the Marketer Of The Month blog!

We recently interviewed Parag Parekh for our monthly podcast – ‘Marketer of the Month’! We had some amazing insightful conversations with Parag and here’s what we discussed about –

1. Financial crime and fraud are heavily linked to identity verification failures.Introduction to IKEA’s launch on the GPT store and initial interaction metrics.

2. Journey from brick-and-mortar to seamless omnichannel retailing.

3. “Front Days” initiative and its role in understanding and improving customer experiences.

4. Strategies for identifying and nurturing high-potential talent in digital teams.

5. Overview of IKEA’s commitment to sustainability in digital initiatives.

6. Use of IKEA Family membership engagement as a key performance indicator.

About our host:

Dr. Saksham Sharda is the Chief Information Officer at Outgrow.co. He specializes in data collection, analysis, filtering, and transfer by means of widgets and applets. Interactive, cultural, and trending widgets designed by him have been featured on TrendHunter, Alibaba, ProductHunt, New York Marketing Association, FactoryBerlin, Digimarcon Silicon Valley, and at The European Affiliate Summit.

About our guest:

Parag Parekh is the Global Chief Digital Officer at Ingka Group | IKEA, based in Malmö, Sweden. With over 20 years of experience in digital leadership across retail, consumer products, and industrial sectors, he has held influential roles at companies such as Adidas, GE, Honeywell, and Tata. Parag has an MBA in Information Technology from NMIMS and completed executive development at Harvard Business School.

From Clicks to Carts: IKEA’s Chief Digital Officer Parag Parekh on Furnishing Stores of the Future

The Intro!

Saksham Sharda: Hi, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Outgrow’s Marketer of the Month. I’m your host, Dr. Saksham Sharda, and I’m the creative director at Outgrow. co. And for this month we are going to interview Parag Parekh who is the Global Chief Digital Officer Ingka Group at IKEA Retail.

Parag Parekh: Great to be here. Thank you.

Don’t have time to read? No problem, just watch the Podcast!

Challenge yourself with this trivia about the exciting topics Parag Parekh covered in the podcast.

Launch Interactive Quiz

Or you can just listen to it on Spotify!

The Rapid Fire Round!

rapid fire Don McGuire

Saksham Sharda: Let’s start with the rapid-fire round to break the ice. The first one is, at what age do you want to retire?

Parag Parekh: Never.

Saksham Sharda: How long do you get ready in the mornings?

Parag Parekh: 20

Saksham Sharda: Favorite color?

Parag Parekh: Red.

Saksham Sharda: What time of day are you most inspired?

Parag Parekh: Late afternoons.

Saksham Sharda: How many hours of sleep can you survive on?

Parag Parekh: Four. You stretch at three.

Saksham Sharda: Fill in the blank. An upcoming technology trend is ____.

Parag Parekh: Exciting.

Saksham Sharda: The city in which the best kiss of your life happened.

Parag Parekh: Paris.

Saksham Sharda: Pick one. Mark. Zuckerberg or Elon Musk.

Parag Parekh: Musk.

Saksham Sharda: The biggest mistake of your career

Parag Parekh: I didn’t take some of the opportunities that had come my way.

Saksham Sharda: How do you relax?

Parag Parekh: Sci-Fi movies.

Saksham Sharda: How many cups of coffee do you drink per day?

Parag Parekh: Four.

Saksham Sharda: A habit of yours that you hate?

Parag Parekh: Procrastination.

Saksham Sharda: The most valuable skill you’ve learned in life.

Parag Parekh: Relationship.

Saksham Sharda: Your favorite Netflix show.

Parag Parekh: Interesting. I may take this question again. Hold on. It’s been so many of these. Netflix. What was the Broken mirror?

Saksham Sharda: One-word description of your leadership style,

Parag Parekh: Visionary.

Saksham Sharda: Top priority in your daily schedule.

Parag Parekh: Meeting the team.

Saksham Sharda: Ideal vacation spot for relaxation.

Parag Parekh: Sangria.

Saksham Sharda: Key factor for maintaining a work-life balance.

Parag Parekh: Quality time with family.

The Big Questions!

Big Questions Don McGuire

Saksham Sharda: Alright, that’s the end of the rapid fire. Let’s go onto the bigger questions. So someone from the audience asked that IKEA has launched the ChatGPT store. Could you tell us a bit more about your launch on the GPT store?

Parag Parekh: Absolutely. Bear in mind it’s only been five months since we launched. So it’s very early trials. So far we have had approximately 3000 plus interactions which have resulted in anywhere between 500 to 600 visits to ikea.com. We are also seeing most of the engagement has been around product retrieval, and product search, in the category of sofas and outdoors. And of course, I think one of the bigger challenges we are identifying is the GPT store clearly has a subscription. We are figuring out how best to work in a fashion where we drive accessibility of our assistant on the charge g PT to the many people.

