Customer Led Innovation With Shantanu Srivastava

Speaker A: Shantanu Srivastava. What one thing do you wish you'd have known 10 years ago?

Speaker B: That's a great question, Andy, to begin with and thanks for forcing that reflection. Well, one thing, when I look back early in my career, I used to operate with the presumption that, uh, brands are hardwired to the product that they sell. And over the years I've realized that it's not the case. Uh, what I've seen and what I do believe now is brands that endure are the brands that own a role in life of their consumer. And the product that they sell is just one expression of that role in life. And the best brands actually evolve that product proposition. They are the ones that don't get stuck to a particular product that they sell, but own the role in life and evolve the product or the portfolio as consumer habits and consumer preferences change. So in reflection, if you ask me, and simply put, wish I had known earlier, brand is not equal to product.

Speaker A: Yeah, I love that. So I was in London yesterday and I was by the BT tower and you know, I spent far too much time on social media. So you see people writing great case studies from the outside about this brand was great because they did this, this brand was terrible. Kodak never moved on with the tower, all that sort of stuff. Nobody ever talks about bt, right. British Telecom as they were. When I was a child in the 80s, they made money from two things. People had a phone in the house, which a landline make phone calls and they were on phone boxes on the street. People would go and put money in and they had to go around and collect the money. That was it. That's where they made their money from. Two things. Neither of those things make them any money anymore. They have a real estate of phone boxes that don't do anything anymore. And um, very few people use a landline. Most of it's just bundled in and given away. That company evolved.

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker A: Yet it's still bt, still British Telecom.

Speaker B: It is.

Speaker A: They still do communication, they do WI fi now they do, uh, you know, Internet and all this sort of stuff is all in there because they evolved with the times. But it's not easy to do, is it? Because go back to I mentioned Kodak. If you're making billions from one thing, it's really hard to move on to something else.

Speaker B: It is. And that's a very, uh, strong challenge that leadership or marketers always do tend to face. It does carry a degree of risk. Now if you look at examples in consumer goods and BT is a great One in the communication industry. But think of Dove, a brand that started as a bar of soap. Now if you look at consumers of today who connect with Dove, do they think of Dove as a bar of soap? Probably we did from the moment we saw the brand. But the brand has endured by making that real beauty role in life very strong and owning it. And there are several examples around. I mean, who would believe Apple started as a good looking desktop computer? Is that how Apple is seen today? It isn't. And that's where I think, Andy, where, uh, and it's something I've seen in my career, in my work life as well, is this disconnect while they are strongly connected, but the need to see brands and portfolios as two distinct things.

Speaker A: It's easy to do, isn't it? I think the tech world, which we're not going to go into the tech world loves being product focused. Smaller startups are often built around one thing. So the brand and the product can often have the same name. Um, so the episode, or one of the episodes before this was dollar shave Club. Now dollar, it cost a dollar shave. It was a razor and it was a club. It was like a monthly payment scheme that was the name of the product. By the time they'd been bought by uh, Unilever, they weren't just razors, they did lots of other shave tech. They did showering products and all that sort of thing. They had to evolve quickly. Yes, um, but so it's hard to sort of disassociate yourself from those two things, isn't it? And what are the kind of the skills that you need as a marketer within those brands though to be able to drive that, uh, do you think, within the organization?

Speaker B: Well, one hack I would say, and I force marketers to think that way. And if you think of brands where the consumer and customer are different, and this plays out very well in kids categories. The kid is the primary consumer, he's the one that eats or uses the product. But parents are the buyer and that pulls apart the product and the brand proposition. And I've had the fortunate have the good fortune to work on a kid's yogurt brand where this played out beautifully. Uh, the kids will not worry so much about sugar content or health, et cetera, et cetera. They just want fantastic tasting products. And you have to think differently about the product design over there. But parents are concerned about those aspects and that's where the brand play comes in. So it's a good starting point to think of brands which have this distinction of primary consumer, secondary consumer or buyer, end user, and then start to pull it apart. But then to further push the thinking, if you actually think long term, think over generations, not five years, 10 years, not just what the brand is doing now. And we have lived through that. We have lived through how consumer habits and lifestyles and usage has changed. How do brands survive that? They have to evolve the product. Now, you picked up the example of dollar Club. Great example, but dollar ties it down and then it gives it little room to then play with the price point. There are good examples, likes of Xerox, where a brand becomes synonym with the behavior. Uh, but I think it's good for marketers to push this thinking out. And that also creates the opportunity to build portfolio relevance over time without necessarily toying around with your brand.

