Lumio’s Varun Nair on why experience, not buzzwords, will win over India’s consumers

In a fireside conversation titled "Beyond Specs: Winning Consumers in the Age of AI PCs, AI Phones and Smart Homes," Varun V Nair, Head of Marketing at Lumio, spoke with Deepak Dhingra, Senior Director, Brand and Content Strategy at 91mobiles, about why the era of selling on pure specifications is over, and why marketing needs to shift toward experience.

Opening the session, Dhingra set up the premise by pointing to his own vantage point tracking specs daily at 91mobiles, before asking Nair why specs alone no longer win consumers.

Nair traced the shift back a decade. "A decade back, yes, it was easy for brands to just say, hey, I've got this, I've got this, I've got this, it's at a certain price, buy me," he said. Two things have changed since, he explained: the sheer number of brands offering near-identical products at different price points, and rising consumer expectations around experience. "Brands need to start, and have already in many places started, differentiating with the experience that you get from the product or brand you buy into. That's, in my opinion, P0," he said.

He illustrated the point with a recent personal purchase, an Ather 450X, describing how the brand marketed a boot-opening sensor without ever calling it AI. "There's a sensor, AI-based, but they didn't say it's AI-based. It just senses your knee coming towards the bike and opens up automatically," he said, contrasting it with the more conventional approach of listing specs such as unlock time and boot capacity. "What I love that they can do is show it to you in an experiential manner. So it gives you a certain delight." He added that the same philosophy applies at Lumio: "I don't have to just tell you I have a QLED TV; I don't have to tell you I have a mini TV. I want to tell you how products are going to enhance your content experience." Specs, he clarified, are not irrelevant, only secondary. "Are specs irrelevant in marketing? No. I think that's point number two for you to discover once you're sold into the experience."

Dhingra then turned to Lumio's content discovery product, asking Nair to explain the TLDR app to the audience. Nair described it as a single repository pulling together recommendations across streaming platforms. "TLDR is a place where I can give you all your recommendations in one space, so you don't have to go doing that job on multiple apps," he said, adding that the tool also extends to sports and news content.

Within TLDR sits Neo, an AI agent designed to answer highly specific, conversational queries. "Let's say you want to watch a Tom Cruise movie, okay? But you want a movie that has no action scenes, wherein he is not running, and which is shot in the 90s. TLDR will do that for you," Nair said, describing it as content discovery for both what users know they want and what they don't yet know.

This led into the session's sharpest exchange, on AI as a marketing label. Dhingra noted the ubiquity of "AI" tags across devices today, from phones to PCs, joking that "we might have AI toasters," to which Nair responded, "I saw an AI mattress in a store once." On whether Lumio uses the AI label deliberately, Nair was direct. "We did not say AI search. We know it's going to search using AI. But I want to tell the consumers that it will help you enjoy or help you show content that you'd never thought you'd see," he said. He added that hype has limits: "If you use that buzzword, it will get your foot in the door. But after that, if the product doesn't hold up, if the experience doesn't hold up, that's where the consumer is lost."

Asked about the TV's relevance in an increasingly mobile-first world, Nair pointed to Lumio's projector business, now nearly a third of sales, as evidence that consumers still want large-screen experiences, just without a fixed location. "The younger generation does not want a fixed place to watch it," he said, describing projectors as a flexible "second screen" for many households.

The session closed with a rapid-fire round. Asked for the AI feature he uses daily, Nair named AI search tools for everyday queries. Asked for the most overused buzzword in consumer tech, both Nair and Dhingra answered "AI" without hesitation. On what device might be in every Indian household by 2030, Nair pointed to a gap in the market for "a human intelligent repository," a knowledge-based device capable of understanding a user's recent activity and helping them make decisions, something he said current LLMs only partially deliver.