How Geometry Encompass is transforming its model, to become future-ready

• Geometry Encompass, the WPP group-owned experiential marketing agency is on a transformation journey, to become a data-driven, digitally charged, creative commerce agency.
• The agency is enhancing its capabilities and service offerings across commerce touch-points to help serve brands better.
• Geometry Encompass's Founder and MD, Roshan Abbas and CEO Ranjit Raina tell us about the agency's efforts towards transforming itself and all that we can look forward to from the agency in 2020.

It’s been a little more than 90 days that the WPP group-owned experiential marketing agency, Geometry Encompass (GE) brought Ranjit Raina on board as its CEO. The move came about three months after Sukrit Singh moved on from the agency.

The aim of bringing Raina on board, Roshan Abbas, Founder and MD, GE, had shared was to make the agency more agile and bring in the new-age way of thinking.

Three months down the line, we caught up with Abbas and Raina who told us about all that has happened at the agency since Raina joined, its performance this year and all that they are doing to become the agency of the future.

Geometry Encompass in 2019

Roshan Abbas and Sukrit Singh had started Encompass in 1998 as an event management company. However, in the last 21 years, the agency has gone beyond that. Acquired by WPP in 2008, Encompass was merged with Geometry Global in 2015 and today offers services across events, BTL and content creation.

However, with Raina at the helm now, there have been some changes. For him, the key focus has been to transform the agency’s structure, by bringing in some strong talent. He says, “The main area of focus has been the talent and looking at how we transform as an agency. We are actively engaged in enhancing our capabilities and service offering across commerce touchpoints to enable us to serve brands. As a group, we are very conscious of the need to fast track this transformation and address a huge need gap that exists as more and more brands look at commerce with an omnichannel lens.”

While the agency is undergoing these changes, we ask Abbas how the year has been for the agency, considering it’s been a slow year for the entire industry. He responds that the year has been one of transformation, from the way they have worked and the things they have worked on. “Most significantly we saw a complete restructuring of the business practices and the consolidation of Rural and Shopper services. Across every practice we have seen wins – Experiential saw Amazon as a new client with the prestigious Prime Days, Rural saw an expansion of new projects with Hindustan Unilever and Shopper is seeing some very interesting projects that we will be unveiling really soon. Another major change has been the collaboration with WPP on some key clients and projects. Alignment with Geometry in the region is helping us expand our relationship with clients like Shell,” shares Abbas.

Building a more agile agency

While GE has been in business for more than 20 years, the agency has aimed at doing things differently now. Lately, the agency has been working on shifting its gears in terms of how they approach work and execution.

On what is being done to make the agency future-ready, Raina says, “Agility is the key today, agile in thought and in action. The agency is now more than ever focused on creating solutions that offer the clients the best of not just GE but the Geometry Network across the world and going beyond to the WPP network. The only way to adapt to change in our business is to ensure that the solutions remain relevant. We have discovered that staying relevant requires one to constantly learn and then put in practice the learning.”

Adding to that, Abbas says that the agency has been on a journey to convert itself into a data-driven creative commerce agency. He explains, “We already have a very robust experiential practice and a retail practice that focuses on rural and shopper – we are now enhancing the capability to cover on-line commerce touch-points as well. This is where the network gives us a huge advantage, Geometry in China has a very interesting Social Commerce offering which we are adapting for the India market – similarly, there are multiple tools from across the network that will be made available to our brand partners very soon.”

What to expect from GE in 2020

With the industry changing at a rapid pace, we asked Raina what would be some trends that the experiential industry will witness in 2020. For him, it will be all about omni-channel experiences. He elaborates, “We will see more and more engagements and experiences that are crafted to be omni-channel and not just channel platform-specific.” He further said that the ecosystem will become more collaborative. “Close to one-third of WPP’s global revenues come from collaborations and we believe India will be no different. We are seeing a lot of interesting opportunities that are collaborative in nature. We are also very excited about voice, which we believe is a tool that can help us re-imagine commerce in India.”

Speaking about his ‘Vision 2020’ for the agency, Abbas says, “2019 marks the beginning of our journey of transformation. Vision 2020 is when we complete the transformation into a data-driven, digitally charged, creative commerce agency, where we build on the legacy and success of our experiential practice and enhance it to a Retail practice that is truly omni-channel.”