Interview
A final farewell to (and from) Mohit Lal
Pernod Ricard Global Travel Retail Chairman and CEO Mohit Lal is about to bow out of the role he has occupied with such distinction for the past seven years to take a well-earned but almost certainly very active retirement.
Lal, who has held several senior roles across the French drinks group during the past 23 years, is being replaced by Laurent Pillet, currently Managing Director Pernod Ricard Eastern Europe as Pernod Ricard Global Travel Retail CEO.
As his final TFWA World Exhibition in Cannes drew to a close, Lal spoke to Martin Moodie in a typically warm and insightful conversation about his years in travel retail, his thoughts on the channel and his (non) plans for the future.
Here is an edited version of that encounter. For the full version click The Moodie Davitt Podcast icon below.
Martin Moodie: When did you first enter travel retail? Because there’s been a couple of stints in different roles, hasn’t there?
Mohit Lal: Really the first full-time travel retail role was August 2015 when I moved to Hong Kong to take on the Asia travel retail role. But prior to that, because the group was not organised globally for travel retail, the roles that I took were in India, which is where I started off with Pernod Ricard as the CFO. We looked after duty free as well as duty paid.
From there I moved to Dublin, Ireland where again we looked after duty free and duty paid. Then I went back to India to run the India business, again looking after duty free and duty paid and then went to Hong Kong, which was a pure duty free job. So I don’t think there’s ever been a time in my career with the group that in some shape or form have not been associated with duty free.
In conversation with Mohit Lal; click on the icon to access the audio interview
Mohit Lal greets Martin Moodie at the Pernod Ricard suite at the Majestic Hotel in Cannes
Let’s look back on those years. Tell us how the travel retail channel has evolved and where you see it today.
If I look back at 2015, when I got into the channel, there was a lot of talk about how online retailing would start to kill not just High Street retailing but duty free too.
Because the assumption that was made at that point of time was that pricing was the biggest driver in travel retail, and as the online environment took over, the relevance of the channel – because it didn’t have the same pricing advantage to offer to shoppers that it erstwhile had – would spell a death knell to the channel.
But that has proven otherwise and I’ve always believed that there is a certain uniqueness about this channel, and about how it is able to engage with travellers and convert them to shoppers.
That will ensure that this channel can stay as vibrant and healthy as ever, irrespective of what happens on the High Street, and the beauty of the channel is this luxury of time and mind space.
What I mean by that is if you look at shoppers, particularly for our category, most of the purchases that are made are by leisure travellers or people travelling to meet family and friends.
When you’re doing that, you’re doing it with a mindset that is open, that’s exploratory, that’s relaxed. On top of that, your sense of time, once you cross the security queues at an international airport, is very different.
Normally, particularly for leisure travellers who are travelling either as a group or with family, you always keep enough time to make sure you’re not rushing to catch your flight. It’s this element of mind space and time that creates the unique opportunity for brands to interact with travellers, in a way that travellers are never ready to interact with brands when they are in their domestic markets.
That’s the essence of the value that travel retail creates. It fulfills not a clinical need to buy but an emotional need to shop. And so long as brands and retailers are able to drive that emotional connect, there’s absolutely no reason why this channel will face consistent headwinds ever. You’re in a constant tailwind. As I say, if planes fly and people travel, they will shop, they will buy.
Absolutely. To continue the analogy, there will be constant crosswinds. Because there’s always going to be bumps and sometimes some severe turbulence as we’ve just seen [with the pandemic]. But that human desire to travel and then to behave differently when we travel isn’t going to go away.
I often say this to our teams and at times, even with our retail partners, that the beauty of this channel is it’s exciting, and it’s exciting because it’s a rollercoaster ride upwards. And in a rollercoaster ride, you’ve got to enjoy the downs as much as you enjoy the ups.
Because every time there’s a down, at some point in time, there suddenly is going to be an up. That’s really the beauty of this channel, that you have to take the fact that it’s not going to be on even keel all the time. You have local issues that create bumps, you have global issues that create bumps.
But every time you go down, you know that you just have to wait for it to start going back up. Therefore, enjoy the downs – there’s a lot of opportunities that the downs create that the ups do not because everyone’s looking at the up.
What was it Mark Twain said? “Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.” And that probably applies quite well to travel retail. We’re several months on from what we would commonly call the end of the pandemic. We’re in a better state now, not always in terms of spending, but in terms of mindset and collaboration than we were pre-crisis.
I think we are much, much better. One of the uniquenesses of this channel that I felt when I was about 12 to 18 months into it was because I had never interacted directly with customers prior to coming into Hong Kong in the Asia travel retail business. Never.
