Varun Bhardwaj takes up new role at Amazon’s Global Studio

WASHINGTON: Most marketers pick a lane. Varun Bhardwaj has driven in several at once, and Amazon has just handed him a job that needs all of them. The brand, product marketing and go-to-market veteran is moving to Amazon’s Global Studio in Seattle as global campaign and AI scaling lead, working across global campaigns and helping scale artificial intelligence across creative and marketing.

He has a knack for turning a career of hard-to-classify work into an advantage. “I did occasionally wonder whether I should have picked a lane,” Bhardwaj says of a path that has taken in brand, product marketing, go-to-market, business strategy and, in his words, a fair number of things nobody seemed keen to own. Apparently not. The new role brings quite a few of those threads together, with AI added, he jokes, because marketing was clearly in danger of becoming too simple.

Behind the wit sits a method. Before any brief or campaign, Bhardwaj asks four plain questions. What is this for? Who is this for? Why now? How can this get better? Simple questions, he notes, are usually the hardest to answer, and he has spent more than 15 years, most of them at Amazon, looking for answers across product marketing, brand and go-to-market.

The record shows the range. Bhardwaj joined Amazon in November 2012 as a business analyst in Bengaluru, part of the Amazon.in operations pilot team that set up the company’s delivery network in India. The team offered innovative services such as guaranteed next-day delivery, and he managed capacity planning for the logistics network. In February 2014 he moved into marketing and merchandising for consumer electronics at Amazon.in.

From November 2015 he worked on brand for Amazon Now and Amazon Pantry, and later became senior brand manager for Amazon Prime, a role he held until December 2019. He then became head of brand marketing for India Marketplace in Bangalore, serving from December 2019 to July 2021. A move to Seattle followed, where he served as global product marketing lead for Alexa Shopping from July 2021 to March 2023. His most recent post, from March 2023 until now, was head of brand for Fulfillment by Amazon. The sweep from a delivery-capacity spreadsheet to a global brand is not a common one.

Before Amazon, Bhardwaj built his foundations in British and Indian retail. At Tesco, from November 2009 to September 2012, he worked in Welwyn Garden City as a senior analyst in trade planning, handling range planning and space allocation for dotcom-only stores. He began there as a marketing analyst, doing category performance analysis and competitor tracking. Earlier, in 2009, he was a management trainee at Carrefour WC&C India in Gurugram, working on asset management, a document management solution for invoice matching and a business intelligence reports pack.

Analysts who become brand builders tend to be useful in an age of AI. Bhardwaj understands both the numbers behind a campaign and the story it has to tell, which is what a job spanning global campaigns and the scaling of AI in creative work demands. Few people can claim fluency in logistics, retail analytics, brand and product marketing. He can.

Bhardwaj also writes Intentional Nonsense, a newsletter of what he calls supposedly profound thoughts, an attempt to stay on brand in LinkedIn’s sea of profundity. He is refreshingly honest about his news, too, admitting he would not be sharing it if he did not want people to notice.

He is also realistic about what lies ahead. He is excited and curious, and old enough professionally, he says, to know that the first week in a new role is usually when confidence begins meeting facts. His request to those already deep in the world of AI and marketing is plain: send him what is actually useful. With a curiosity that big and a career that wide, expect him to make good use of it.