Speaker A: There was an interesting thing you said at the beginning. You said about there's a risk, um, if you're trying to move and evolve with the customer like BT into new worlds. But there's also a huge risk with not doing that, uh, isn't there? The marketing world is littered with a graveyard of products and brands and companies that were once great but just didn't see which way the wind was blowing, isn't there? So it's not that there's risk in changing, but no risk in staying the same. There is risk everywhere, isn't there?

Speaker B: There is. And, um, we know of enough and more examples and I don't want to get specific into any one of them, but there's always this challenge and as a business person, I totally appreciate that. Is, should I focus on making sure I deliver growth this year, next year, in five years, and put my resources and budgets on what is bringing me growth? Because end of the day, time, money and resources are limited and what tends to get prioritized is what is delivering me growth in the near term. And that's the tension in most of the organizations in the field of marketing.

Speaker A: How do we think over 10 years while we deliver over 10 days?

Speaker B: Exactly.

Speaker A: Brilliant. Well, look, what a start. Thank you very much for that. We'll go to the introduction and then we'll be back with the rest of the podcast. Hey up and welcome to the Strategy Sessions. My name is Andy Jarvis. I am the host of the show and the Chief Strategy Officer at Eximore Marketing. 60 seconds. We'll be back with the interview with Shantanu. But before then, I wanted to give a quick plug for a conference I'm speaking at, uh, in Belfast called mind control on 27 May the strap line for mind control is influence doesn't stop with campaigns. Trina Clark, who's behind this event, has pulled together people who talk about influence and from very different perspectives. And there's lessons in there from marketers, not ethically bad lessons, how we can take things from say how cults or terrorists tell us recruit people or what happens on the darknet when people try and have their spouses killed. All these people who know about this are speaking at the conference by the way, but we're looking at it from that, through a marketing lens about how it can change and improve what we do and how we do it more ethically. Absolutely fantastic. If you want a discount code to this event, drop me a message. My details are in the show notes. I have a discount code that has a few uses left. You can use it and you can get a discount. It's going to be incredible. I'm talking about anti social media there very brief. I'm hosting mostly but I'm going to talk for 10 minutes just about some of the challenges and problems that social media causes. I've been working on this for a little while. It's kind of a work in progress moment um, before the whole presentation comes out later in the year. So do get along to that on the 27th of May if you can. Right, enough of me. Let's get back to, well, more of me talking to Shantanu Srivastava about tea, innovation and lots of other stuff. Here we go. Shantanu, welcome to the strategy sessions. Do you want to give us a bit of a quick background to your career so people can get a feel for what you've done and who you are and who you've worked with.

Speaker B: Yeah and it's been uh, fairly long journey I would say. I wouldn't mention the number of years now but yeah, fairly long journey. Started my career back in India. I'm Indian by origin, uh first few years spent in advertising, communication world working with agencies. A bit of time spent then in sports marketing working with sports broadcasting companies and then I moved into fmcg, uh consumer goods and I've stayed in that industry over the rest of the career life. Uh, my work area largely has been around uh brands, marketing, innovation and portfolio. Uh half of the career spent doing that at business country level leadership positions and then last 12, 13 years now in global roles and recently uh, actually um, not just about six months back I stepped away from a full time job and I am a co founder now of a health and wellness venture together with my wife who's actually, uh, the health side of things. And I'm also working as an independent consultant in brand portfolio and innovation areas, essentially helping FMCG organizations and early stage companies looking to scale, uh, to help build portfolio love and portfolio relevance and brand love.

Speaker A: Brilliant stuff. So we're going to dive into some of that experience over the next 40 minutes or so and I want to start maybe. Um, we talked earlier off camera about you being a tea fan. And um. So was it a dream come true when you got to work with the Twinings brand?