Before I got into this channel, I said, let me talk to people who worked with the off trade. And the stories that I got to hear were not pleasant. It was almost like you’ve got to figure out which day you become the punching bag. And so you approach this channel and you approach customers with a very cautious mindset to say, you could become the punching bag anytime.
But over a period of 12 to 18 months, I realised that there’s an ease with which you can both be walking the same path, despite the fact that you’re sitting on opposite sides of the table. And while inherently there is that element of competition, if you start to build transparency and trust, there is a huge sense of collaboration and partnership that naturally comes about.
It takes a while to build that transparency and trust, and then rather than have this whole relationship between suppliers and customers, you actually end up making friends in this channel.
When I look back at my eight years in travel retail, the maximum number of friends that I’ve made have been sitting on opposite sides of the table. So it’s very endearing to begin to understand that there is a heart and soul of this channel that is very different from the heart and soul of what happens in domestic markets. It’s very, very endearing and therefore very emotional in terms of the fact when you’re sitting at the edge of the cliff saying, now I’m jumping off.
International spirit: Mohit Lal speaking at The Trinity Forum 2022, alongside (from left) Nestlé ITR General Manager Stewart Dryburgh, L’Oréal General Manager for Travel Retail Worldwide Vincent Boinay and Martin Moodie (right)
Yes. I think the internationalism of our channel is key to that. That’s the differentiator. I think it’s humbling for all of us because much of the time, by definition, we’re outside our own domicile. We’re in this global world, and you and I could go to pretty much any country in the world, make a call and we could have a very nice dinner with a very engaging person.
I find this international spirit humbling. So I often refer to the travel retail community as opposed to the industry, which I think is a utilitarian word.
Very true. So it’s been a fascinating journey. As I say it’s hugely privileged in a way to have had the fabulous opportunities that Pernod Ricard offered to me.
I actually joined Seagram and within six months the business was up for sale. It’s not a pleasant thing for you when you’re just about to switch jobs, and joined what you thought would be an area that you’d want to be in for a decade or two, and then Pernod Ricard came in and acquired the entire business in India.
And for me, there’s been no looking back. It is a small business that Seagram used to run in India that Pernod Ricard took over. It was a market that had its challenges but had huge opportunity, and the first six years or so I spent in India to create a base, to begin to understand this industry.
Then Pernod Ricard offered me the fabulous opportunity of going to Ireland, a country that I’d actually visited the first time when Seagram organised an event in Dublin.
So I’d visited Dublin along with my wife and therefore, when the opportunity came to move to Ireland, we were almost ready to jump at it because we’d enjoyed our time over there.
We had school-going children, and they also took to Ireland quite easily. My son is still involved in a lot of Irish music. He’s a musician. So he is based in New York, but he is still associated with a lot of Irish music while in the US, though he plays all other kinds of music too.
And my daughter took to Irish dancing and represented her Irish school in the Dublin Championships, and in the All Ireland Championships. So it was very endearing.
Then I moved back to India as the CEO of India and again it was a big honour for me to be entrusted with that role of what was now a massive market for the group in India. And then soon after to be brought on to the Executive Board of the company, run global travel retail, and then I was given a blank page saying, “This is an area that we believe is an extremely important market for us. You figure out how you want it to be built and run.”
So a big thank you to Pernod Ricard for having given me great opportunities over the last 23 years, to experience different parts of the world, do different roles, and to feel extremely fulfilled in terms of the work that I’ve done.
While I’d say the role in India was the most challenging… I think the most endearing and most fulfilling time I’ve had was in travel retail. Because in travel retail, it wasn’t just about what Pernod Ricard did. It was about your ability to start interacting with the larger part of the spirits industry, outside of the spirits industry, and really start to become a part of the ecosystem, which was not necessarily the case in any of the previous roles.
Another image from a memorable Trinity conversation in Singapore, October 2022
And if I zeroed in on those years, always an invidious question, could you pluck out a high moment?
I wouldn’t pluck out high moments, because the moment you do, you’re saying every other moment was not high. I believe life is made of experiences and the way you live your life is to create good moments. It’s not a flow. Your memory of the past is only made up of moments, never a flow, and therefore, so long as you keep focused on making good moments for yourself, you find that your life is good.
When you received the Frontier Lifetime Achievement Award [at the Frontier Awards on 4 October] must have been a nice moment. You were recognised by your peers in front of a really diverse and all-encompassing audience of the travel retail community and that’s got to be quite touching.
It was more than touching. It was absolutely surprising. Though I still see myself as a relatively new kid on the block when it comes to this channel.