Saksham Sharda: And what led to the decision to launch the GPT store?

Parag Parekh: Clearly we are always experimenting with the best touch points where we wanna connect, engage, and inspire the customers. And of course, from that perspective, we have had fantastic stores. We migrated into the web and the app ecosystem. In some parts of the world, we are also into marketplaces, but, one of the channels we feel, will start becoming relevant now, but also in the future is what we see, with the emergence of GPT. Uand as new GPT started emerging, we felt that’s one of the places where we wanted to put ourselves ahead, try, learn, experiment, and really understand, how the engagement is going to be and, make it into being accessible to the many. And some of that might also be in the GPT. So really experimenting and looking forward.

Saksham Sharda: So in this test and try, are there any specific challenges or an interesting story you have about the implementation of the AI assistant?

Parag Parekh: I think it’s really a learning mode and I’ll, I’ll give you one of the examples, not necessarily about the AI assistant, but linked into it, we had launched the, the creative room design experience and planning experience to our customers about a year, year and a half ago. This is where it really allows the customers to go away from really selecting individual home furnishings to trying to understand what it feels like to bring this home furnishing into your room. So you really use your phone, you scan the room, you create your, version of your room, and then you see how the IKEA products would look and feel in that space. At some point, we decided we wanna bring that experience from the online world also into our store. So we created the same creative experience to bring it into a store and think of a small show set that we have in a store where you get to experience it. And we put a few room sets and pre-canned room sets for the users to start experimenting with. This in our stores in France, what we quickly started realizing was there were customers who were coming up to us saying, we just finished the design of a kitchen with your store coworker in the same store. Is it possible to have a look at that kitchen design in this store set? And all of a sudden we started realizing there’s a huge opportunity where customers who have just finished their design experiences, whether it’s the kitchen, whether it’s their bedrooms, whether it’s their taxes they would love to see it, and creative all of a sudden creates that opportunity. So when you work with the customers, the coworkers, we really are figuring out there’s so much opportunity and customers will tell us in terms of the best use cases and the best adaptation. And then it’s of course up to us how we are resilient enough to start adapting and start addressing some of those asks from our customers. So it’s all about listening and then being resilient in responding to what the customer is asking for.

Saksham Sharda: So speaking of response then, what strategies have you implemented to create a seamless omni-channel experience for IKEA customers?

Parag Parekh: I think we have come a long way. So when you look at IKEA this year, we celebrate our 80 years of existence, and we grew from being a company that started as a mail order company in a small village in Sweden. Now being the global leader in home furnishing. For a large part of this home furnishing journey, we were largely brick-and-mortar retailing somewhere around early 2010, or 2012. Customer behavior was drastically changing with the advent of smartphones. And we missed the queue on us having to adapt to this. But by 2015, 20 16, we realized we could no longer ignore that trend. And we really said we need to transform ourselves from being a brick-and-mortar retailer to being a true omnichannel retailer. So this is, we literally had to overnight start thinking about creating the foundations and the basics of what an omnichannel experience would look like. Believe it or not, in 2016, we had only 1% of our business, which was digital. Today we stand on an average of 25% of our business digital, and almost 50 to 60% of our orders are clubbed with one or the other services. And we had to start with where do we find inventory to show online. Where do we make sure that, what are the experiences? How do we create the possibility of key click and collect in stores? How do we fundamentally transform our stores into fulfillment units? So we are really making all of these transformations right from the experience level in terms of how customers interact with us in the app, in their web systems, and also in the store. How are we seamlessly connecting it, but to be unable to enable this, we are also having to change everything into our middle layers, so everything into our fulfillment systems goes right back into our ERP systems as well. So we have the saying group digital where we say we are changing almost everything at the same time. And I say almost, because the one thing we are trying to stay true is our cultures and values, and how do we make sure that we continue to embed this also while digitizing the whole towards our omnichannel experience? So it’s been a fantastic journey still lots to do, but come a long way from where we started.

Saksham Sharda: How do these transformations impact the customer journey? For instance, how do the “Front Days” and other immersive experiences contribute to understanding and improving the customer journey at IKEA?