Speaker B: It was to a certain extent and it was challenging as well. Two sides to it, right? Yes. Amazing to get into tea professionally. I do believe tea is a fantastic category with a lot of potential. I've been a tea drinker all my life, so working with a brand like Twinnings was amazing. And there was a, uh, conflict in my head because being Indian tea for me means a different thing compared to the Western world.

Speaker A: It was more chai. You were sort of sweet, more chai.

Speaker B: I'm more like hot tea brewed with ginger, with masala, in milk, not the tea bag. Black tea. I'm not that. But it was interesting and it was interesting see how tea is really expanding beyond the core category that it has been for centuries now.

Speaker A: So your work then, you've worked in different markets with Twinings as well. So is that different, uh, cultures in the way people drink tea, does that sort of show up in the data and in how you have to approach

Speaker B: does and uh, not very different and diverse, right? I would say broadly into three or maybe four different behaviors across different markets. Now the interesting part is, and that's not going away, right, it's facing a bit of challenges. But the core black tea business, uh, the way here in the uk, uh, we have been used for centuries, is not growing as much anymore. And tea is expanding into a lot of adjacencies, mostly around health and wellness, but also a lot in the botanical space.

Speaker A: So let's talk about that a bit more because tea, as you say, it's a centuries old category. Um, it probably wasn't called a category in the old days. There's a story that I love, um, and you'll probably tell me it's made up, but I'm convinced the tea bag was an accident. I'm sure I've heard this story before that tea used to be sent in chests because it used to be tea leaves in your porn. Um, but if the chest of tea got uh, wet or got uh, on the ship over, you Lost the whole box. So they started putting it into small little bags so it was easier to pack and move. And if some of it got wet, you didn't lose the whole thing. But when it got back to England, people were just like, oh. And started brewing it in the teabag. So apparently was an accident, but may or may not be true. I'm just interrupting my own podcast here with a bit of an update. Why am I doing that? And no, it's not an advert. Don't skip. I've just told a story about the invention of the teabag and it wasn't right. So I wanted to kind of correct myself because I think we have an obligation to try and get as much right as we can. And especially when you tell a story which I did believe was right, but it was wrong. I checked this after the episode and I was like, do I pull that out? But I don't want to pull it out because it actually gets us into an interesting discussion. So just very quickly, here's how the teabag was invented. It was an American invention. Breaks my heart as a Brit. We're a nation of tea drinkers. Yank invented tea bags. 1908, a guy called Thomas Sullivan was a tea merchant. And what he wanted to do, he was a marketer. Uh, he wanted to send samples to customers of new teaspoon. How do you send a sample? You put it in a little silk purse. People got it and thought, well, this must just be for putting in the water, because by that point people had decided that they needed to take the leaves out of the tea for it to be a proper cup of tea. So accidentally, I was correct on that. That's how the teabag was born by an American called Thomas Sullivan. So there you go, enough of me interrupting myself. Let's get back to the show. Innovation has therefore happened in that category. At certain points before, you wouldn't necessarily think tea innovation, but it' pressure. Coffee drinking has exploded, certainly in the uk. Uh, people moving away from traditional drinks, drinking drinks in different ways. So how does tea respond when you're hundreds of years old? Twinings as a brand is hundreds of years old as well, isn't it? How do you respond to that?

Speaker B: Well, Twinings is 300 years plus now. It was kind of the category creator or Twinings. The brand, the person Twinings. Uh, and the founding family is still involved. No, really, we did have 11th or 12th generation person of the family is still working in training.

Speaker A: Does that make it even harder to innovate then? When you've got Somebody who, you know, stretches all the way back to the beginning of the brand. Is there kind of resistance to wanting to change, or does that make it easier to change?

