Asia-Pacific Power List 2022: Ravi Desai, Amazon

Ravi Desai

Director, mass and brand marketing
Amazon
India
Member since 2018

A member of the list since 2018, Ravi Desai, Amazon India’s director of mass and brand marketing, has spent the past 12 months trying to further promote and strengthen what he refers to as the Amazon Fundamentals: offering customers growing selection, great prices, and value for money and convenience.

In particular, when it comes to customer selection, Desai and his team have tapped into an Indian shopping insight where Indian customers love choice. To do so, he brought back an older campaign and slightly expanded it in the first half of 2022 that makes use of a phrase in India that captures the sentiment of loving choice called 'aur dikhao'.

'Aur dikhao' is essentially Hindi for ‘show me more’, which goes back to the insight around customers who love choice. Desai leveraged this insight five years ago in a campaign that was very successful and decided to bring it back in early 2022, but this time with a slightly expanded understanding of what the company can offer customers in terms of more ways to shop, more languages, more ways to pay, and more selection. It’s early days, but so far the campaign has delivered promising results. This comes at a time when Amazon has announced plans to increase its focus on local stores and social commerce to tap into the “next 500 million consumers” in India.

Meanwhile, with the past two pandemic years and the changes that customer lives have gone through, Desai and his team have focused on strengthening their customer mechanisms. This has largely involved predicting what categories are likely to be of relevance to customers, as well as making sure the shopping experience on the site, as well as the communication offsite syncs with what customers may be experiencing and what they would require from a solution like Amazon. 

Among his team, Desai has deliberately tried to foster more of a culture of empathy by gestures such as giving staff more flexible working arrangements and time to take care of other priorities beyond work, especially during the pandemic. Desai is also one of the co-sponsors of Amazon India's DEI program. He works to promote diversity and inclusion to relevant stakeholder sets in the employee ecosystem and outside of Amazon as well.

Sustainability is also a key focus area for Desai. There are a number of initiatives at play to improve sustainability across Amazon’s seller and partner ecosystem, the distribution product delivery side, and within internal operations. Whether it be a reduction of a certain kind of packaging material like plastics, or trying to reduce carbon footprint by getting electric vehicles into the entire delivery fleet, there is growing responsibility, given the scale of Amazon's operations, to do what is right by the planet.