Parag Parekh: I think just to explain front days, the concept of front days, this is where IKEA coworkers who are in the back office, who are in different functions also have the possibility to spend a full week in the stores and of course, depending on and spend in different parts and different organizations of the store. I just finished my front days about a month ago where I had the possibility then to spend time with the fulfillment team receiving and offloading trucks at four in the morning making sure to replenish the store, getting it ready before the store opens at 10 o’clock and making sure that picking up click and collect orders for having it ready for when the customers. But I also spend time in the HF bs, which is the home furnishing units in the bedroom and also with kids but likewise spend some time into our favorite restaurant serving some amazing meatballs to customers at the store in Malmo. So this is where you really truly first up understand the soul of Ikea. The store is at the soul of Ikea, and it gives you the possibility of understanding how the store really becomes a community. And we at Ikea always say, we are one big family. This is where the whole concept of IKEA as one big family comes together. So that’s, that’s probably the first real true experience you get from being away from the corporate world in the stores. But secondly, you start understanding what’s relevant from a customer perspective, what’s working, what’s not working, but also what are the challenges that the coworkers are feeling and in my case, when they’re using some of the digital solutions, and I’ll give you two concrete examples this time around when I was doing a visit in the store in Malmo the coworker led me to this one fantastic chair. And the chair actually had a label to say, please experience this chair. It’s only when you experience it, you’ll realize how comfortable this is. Now, this is really a hard wooden chair looking at it, you would feel it’s not really soft enough and not really comfortable enough, but when you sit down and you experience it, you realize it creates a different experience. But I had to try this out. What she asked me was something that had me thinking, how do I bring this possibility of test and trying in the digital world? How do the same chair when displayed in the digital world, how do I give customers who are looking at it digitally feel the possibility of experiencing it? Then we have a lot of commercial rules and guidelines in terms of how our stores are staffed. It gives me a fantastic opportunity to understand that and see what that means. Our commercial guidelines, the way showrooms are prepared, the way commercially they are set up, how do I apply that to the digital world as well? And if I take I I told you about my experience of replenishing the store you really have to use the tools. And that’s when you realize how very simple changes in terms of the user experiences can make a phenomenal experience differently for the coworker helping with productivity and efficiency, but also putting a smile on their face. So this is where I, I really believe, truly believe front days are phenomenal in putting yourself in the shoes of the customers and the coworkers, and really truly bringing that back into your day-to-day job. So something that is a must-try out for a lot of us.

Saksham Sharda: So now tell us about your regular days that are not front days, you wake up in the morning, and then what is your schedule like?

Parag Parekh: Every day in a week is fundamentally different. My role from a digital perspective goes from making sure that we are operating 24 by seven in all parts of the world that we are operating into. And sometimes goes from making sure we have the right wifi and network capabilities in all our stores and our sites to really designing some of the best experiences today and for tomorrow. So it really starts with getting a first view of what the day-to-day looks like. Of course, if we are into some of the discussions like what we have today making sure we have a little bit of an understanding of what I’m stepping into, what are those preparations? And then it’s a mix and match of what we call committees and councils on specific initiatives and topics. But also I use the week to divide to say, there are parts of the week where I focus on content, but then there are parts of the week where it’s really dedicated towards one-on-one with either my direct reports or skip meetings, but also meeting teams and visiting the different sites and making sure that we have the possibility of really connecting and understanding what’s happening across. So it really goes week to week. I think it’s a good mix of ensuring content for my customers both internal and external, but likewise, a lot of time spent with my people as well.

Saksham Sharda: So if you had to put an average guess on it, how much of your time is taken up by meetings?

Parag Parekh: 50, 60% of my time goes into meetings. Ideally, it needs to go into a session where we are able to delegate this out to the rest of the organization and really use in-person time more for connecting and meeting individuals and or teams. Ideal scenarios, probably 30% would be a good bet, but I think it’s something that I’m working on.

Saksham Sharda: So speaking of delegating tasks, how do you identify and nurture high-potential talent within Ikea’s digital teams?

Parag Parekh:  We have been able to attract fantastic talent and we have some amazing programs to be able to grow them both from a vertical aspect of the digital muscle and also to figure out how we can bring some of the digital talents and bring them into a lot of what we call the retailing world outside in the broader Inca and the IKEA world one of the most recent has had been the head of Omni meeting points in our retail business is someone who has had been a chief product officer in group digital. So this is where we are really starting to mirror group digital to work extensively with our business. And that’s why we are starting to see a fantastic amalgamation of talent. At IKEA, we always say togetherness is at the heart of everything we do and we truly are bringing this to life. So it’s amazing to see the talent blossom and when you see some of the talents grow and achieve what they’re achieving that’s also tremendously satisfying.

Saksham Sharda: And what approaches or do you have an interesting story around any approaches that you’re taking to achieve personalization at scale within Ikea’s digital platforms?