Speaker B: Well, the business completely became professional, and I don't even know when. But it's not really run and owned by the family anymore. It's part of ABF Group. Uh, so it's run very professionally. I don't know since when, but I think it's been long. And then going back to the point you made about how tea bags came around, I don't know actually, but tea historically originated in China. There's a ritual behind how it started off. And my assumption would be the ritual evolved over time into a tea bag format. Now, the challenge that the category has been facing, and particularly with the younger consumers, is that ritual has moved on. Uh, people like us and slightly older, around our age group still probably have that ritual. As I told you off camera as well, I have a ritual around tea, but the younger generation has moved on. Uh, things like on the go consumption, convenience, uh, functionality that you get out of your beverage, out of a drink have started to drive that behavior. Something that. And instant energy as well. Uh, where coffee really, really delivers. It's driven to some extent by paucity of time. But that tea ritual is declining. Now, if that has been the heartland of tea, how does tea evolve? And without losing the core, uh, which is black tea, which still is 60, 70% of the volume, but not growing as much. And for a brand like Twinings, it's a legacy brand with a strong amount of heritage. So a brand like Twinings would not give away black tea and continue to innovate and bring in new experiences, new flavors, new functionality within that. But you start looking at new formats which are more friendly to on the go consumption, going beyond the ritual of hot tea, brewed tea into sparkling and cold tea or powder formats which are ready to make in a different way, or even, uh, hot brewed, served cold. So all these kind of new consumption habits which are driving beverage consumption is where tea can get into.

Speaker A: You mentioned powdered tea then, and a little bit of me m died inside. Is powdered tea a thing?

Speaker B: There is something that Twinings, uh, has been experimenting. And again, these are something which is being driven in the US Because US Is not really a tea market. So the experimentation around tea is stronger.

Speaker A: Yeah, I still think a little bit of me died inside. That can come back. But new product innovation like that is inherently risky. We've already talked a little bit about risk. You look at brands like Guinness for example, uh, you know, great brands, hundreds of years old innovated with loads of different products and most of them were Mrs. Until um, fairly recently. But you know the history of Guinness over the last 40 years has been launching new product, killing it after two years long. Now some people say that's failure. Most people in innovation would say that's probably success. Right, you're learning as you go. But how do you all these different formats, all these different types, how do you look to try and work out where are the winners going to be? How do you find which products to invest and put your resources behind when you know the scientists at Twinings have probably got 15 different ways of making the format easier, quicker, faster, uh, how do you then start to get that information to go, okay, we're going to go behind 1, 2 and 3, not ABC.

Speaker B: You hit the nails head, uh, Andy. And that's a big one. Particularly when you're talking of large organizations and big brands. I wouldn't disagree with what you mentioned. Some people say that it's not a failure to pull out a market after two years of launch and I'll get into the consumer side of it but from a business side first. When you're looking at mid sized to large organizations or big brands, it's important to be clear what is success for a billion Turnover brand getting 10 million in sales or 5 million in sales is not success. For 50ah million brand that's huge success and that tends to kill innovation or that tends to promote the behavior of pulling out and labeling something as failure many a times. And then that's my watch out. Now where it tends to work is when you are basing your innovation on a real cultural insight and an evolving consumer behavior.

Speaker A: I'm glad you said that because I'm wearing a T shirt here. I don't know if the camera can pick that up that says talk to your customers on it. Now we're going to get everyone listen. If you're a regular listener you're like oh no, not again. He's still talking about that. But so you base it out of real customer insights and cultural insights. That's where you start to work, which is the M role of marketing, isn't it?

Speaker B: It is, it is. And then have the patience. It doesn't happen overnight now and then I'm moving away from the big brands, big organization story here. Uh, but if you look at what is typically called the challenger brands, many of them accelerate pretty fast and become big and then they have their own challenges of once they Become big. But how do they get big is by sticking to their path, is by believing in that conviction and not looking at ROI in two years or one year's time. I don't blame the organizations. I have been there myself, and I have myself cut pipe when it is not working to the expectations. Because organizations are set up differently. Innovating at scale is different from innovating for future portfolio relevance. And the two need to be set up and approached differently.

