Rahul Singh on sustainability and data and measurement

great have you on the show well thank you for having me now you're a very interesting marketeer and round I know before we get into the topic I know you have a very particular perspective on how brands tell stories start us off there please well storytelling at least that's this is my definition in the context of business is really about you know wrapping up or packaging your value proposition in a you know in a humanized narrative right and for some reason it is assumed that you know in the world of B2B where I come from there is very little space to do that to be able to create a narrative which talks not just to the brains of your customers but to their hearts but nothing can

be far from the truth in fact I am I'm personally a huge fan of a storytelling format which I call B2B B2B2C right which is which is really about telling your story from the perspective of your customers customer right so the story is not about what we sold and what they bought it is about the impact that they created in the lives of their customers and their employees and really proud of a piece of work that our team created about two years back when SAP was completing 25 years of its inception in India you have used this B2B2C format and we looked at you know the changes that have happened in India in the previous 25 years and it was just incredible to see the transformational change that had happened in

sector after sector right so if you look at automotive power utilities multiple sectors right so we decided to tell the story let's say if you pick up automotive right in 1996 there were probably two car brands in India and now the whole world is here eight out of ten cars that that run on Indian roads are manufactured by our customers okay so that's the way that's the hard data point but the story that we told was from the perspective of the first car buyer Rajesh who moved from his scooter to a car for the first time we were there right so that's that's storytelling from the point of view of your customers customers in fact and even today our

storytelling narratives are built on two broad pillars right one is one is sustainability of course and the other is customer success we'll get on sustainability I'm going to push back a bit on you Raoul because we've met many marketers who have B2B that will say it's all about enabling stories but are your consumers buying that

it's all very well telling these stories but are your consumers buying into these brand stories yeah I mean if you look at our business in the last let's say three or four or five years I think the success that you've seen in markets like India is is a testimony to the fact that those stories work and as technology is becoming more and more commoditized I think storytelling or differentiated storytelling is very very important to be able to create a

different position for yourself well I'm being in the market for 25 years congratulations by the way is gives you an advantage right more years more stories absolutely I mean globally of course this is 50 years old in India we are about 27 years I love it's it's a bit like the queen he has a who has an official birthday and a real a real birthday but let's let's get into sustainability pushback number two Raoul big tech businesses that have been around a long time the the the the the

skepticism lies in these fellows are out now all talking a sustainability game but they weren't like that 50 years ago how do you tell authentic stories Raoul well sustainability to start with for us is is not a brand narrative okay it is actually embedded in everything that we do it's not a story it's not a story right but having said that

um um you know we've been like I said we've been uh in business for 50 years right and and our customers are half a million businesses that that that are SAP customers are actually some of the most successful businesses but do remember they're also the biggest carbon uh emission contributors as well right uh so that gives us that ability I mean it's a natural progression for SAP because we've been in the business of improving processes uh for all of these customers so for all of these customers so for us to take take those solutions to the market is one part of our story which means our sustainability solutions which fit into that entire portfolio is is one approach but I think from a from a brand perspective um I think

a more important approach is uh is something that we call leading by example uh where SAP SAP tells the story of how um a large multinational operating out of 160 companies 100,000 employees how we have managed to reduce our own carbon footprint over over the last uh in fact we started our sustainability journey in 2009 so it's been 15 years and for each of those 15 years we've topped uh the Dow Jones sustainability index uh in in our business category and also um we are going to become carbon neutral in 2023 two years ahead of time and by 2020 2030 uh we intend to be net zero well that that's awesome and listening to you it's really interesting because as an enabling brand these sustainability

stories not only inspire your downstream clients but they also of course inspire other big businesses who may or may not be your clients well you've been a fantastic guest on this show thank you so much thank you jespa my pleasure