Parag Parekh: I think I always say currently we have been on this journey of moving from being a brick and retailer brick and mortar retailer to being an omnichannel retailer. In the last five to six years, I think we have cracked the code of making sure that we are omnibus when it comes to seamlessly connecting the different channels and allowing you to transact omnichannel into different parts of the IKEA ecosystem. One of the topics though, which is on our agenda where we really need to go from being good to great is essentially how do we get to an omnichannel experience, which is engaging and inspiring also from across all of our ecosystems. And I’ll give you a very concrete example. When you are in a store, and of course one of the big attractions of being in an Ikea store is the fantastic room sets and the showrooms you see while visiting a store. And you really see how life in one of those room sets, whether that’s the living room, whether that’s a bedroom, really looks like the topic we are working on, is how do I bring that room set to life also in the digital context, and with the same set of inspirations and the same set of engagement that you would see in a store. This is something that is a work in progress, but when I do this, how do I make sure that someone who already is an Ikea family member who we know has likes and dislikes, how do we also start personalizing those room sets for the journey the family member would have, right? From exploring to engaging, to discovering, to really going to, the transaction at the end of it. So this is where we are discovering ourselves, but also one other thing IKEA does from a life at home leadership, we reach out to the many people in different parts of the world. We do home visits. We try and understand what it means to live at home in different parts of the world, and amazingly enough and understandably enough, life at home is very different in different parts of the world. We are bringing this knowledge both into our products, but also how we engage with them from a localized perspective in a store, and also from a personalized experience in the digital ecosystem. So still on a journey of work to do and something that we are evolving, and you will see more of it in the coming years as well.

Saksham Sharda: How do you measure the effectiveness of all these personal personalization strategies? A lot of businesses are also looking to measure the ROI of certain strategies. So what advice would you have?

Parag Parekh: So at IKEA we have what we call the value drivers. This is how the company measures it on the different KPIs, which is, which goes from, of course, the business performance, but also our performance and aspects of corporate sus, corporate governance aspects of sustainability aspects of leadership at life at home. But when it comes to personalization with regard to customer experience, our biggest benchmark is in terms of family the IKEA family and the loyalty and engagement we create. As we speak. Today, we have about 190 million IKEA family members. The challenge we sit with is how many of them are active and what, at what rate are we really working with them? And this is something that we are actively working to say, how do we go from one or two interactions in a longer timeframe to really having meaningful five to 10 interactions ideally in a month? This is something that we are putting at the heart of it. So clearly the family membership and what’s the size of family membership, but most importantly what’re the active customers that we engage within the family and driving loyalty around this clearly on our radar and something that will be on our agenda in the coming months.

Saksham Sharda: Alright, so transformation. We’ve talked about transformation, personalization, and measuring effectiveness. Let’s talk a bit about sustainability now. How is IKEA integrating sustainability into all of these digital and technological initiatives and transformations?

Parag Parekh: Sustainability is one of the three roads that we speak about from an IKEA perspective. So at Ikea, we talk always about the three roads really being affordable for the many, creating a better life for many people, being accessible to the many, and last but not the least being sustainable. And clearly, sustainability has been a topic on our agenda and it goes across the full ecosystem from the forest to the product and back. And we are as Ikea, we are evolving the full ecosystem and a lot’s happening in terms of how do we best design sustainable products. How do we make sure that we are able to get these products to our customers in the most sustainable way through the right mobility using the right fulfillment centers and really reducing the impact on the planet around us? Last but not least, how do we make sure that when these products are with our customers, we are also able to turn around and make sure that if they wanna give a second life to these products, they’re able to bring it back either into a recycling unit as we have in the Netherlands, and I’ll speak about it, but also are able to bring it and give it a second life to a different IKEA customer. So if I take two concrete examples here in the Netherlands we allow everyone who has used a mattress to be brought back to Ikea into what we call a mattress. And we as Ikea will recycle this for all of the Netherlands. This is something that we have kicked off and extremely proud of being able to make sure that mattresses, which maybe historically have been burnt really have a second life and are recycled in the best possible way. But likewise, one of the initiatives I’m super proud of is kicking off what we call circular. And we are now experimenting with how we best allow for peer-to-peer connects. We of course have buybacks where if you are an Ikea customer, you can bring back your old furniture, IKEA furniture into our stores and we will buy it back from you. But also we are now enabling and piloting with some of our first POCs of allowing customers to connect and giving Ikea products a second life. So super exciting, stay focused. We are launching this soon in Spain and Norway, but I’m super excited about this initiative as well.

Saksham Sharda: Alright, so the last question for you then is of a personal kind. What would you be doing in your life, if not this?

Parag Parekh: Teaching? I really grew up as the son of a teacher. And of course in my early days also helped my mom with teaching and I really enjoyed doing this. So clearly, if not this as a career and something that I’m also looking to evolve is how do we really embrace this and help prepare the next generation. Super excited about it.

Let’s Conclude!

Saksham Sharda: Thanks, everyone for joining us for this month’s episode of Outgrow’s Marketer of the Month. That was Parag Parekh who is the Global Chief Digital Officer Ingka Group at IKEA Retail.

Parag Parekh: Pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Saksham Sharda: Check out the website for more details and we’ll see you once again next month with another marketer of the month.

Similar Posts

Leave a Reply