Speaker A: So I think what you're touching on is a really important part of innovation is the cultural insights and where that's coming from. We're going to dive into that in a minute. But also is the organization set up to allow innovation to happen? Because if you don't create those pathways and those sort of success routes, it's really hard to innovate, isn't it? Because every organization I've ever worked with says they want to innovate. I think every organization in the world wants to innovate. You're listening to this podcast. You go, does your organization want to innovate? You're probably all nodding, going, yes, of course they say that. There's a statement in the annual report. But saying you want to innovate and creating the conditions for innovation are two different things.

Speaker B: They are completely different things. And I'd take a step back as well, and I'd say, okay, and then it's part of annual reports. Every organization is, we want to innovate personally. And this is my opinion, Andy, in full transparency. But what do you mean by I want to innovate? One has to go deeper. One has to double click, triple click on that. You could innovate for cost efficiency. You could innovate to open new markets. You could innovate to build consumer portfolio relevance over time. You could innovate to drive profitability. Now, I think it's very important for leadership to be clear. When they say we want to be more innovative and innovate more is what is the objective of that innovation? And that plays into the point you mentioned about the pathways. Uh, there are enough and more playbooks and books written on this topic. But different innovations have different time horizons and they need to be approached differently. The challenge is many of the organizations are set up to work on innovation in one singular way. There's one pathway which is optimized for safety and risk minimization, not for necessarily the other things. Many of the organizations, including the big and large ones, are trying to create those bespoke pathways for different innovation types. I think that is Part of the

Speaker A: unlock, can you do innovation properly while trying to do it in a risk free way?

Speaker B: Yes, you can. Easier said than done though. Uh one, you have to dissociate the ongoing business risk. Uh, when you what an organization is typically called disruptive or breakthrough innovation. And many of the organizations have either dedicated teams or a small incubator or a pilot to pursue that. In my experience, many of those incubators and pilots deliver brilliant results and I have been fortunate enough to be part of some of them back in Danone as well and in Twinings as well. Where then it starts to struggle is when you try to land it back into the organization. Because when you have this different approach it needs to be end to end and the leadership, decision making and the behavior around that incubator needs to be adapted as well.

Speaker A: So there's different models, isn't there? We have an incubator, you do innovation over there and uh, Google called it the moonshot lab or whatever. You've got a bunch of people coming up with crazy ideas or good ideas or whatever. But then they often use a different structure, organizationally, different measurements. It comes back into the big organization struggles. So the other way to do that then is, well you keep organizing uh, innovation within the main body of the business and people do it but then they often end up doing it kind of on the side of the desk and oh, we've got peak quarter coming up for sale so we'll stop doing that and we'll focus on this is one way better than I know there's kind of lots of ways in between that uh, as well the shades of grey. But in your experience is one way better than another. Is it better like you say when you're at Danone and Twinings and you're in the little lab coming up with the ideas or is it better when it's part of everyone's every day because you're so close to the customer then that you can see the insight and it starts to become part of what you do.

Speaker B: Yeah, if I had a ready perfect answer to that, it'll be perfect. No, but it needs to be a bit bespoke. Now let me take two extremes to explain my thinking on this. One thing as you said, is keep it as part of the day to day organization and try to assign a team, do something disruptive and break through thinking. In my view that struggles uh, because the entire mindset and behavior and capabilities and skills as well that you need to do that is different from managing day to day business. The pressures that the team doing that face is a bit of distraction. So I'm not a big advocate of trying to manage both simultaneously. Then the other extreme, which is incubator, uh, I think that's a good start. But where things can improve is having this clarity from M Day 1. And how do we bring it back in and not leave it to the incubation team alone to figure that out. And that's where I've seen quite a times incubators fail. And my bias is consumer goods industry and probably the Googles of the world do it better. But then when you put aside an incubator, you need to treat them and nurture them in a different way and support them on integrating the innovation back into the organization. Because they are not. Their superpower is not to think how to bring it back into a multibillion business. They are superpowers. How to create something that will be super exciting for the consumer, um, in five years from now.

