# Between Mobile and Web: The User Lifecycle in Both Worlds

- Link: https://phiture.com/mobilegrowthstack/between-mobile-and-web-the-user-lifecycle-in-both-worlds/
- Published: 2020-09-01T09:04:18+01:00
- Author: Varun Thunugutla

#### ⌊Between Mobile and Web: The User Lifecycle in Both Worlds⌉⌊Between Mobile and Web: The User Lifecycle in Both Worlds⌉

_Varun Thunugutla is a man that binds two worlds. Having worked in marketing for
more than 13 years, his career has spanned the worlds of mobile and desktop. His
roles, which include being a Marketing Director and Manager at Zalando and Idagio,
have seasoned his experience in lead generation, the user lifecycle, and the perfect
marketing campaign. On a hot day in Berlin, Varun sat down with the Mobile Growth
Stack to talk about his experience in mobile, web, understanding the user, and what
companies should be doing during COVID-19. _

#### **First of all, who are you and what’s your background?**

Hey! I’m Varun, and I’ve been working in marketing for close to 13 years now. My
academic background is in economics, after which I decided to get my feet wet with
the working world. I started off as an account manager at Google, taking care of
a portfolio of clients in North America. This was back in India where I’m originally
from. Since 2012, however, I’ve been working in mobile in e-commerce, gaming, weather
forecasting, music streaming, and now, health tech. It’s been predominantly mobile,
but I’ve taken a conscious decision to step out of mobile for a bit—to catch up 
with all other topics and sort of align both these skills together again at some
point. 

#### **From your experience moving from mobile to web, what are the defining differences between the two? **

I think the defining difference is speed. And I choose speed simply because if we
talk about big topics like GDPR, and data privacy, you first speak about it in the
world of web, but you come to terms with it a lot faster in the mobile world. So
a small example would be if we talk about web browsers like Safari or Firefox. They’ve
had this hard rule where they say, okay, starting now, we’re going to be a lot more
aware of the cookies you can use. Google plays the long game by saying that they’ll
keep things the way they are until 2022, when they’re planning on introducing a 
sort of privacy sandbox, limiting advertisers to a certain extent. 

But if we speak about mobile, we’re talking about the SKAdNetwork, and we’re looking
at what’s happening with the next change during the IOS14 rollout. We’re also asking
what that means for IDFAs, and how advertisers and DSPs deal with it.  The conversations
are a lot faster on mobile, and it happens very, very quickly. There’s no time, 
so to speak, to take the luxury of figuring things out, you just go head on collision,
right? And then you figure it out along the way. So the risk is always very high,
but the reward is extra sweet as all of us know.

#### **What does the difference look like from a product development perspective?**

Something that I’ve always campaigned for is very close product-marketing that has
a mix within every organization. I think some organizations have done a brilliant
job of that; some organizations are still slow to the game. I think when it comes
to things like data privacy and what that means for the actual data that you work
with, teams that have aligned a lot more in terms of customer service, consumer 
research, and product based developments tend to win. These teams are also very,
very closely aligned on marketing audiences: your active users, the users that you
want to target,and the overall future pool of your users. 

If you look at it purely from a product development spectrum, you’re trying to build
the best product for a certain kind of user. But to get started at all, you do actually
need user acquisition. And when you do user acquisition, you’re talking about different
kinds of users based on the platforms you’re reaching them on. And these are points
of information that are very crucial for anyone working on a product to see in the
light of the product itself, because your current active users might not necessarily
be the ones that you thought you’re developing the product for, but there might 
be a huge value there, right? People often tend to ignore this. 

A very good example would be something that I saw when I was working in weather 
forecasting, where we didn’t think of certain audiences at all. However, we realized
that certain demographics, like people in sports—cycling enthusiasts in particular—
could tend to be quite a huge segment of value for us. And then you start to pivot
the product accordingly. But there was no way we knew the potential of certain sub
personas from the very start, neither from a product perspective nor from a marketing
perspective.

#### **Do you also see this in the world of the web, too? **

Oh yeah, absolutely. Currently, I work for a company that manufactures hearing aids,
and owns the entire supply chain. So everyone from the stores to the audiologists
are employed by the company themselves. In an environment like this, where there’s
a very heavy offline component and a very short online component, I think understanding
the user is paramount simply because you’re talking about sales cycles that are 
just not altogether common in the mobile sphere. 

If you’re not doing enough research on your users on their pain points, even before
you start your product planning, or if you don’t have the feedback funnels, from
say, your stores or your customer service teams into product on a continual basis,
you’re just developing the wrong thing for the wrong audience. And that can cost
a lot of money.

#### **A great place to pivot to the user lifecycle here. Once you have an idea of who your users are, what’s the most efficient way to achieve great user lifecycle management?**

At the risk of not sounding ad nauseum, it’s  what most experts would call funnel
based marketing. The only reason I’m mentioning the concept is because on the one
hand, as a first step, you try and understand your user—or shall I say users because,
you can have different kinds. But as a second step, it would be the identifying 
of users in different funnel stages of your sales cycle. So here it’s the same game
from your marketing methodology 101: awareness, interest, desire, and action. And
you need to make sure that you reach the people in the correct stage with the right
kind of content. That’s definitely one thing that works irrespective of whether 
it’s mobile or web, and irrespective of the kind of vertical you come from.

#### **But do you see a difference between the web and the mobile world here in terms of what you’re describing?**

Oh yeah, absolutely. The fact that an app is native to the platform that your phone
works on makes it the first and closest touch point to an actual user.  This makes
a world of difference, especially when you look at this in terms of user [lifecycle management](https://phiture.com/mobilegrowthstack/lifecycle-marketing-101-21e874be642f/).
Mobile CRM is a complete world apart: we’re talking about very quick information
points that are delivered to the user, and that you can also iterate on very soon.

On the web, it’s very different simply because you don’t have people who are opening
up mobile websites on their phone all the time. Of course, you have desktop notifications
and web notifications, but it’s just not the same level of dependency or the same
amount of spontaneity that you can have on mobile.

#### **And now, the classic COVID-19 question. What are your thoughts on the new data that suggests that users are spending less time on mobile and more time on the web? **

I think that the companies who have a product or service offering which is seamless
and platform agnostic are definitely ones that see the least amount of change. But
I think companies should also consider the following question: how important is 
the choice of going mobile to you in the first place? What is your actual product
and service offering? And most importantly, how much of the native efficiency of
an operating system does it need to function if it’s something that relies on say
GPS? So I think these are the hard questions that companies and product managers
need to figure out to choose the right path.  Irrespective of the pandemic, it comes
down to the vertical, and to the use case you’re trying to solve. And the most simplistic
way of looking at it is try and keep your users engaged, irrespective of the platform.

#### **Any advice for companies at the moment? **

The one quality that everyone needs to have at a time like this is to have an open
mind when it comes to learning. It doesn’t mean that you have to sit and code all
night to figure things out. But I think as long as you have your receptors out, 
and you’re able to judge how things move, you could contribute with your product
or service in a corresponding manner. Read the market. Don’t take people for granted.
Take technology at its face value and ask the right questions: it’s all about how
relevant it can be for you.