I meet so many people, they’ve been in the channel for ten, 15, 20, 30 years and to me, I still see myself as a relatively new entrant to this channel. So when people talk of a Lifetime Achievement Award in this channel it didn’t fit into my head at all. So it came as a complete surprise, and an absolutely big honour to have been recognised by a very large fraternity, many of whom perhaps I have not met.
The reaction from the audience was very warm and I think it isn’t about longevity so much in the channel, although the terminology might suggest that. It’s about achievement and making a difference and you have made a really big difference to category, company and channel. Not too many people can say that to the extent that I think applies to you.
Thank you Martin for those words. I’m flattered.
Tell me about pastures new.
Pastures new for me are something that I’ve often reflected on, and it comes out of two or three key insights.
We often say we learn the most when we are able to begin to understand key insights, and the first insight really was that as you become more successful in the corporate world, one thing that becomes your enemy is time. You’re constantly chasing time, and there’s never enough of it.
Therefore, a couple of years back I said I have to look to switch this around, with a mindset that’s very simple. Which is to say how do I make time my friend?
And that’s really one of the big insights I’ve had in terms of how I want to make the change. So people ask me what are your plans? And I say the idea is not to plan.
The second insight has to do with something that came about as a quote to me about four years back. It was a question, but it was a very deep question which said, “If money was not of consequence, how would you live your life?”
That caused me a lot of internal reflection in terms of what are the drivers that make you live your life? If you were to step back to really think about how you’d want to live your life, how divergent is how you live your life versus how you’d want to live it?
That was one of the eureka moments where I said that rather than wait until the end while I can still work and keep myself intellectually agile, that’s kind of in a way still being a rat in the rat race. And if I want to be a rat, then I will do it.
But if intrinsically, I don’t want to be a rat, then I need to step out of this, while I still have the ability to enjoy life without being in the race.
The third insight is linked to how you want to live your life. Again it was a quote I came across which said that detachment is not that I own nothing, but nothing owns me. And that is the sense that I want to get into as I move to the next chapter of my life, which is to really feel free.
Mohit Lal has driven the premiumisation of Pernod Ricard brands in travel retail, epitomised by this dazzling Martell boutique at GDF Plaza, Haikou Mova Mall, Hainan
Okay, no programme as such. But what are some of the things you’re going to do?
So for now, one of the key things that I want to do is to do nothing. I know it sounds difficult. It’s about living your life spontaneously, not having any serious pursuits that crimp your time. But having a lot of pastimes that give you some pleasure.
So I’ve been learning how to fly, which is a serious pursuit. But the objective of learning how to fly is to create a pastime where I can truly feel free by being up in the sky entirely on my own. With nothing other than the sound of a small propeller engine in front of me.
The other is that I’ve travelled a lot, but I’ve spent all my time at airports or inside hotels or inside restaurants. So in a way, you could say I’ve seen the world but in a way I haven’t. And it’s about really travelling for why people travel, not travelling the way travel retail industry travels.
So that’s the other aspect that I really want to do, and that is in a way connecting to the outdoors. That’s why while India will always be home, we have chosen also to build a small base in London, because in India with the climate and otherwise, outdoors is not something that you relish as much. But the UK offers you fabulous opportunities to interact with the outdoors and be with nature. So that’s something that I would be looking forward to doing.
Thank you Mohit, I wish you so well. You’ve been a great supporter of mine, and of the industry. I’ve always enjoyed engaging with you. You’re so thoughtful in every answer you give. You’re so erudite in delivering that thoughtfulness. It’s a rare combination, I can tell you, from having conducted, I guess, hundreds and hundreds of interviews down the line.
Thank you, Martin. I have to say that for an industry to be as vibrant as this industry is, to be as positive as this industry is, to be as collective as this industry is, it needs glue.
And when I try to look back at my eight years in this industry, there are certain parts of this industry that are definitely part of the glue and Martin, you are definitely perhaps the most important part of that glue.
The role that you do, as far as this industry is concerned, is absolutely incredible. You stitch and weave threads across all parts of this industry like nobody else ever does, and I don’t think anyone else ever can. It comes from your own personal approach, and I know the industry owes a lot to you in having kept it stitched together the way it has over so many years.
That’s very kind of you to say but I don’t know about that. I’m trying to keep myself stitched together as I get older.
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The Moodie Davitt eZine
Issue 328 | 20 October 2023
The Moodie Davitt eZine is published 14 times per year by The Moodie Davitt Report (Moodie International Ltd). © All material is copyright and cannot be reproduced without the permission of the Publisher. To find out more visit www.moodiedavittreport.com and to subscribe, please e-mail kristyn@moodiedavittreport.com