Speaker A: And you have different challenges in those consumer goods businesses. And I know one challenge from when I've worked in the alcohol sector, for example, is shelf space is limited.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: So you innovate and you come up with the great new products. Product B, this is fantastic. This is our new thing. People love it, everybody loves it. This is great. Um, customers love it, the retailers love it. We'll stock that. But something has to come off the shelf to allow them to stock this fantastic product. Sometimes it's product A of yours that comes off the shelf so they can put your new one on. And this is the thing that drives all your revenue that's just suddenly come off the shelf to put the new one in. So it's not just as easy, especially if you're innovating within your category. Because if you go into Tesco, they don't suddenly say, oh, this is fantastic, will just create you another meter of shelf to put your new product on. It's like, oh, great, something has to go. So it's not just the case of this idea is great. When the rubber hits the road, it has to work as well, doesn't it?

Speaker B: It has to. It has to. And the emerging technology and e Commerce and D2C actually is an opportunity in that space, uh, because you can test out things through D2C or e. Com. Much better get to a scale or a replicable model and then look at retailing and then that gives you more oxygen.

Speaker A: I also want to talk about the. You've been in huge companies, some of the world's biggest, and you've also Worked with challenger brands as well. What's the difference between the two when it comes to innovation? I once interviewed, um, not for this podcast, but many years ago, I interviewed One of the UK's most famous scientists, Professor Robert, uh, Winston. And I asked him about funding of science and he was like, it is what it is. Sometimes not having much money means that you have to think differently.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker A: Podcast tagline is makes you think differently. And he said, you know, if you had endless money, you'd almost become lazy with it. Sometimes you have to bash ideas together to get better things. You know, I think if you're trying to innovate at Coca Cola or Dano, you know, you've got the safety net, you get paid at the end of the month, whatever happens and all that. Whereas if you're a child Challenger brand, it's like, we've got to really make this and we've got to do it. Does it improve innovation or actually is it done better in big companies because there is that safety net and people can kind of bounce around with ideas.

Speaker B: I do feel challenger brands do it better. Where they struggle is once they hit scale. What do you mean? And then that's why the point I made initially is innovating at scale is different from innovating for consumer relevance. And challenging is something I have always believed. And even when I was leading innovation for Danone globally, I was having the chance to interact a lot with startups in the food industry, food space. And while as an employee of a big company, I used to feel envious of them, how they can do things so fast and so quickly and develop great ideas and products. One of them, one of the founders actually mentioned to me, listen, you guys have so much M money, muscle retailer relationship, R and D capabilities, factories that you own, and these are things we don't have and we struggle big time. And I actually am surprised why you can't do all of the things we do. And that really was revealing for me and started made me think, okay, what is happening here?

Speaker A: There's an old story of, um, a business owner driving his Porsche home from work. It's made up, entirely made up. But he's driving his Porsche home from work, having just had a phone call from the bank that they're going to close down his business because he owes him too much money. It's absolutely chucking it down, it's throwing it down. And he stops at one of those guys holding like a lollipop sign saying stop, go. Cause there's some roadworks happening and the Guy stood with a lollipop in pouring rain, stopped this guy and he's looking at the guy in the Porsche going, oh, I wish I was lucky enough to be you sat in that Porsche. The guy in the Porsche, he sat looking at the guy in the lollipop going, I wish I didn't have the stress of having to tell 200 people are losing the job. I want your job. And it's always the same as it doesn't matter where you stood in the world. You always think, oh, it's much better in that side of the house, isn't it? You always want to be the other side. How do organizations then tap in to make the best of that? If you think in a big organization, the challenger brands have got this fast moving thing, they come up and all the ideas are there. Uh, and the challenger brands are looking at you going, you've got retail relationships, you've got all the stuff that we want. How do you bring those two worlds together? Or should you ever try and bring those two worlds together?

