Sucharita Mulpuru – Forrester Research
Sucharita Mulpuru is a Vice President, Principal Analyst at Forrester Research based out of Cambridge, MA.
Sucharita serves eBusiness & Channel Strategy professionals. She is a leading expert on eCommerce, multichannel retail, consumer behavior, and trends in the online shopping space. She is also a noted authority on technology developments that affect the online commerce industry and vendors that facilitate online marketing and merchandising.
In her research, Sucharita covers such consumer-oriented topics as eCommerce forecasting and trends, merchandising best practices, conversion optimization, and Social Computing in the retail world. She has also authored “The State Of Retailing Online,” a joint study conducted annually with Shop.org and a leading industry benchmark publication.
Prior to Forrester, Sucharita was the director of marketing at Saks Fifth Avenue, where she managed the customer acquisition, retention, and market research efforts for the $2 billion luxury retailer’s online channel. Prior to Saks, she held management positions at Toys “R” Us, where she was a merchant in the Babies “R” Us division and a store manager in one of the company’s largest toy stores. She also worked for the Walt Disney Company, where she developed and managed marketing plans for new business initiatives, including the Disney Stores, the Disney Cruise Line, and Club Disney.
Additionally, she was involved in the expansion of Cap Cities/ABC properties, specifically ESPN Zone, ESPN Magazine, and the Go.com network. She has written two nonfiction books and has contributed to BusinessWeek Online.
Sucharita holds a B.A. in economics from Harvard University and an M.B.A. from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
ASIANCE: Where did you grow up? Can you give us some history about you?
Sucharita: I was born in India but came to the US when I was little and spent most of my childhood in a little coalmining town of 20,000 called Fairmont, West Virginia. My father was a pediatrician and thought it would be a nice place to raise kids. When people heard I was Indian, they would ask what tribe I belonged to.
ASIANCE: How did you land the job at Forrester? Why did you switch to the research side as opposed to receiving the research for your previous jobs?
Sucharita: When you haven’t found something you love, I have a motto: Always Be Looking. The jobs I had before Forrester I knew I wouldn’t stay at long so every month I’d carve out time to look at company websites to see what was available and as soon as I saw an opening to jump on it. I’d been a client of Forrester for years and always thought that the analysts had a cool/interesting/challenging job and as soon as I saw that there was one to cover eCommerce and retail, I jumped on it. The analyst job at Forrester is a combination of business, journalism and academia. It’s unlike any other job I’ve ever had.
ASIANCE: Do you follow any other South Asian’s career?
Sucharita: I love it when I see South Asians land in prominent positions—I’m following Nikki Haley who’s Punjabi and running for governor of South Carolina now. I’ll always pause the radio or TV when I hear Sanjay Gupta from CNN is on. And I just am in awe of the Pulitzer Prize winning fiction writer Jhumpa Lahiri—the last novella in her last book Unaccustomed Earth haunted me for weeks.
ASIANCE: What company, in your opinion, has a great eCommerce model?
Sucharita: Amazon, hands down of the big players. It is an incredibly innovative company with a non-traditional revenue model that most always does right by the customer. Among small companies, I’m a fan of a little site that’s in my hometown called Heels.com. It has fun, affordable shoes and a really sharp, talented and young team running the company that has taught me a lot about entrepreneurship.
ASIANCE: What do you do in your free time?
Sucharita: What free time?? I have 2 little girls under the age of 5 so the only free time I have is waiting in airports, when I’ll speed dial old friends I’ve programmed on my mobile for exactly that purpose. Otherwise I’d never keep in touch with anyone.
ASIANCE: If you weren’t in research, what would you be doing?
Sucharita: Good question…probably blogging, being someone’s gadfly.
ASIANCE: What do you see as the future/trends of ecommerce?
Sucharita: Mobile commerce will be huge—it will have an enormous impact on where people access Internet content, but also how the content is presented. I think we’ll also start to see lots of businesses really pushing commerce capabilities that historically hadn’t, like Starbucks and McDonald’s.
ASIANCE: What do you see as the future of the internet?
Sucharita: Big, huge question…something that Forrester has over 100 analysts trying to figure out. Not sure a single line can do justice, but everything from smartphones to open APIs to IPTV to Bluetooth will change our lives.
ASIANCE: What are the 3 biggest differences between consumers who shop instore and consumers who shop online?
Sucharita: Web shoppers tend to shop online because of convenience, selection and value. They tend to be more affluent than the average store shopper, they tend to be younger and they tend to be more educated. The web is still a channel for those who are most comfortable with technology. That said, most people in general love shopping in stores and always will—it’s just a chance to get out of the house, and it’s often a fun, social activity of discovery.
ASIANCE: What advice would you give to companies who want to start an ecommerce site?
Sucharita: Find a business where you can drop ship a significant portion of your merchandise (i.e. don’t own your inventory, just pass the order on to others.)
ASIANCE: What advice would you give to existing online companies who want to start offering products online?
Sucharita: Find out if you can expand your assortment by drop shipping more of your assortment. Figure out how you can create product bundles where prices aren’t easily comparable. Take great pictures and listen to customer ratings and reviews.
ASIANCE: What advice would you give to women who want to follow your career path, including attending Harvard and Stanford?
Sucharita: I think women have a unique challenge because they’re usually the caretakers of their kids and raising kids is pretty expensive if you want to do it well. To cut to the chase, go to the best school you can get into and can afford to go to, do some hard soul searching and figure out what you want to do (ignoring all the noise of people taking lemming paths), do a gut check and make sure it pays you enough to make you happy and gives you some flexibility (very key when you have family), and pursue the heck out of it. Whenever you meet someone interesting—male or female, ask them how they got to where they are, what choices they made and why.
ASIANCE: I saw some of your Forrester Research reports. Which is the most important to read in your opinion?
Sucharita: When I first joined Forrester, my hiring manager told me “we’re not saving lives or curing cancer” implying that even though we’re a client-services company, we shouldn’t think we’re anything more than we are. To that end, nothing I’ve ever written isTHAT important. That said, if you’re in the retail world, you’ll probably find our 5-year forecasts or our benchmarking studies with Shop.org to be really useful. If you’re not in retail, I think you may like my Tweets more!
Follow Sucharita on www.twitter.com/smulpuru
To see research by Sucharita, please visit www.forrester.com