Speaker B: There's a learning, there's a common learning, which I think both worlds can benefit from. And bringing them together, forcing them together actually in my view is a mistake. Why I say that is because, and particularly if you look at various examples and there are exceptions, right? But how challenger brands operate, mostly they start with one. Their journey is centered around conviction building for the founders or the small team that is leading it. Uh, for large organizations it's scale building and risk minimization. So the entire mindset and behavior is very different. And conviction building does not come through expensive research or huge amounts of data being bought. It's an individual or a group of individuals conviction about doing something. Now having said that, something I had read somewhere, and I love this expression is, uh, being anti establishment is easy till you actually become part of the establishment. And most of these startup, uh, challenger brands get initial success by being anti establishment. The key things that they do very well, I mean they're talking Tony Chocol only or Oatly or in tea category brands like Tepigs. They really identify their enemy very clearly and they go full fledged against that enemy because their objectives take share from that enemy. Because they are so clear about their enemy. Their messaging is super sharp and their reason to believe around the messaging is crystal clear. Big brands struggle with that sharpness. Thirdly, they really tap into the early adapters and get into their culture and build their initial business through them. So most of these brands get to 50, 100 million, 200 million rather quickly and Then they start to become part of the establishment and that's when they struggle.

Speaker A: We touched on a previous episode, uh, Brewdog, who are really struggling with that. Uh, you know, they were the punk drinks upstart until the founder suddenly became part of the establishment and started having some interesting views that started doing strange things to staff like sacking them zero hour contracts because they were just part of the establishment. And they uh, have really struggled with growing up because actually what they've done is grow old. It's a real difficult thing for a brand to do, isn't it? It's like, yeah, we're not them. That takes you so far. And let's not belittle it. Getting to 50 million or 100 million is an incredible achievement.

Speaker B: It is.

Speaker A: But knowing how to go back on that probably comes back to where you started with your first answer. Brand is not the same. Um, I've forgotten the word you used. What did you say? Brand is not the same as the product. As the product. You got to disassociate those two bits. And that's probably the trick, isn't it, as to how they do that as they go forward?

Speaker B: It is. And where I think, um, big brands and organizations can really learn is the way these challenger brands make their choices. Are single minded about it, sharp about it and stay centered on the culture. Now something that I've always wondered in my work as well is and let me narrow down to t where we discussed earlier. It's kind of the core tea business is not really growing as much. And likes of Tea Pig and many others have come in and taken share from Lipton Twinings of the world. Why couldn't the Liptons of the world do the same what tea pigs did? And I love the expression from teabigs. Two expressions actually. Uh, dust in a bag. You suddenly completely deposition tea like straight away. It just creates a different. You say look at tea differently, right? Smart line. But it talks. And then tea temples instead of tea bags. Transparency, recycled cyclable packaging. When multi layered packaging has been a challenge in tea category, uh, ethical sourcing. So things that big brands can easily get into. But that's about challenging yourself the lead brand or a typical Lipton hero sko would hate doing that.

Speaker A: And even then probably the margin on that product is slightly smaller than the margin on a Liptons, which to teepigs is still a great margin, but to Liptons is actually. You multiply that across our balance sheet, the whole board's going to get sacked for ruining shareholder value. These Are the decisions, is it, it's never just about how that product shows up, is it? It's always more difficult than that. Um, what I'm intrigued in is you've got obviously a very small company now, I say very small, but, you know, a startup with your wife.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: What lessons, what sort of two or three lessons have you taken from your career that you're really honing in on now to get a new product which is by its very nature innovation off the ground. So tell us about the health product first and then what couple of lessons have you learned that you are really taking with you into this business?

Speaker B: Yeah, it's lessons taken and then also the opportunity to learn fantastic new things. And I'll touch upon both of them first, quickly. What is healthverse? Uh, is essentially a, uh, new health and wellness platform we are building, which is a combination of. It will be a learning platform, credible, uh, authentic consultation platform, building community around that and offering products, functional foods, supplements, which help with health and well being. The entire reason we got into this, and then my wife took the first step and now I'm kind of supporting her, is, uh, this thing of not everything need be solved through medication and pharma. There are lots of lifestyle ailments existing out there which can be better managed through a more holistic approach to healthcare. And that was our thinking to get into it. Now the learnings. And this is a very attractive space today, which means that lots of new brands and companies are getting into this space. Uh, taking the challenger mindset is how will I be different? Who's my enemy? And I don't have an answer yet because I do believe and totally respect the pharma industry because they have a role in life of the consumer. But that role is how can I find my role while not saying that role doesn't need to exist and then find my space? And that's a work. We are currently on the journey.

Speaker A: Yeah. And is there anything about, you know, you talked about finding the customer and being able to position for that particular group. Have you been through that step? You know, because as you start to narrow in, I often find with that positioning, who are you against or even who are you for? The narrower your customer is, the easier it is to do. I've been brought into several companies to look at their positioning problem. You've got a positioning problem and when you scratch the surface, you look and you go, you don't have a positioning problem. Your positioning is fine. You've got a targeting problem. You're trying to target seven different Customers and every one of them has got a slightly different positioning. So each one has great positioning. You just need to pick one. That's what we need to do next. Your targeting problem, not positioning problem. Is that where you are at the minute? Are you still trying to narrow it down to go these are the groups of people we want to help or because it's healthy, it's still quite broad.

Speaker B: You hit again the nail said because

Speaker A: that's, that's exactly where we're reading your mind.

Speaker B: I mean honestly, I have a long list of concepts that we have built over the last few months, each of them targeting different sub segments as you mentioned. And right now we are at stage to take a call. Yeah. Take a decision. And we don't have the funds to do extensive research or extensive data buying. Right. So it's again the pilot approach. Uh, and what is very interesting as well, and you have been in that space and talked to a lot of people in that space, is how AI is helping in this.

Speaker A: So are you. Um, I've seen some great things about synthetic research. I'm still, uh, I wouldn't say I'm on the fence. There's issues that I'll go into another time, maybe on a different podcast about synthetic research. But is that the sort of approach you're taking, Bill, Building synthetic customers and testing things with them initially to see where this lands?

Speaker B: No, I don't want to go there yet because I am still very much a believer in you need human oversight and you need human feedback, not synthetic consumers. This is linked to what I've seen working in organizations, larger organizations. Let's take a step back. Think of this. Whenever any brand, any organization thinks of new ideas in the early stages, what is typically called ideation concept generation, feasibility assessment, 80, 85% of the work is based on secondary research, information collection, data mining, um, looking at reports, etc. Etc. Traditionally takes huge amount of time and effort and also money to buy a access to all of that information. That's where AI is good at. That AI can really help. And that's what I've been doing. From a traditional sense. How do you accelerate and collapse that old approach of ideation concept generation and feasibility assessment into using AI to do that rather quickly and efficiently? All of that the right AI tool with the right human oversight can do rather quickly. And that's what I am experimenting with. And I'm getting to a good result out of that. Now watch out. Is it is dangerous to assume that you'll get something ready to execute. But from Again, an organization's perspective. And if you think back, organizations do extensive amount of research, spend a lot of money, but still does everything succeed in the market? It doesn't. So if I have bunch of 80% ready, 20 80% ready concepts, I'm in a better place than having spent a lot of time and money with three perfect looking concepts. And that's where AI really brings value.

Speaker A: Uh, brilliant stuff. Well, look, before we wrap up, I ask everybody if they can recommend a book, a resource that would um, maybe help their thinking in this space. So anything you'd recommend?

Speaker B: Yeah, of course. I mean there are two ways I look, look to this question. Uh, there is one thing of there's a lot happening around marketing and innovation and lots of good stuff happening all around us. There's a strong need to stay tuned and there are some resources I do use to do that and then there's something of building your judgment and knowledge and analysis base to stay tuned. I think the likes of Marketing Week, the Drum, the grocer are our good resources. The Drum gives a more global perspective. Marketing week in the grocer, retail marketing in the uk on reflection and I've and let me say this, actually I've not been a big believer of reading lots of playbooks and authors. Yes I do when I need to. But I'm a big believer of learning through reflection and what I would urge, what I do myself and I urge people to do. Use any resource Cons alliance is one look at the winners and back analyze and understand what are they doing and why is it working and think it through, build your own point of view and to me that's a better way to learn and then top it up with the books you want to read and the kind of models you want to refer.

Speaker A: Brilliant. Shan Srivastava, thank you for coming on the strategy sessions. We've got your details in the show notes if anybody wants to contact you. But thank you for coming on.

Speaker B: Thank you so much for having me. Andy, lovely to talk to you.

Speaker A: Thank you.