Shantanu Srivastava is a global marketing and innovation leader whose career spans leadership roles across Twinnings, Danone, Sanofi, and Reckitt.
Listen on Apple, Spotify or YouTube.
In this episode we discuss:
- The risks and benefits of evolving a brand
- Customer led innovation
- Making innovation work inside a company
- How challenger brands see innovation v mega brands
- Innovating inside a start up
- Humans v AI in research
Shantanu Srivastava
Shantanu Srivastava has led global brands and innovation transformation across multiple categories and markets.
Over two decades, Shantanu has built a track record of shaping consumer-led innovation, launching new brands, revitalising heritage brands, and embedding storytelling in brands and growth strategies. His work sits at the intersection of creativity, strategy, and impact, translating human insights into ideas that move markets and minds.
Now Co-Founder of Healthverse, he is pioneering a new wellness ecosystem rooted in natural healing, nutrition, and science-driven wellbeing, a venture that reflects his belief that brands & innovation should serve both human and business health.
Through Vector, his speaking, advisory and consulting platform, Shantanu partners with organisations to reimagine brands through purpose and storytelling and accelerate innovation through creativity, structure and agility. Helping leaders connect their mission to momentum. As LabelMate @ LabelSessions, Shantanu is part of a network of global leaders & experts who run accelerators inside some of the world’s most ambitious brands and companies.
Find Shantanu on LinkedIn
Strategy Sessions Host – Andi Jarvis
If you have any questions or want to talk about anything that was discussed in the show, the best place to get me is on LinkedIn or Instagram.
Make sure you subscribe to get the podcast directly or sign up for it here to have it emailed when it’s released.
If you enjoyed the show, please give it a 5* rating.
Episode Transcription
This transcript has been done automagically using Happy Scribe and hasn’t been checked by a real person, so there may be some hilarious mistakes where the AI can’t work out our accents – I’m sure they’re trained on just the American accent.
[01:00:00.260] – Andi J
Shantanu Srivastava, what one thing do you wish you’d have known 10 years ago?
[01:00:05.720] – Shantanu S
That’s a great question, Andi, 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 brands are hardwired to the product that they sell. And over the years, I’ve realised that it’s not the case. What I’ve seen and what I do believe now is brands that endear 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 brand, 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.
[01:01:05.730] – Andi J
Yeah, I love that. So I was in London yesterday and I was by the BT Tower. And you know, I spend 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 time, 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 run phone boxes on the street. People would go and put money in, and they had to go around and collect the money. Yeah, 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 very few people use a landline. Most of it’s just bundled in and given away. That company evolved. Yes. Yet it’s still BT, still British Telecom.
[01:02:00.660] – Shantanu S
It is.
[01:02:01.060] – Andi J
They still do communication. They do Wi-Fi now. They do, 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.
[01:02:19.440] – Shantanu S
It is. And that’s a very strong challenge that leadership or marketers always do tend to face, right? Because 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, Andi, where— and it’s something I have 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.
[01:03:23.290] – Andi J
Yeah. And it’s often, 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. So the episode or one of the episodes before this was Dollar Shave Club. Now, you know, 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 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. But so it’s hard to sort of disassociate yourself from those two things, isn’t it? What are the kind of the skills that you need as a marketer within those brands, though, to be able to drive that, do you think, within the organisation?
[01:04:18.990] – Shantanu S
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.
[01:04:32.060] – Andi J
Yeah.
[01:04:33.190] – Shantanu S
The kid is the primary consumer. He’s the one that eats or uses the product, but parents are the buyer.
[01:04:38.240] – Andi J
Yeah.
[01:04:39.430] – Shantanu S
And that pulls apart the product and the brand proposition. And I have had the fortunate— I have the good fortune to work on a kids’ yoghurt brand where this played out beautifully. 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 and 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 5 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, like Xerox, where a brand becomes synonymous with the behaviour.
[01:06:00.160] – Shantanu S
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.
[01:06:13.780] – Andi J
Yeah. There was an interesting thing you said at the beginning. You said about there’s a risk if you, 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, isn’t there? Yes. The, 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?
[01:06:40.200] – Shantanu S
There is. And 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 5 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 prioritised is what is delivering me growth in the near term. And that’s the tension in most of the organisations in the field of marketing.
[01:07:17.120] – Andi J
How do we think over 10 years while we deliver over 10 days?
[01:07:20.250] – Shantanu S
Exactly.
[01:07:21.770] – Andi J
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. Ey up and welcome to The Strategy Sessions. My name is Andi Jarvis. I am the host of the show and the Chief Strategy Officer at Eximo Marketing. In 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 in Belfast called Mind Control on the 27th of May. The strapline for Mind Control is influence doesn’t stop with campaigns. Treena Clarke, who’s behind this event, has pulled together people who talk about influence from very different perspectives. And there’s lessons in there for marketers, not ethically bad lessons, how we can take things from, say, how cults or terrorist cells 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.
[01:08:21.300] – Andi J
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 gonna be incredible. I’m talking about Anti-Social Media there. Very brief. I’m hosting mostly, but I’m gonna 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. 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.
[01:09:04.740] – Andi J
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?
[01:09:12.850] – Shantanu S
Yeah, and it’s, it’s been a 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. 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, actually, not just about 6 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 the health side of things. And I’m also working as an independent consultant in brand portfolio and innovation areas, essentially helping FMCG organisations and early-stage companies looking to scale to help build portfolio love and portfolio relevance and brand love.
[01:10:29.450] – Andi J
Brilliant stuff. So we’re going to dive into some of that experience over the next sort of 40 minutes or so. And I want to start maybe— 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?
[01:10:45.000] – Shantanu S
It was, to a certain extent, and it was challenging as well. Uh, 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 have been a tea drinker all my life, so working with a brand like Twinings was amazing. And there was a conflict in my head because being Indian, tea for me means a different thing compared to the Western world.
[01:11:14.860] – Andi J
It was more chai, sort of sweet.
[01:11:17.310] – Shantanu S
I’m more like hot tea brewed with ginger, with masala. Yeah, yeah. In milk, not the tea bag black tea. Yeah, I’m not that. But it was interesting and it was interesting to see how tea is really expanding beyond the core category that it has been. For centuries now.
[01:11:35.640] – Andi J
Yeah. So your work then, you’ve worked in different markets with Twinings as well. So is that different cultures in the way people drink tea? Does that sort of show up in the data and in how you have to approach it?
[01:11:50.170] – Shantanu S
It does. And not very different and diverse, right? I would say broadly into 3 or maybe 4 different behaviours across different markets. Now, the interesting part is, and that’s, that’s not going away, right? It’s facing a bit of challenges. But the core black tea business, the way here in the UK we have been used for centuries, is, is not growing as much anymore. And tea is expanding into a lot of adjacencies around, mostly around health and wellness, but also a lot in the botanical space.
[01:12:23.710] – Andi J
So let’s talk about that a bit more, because tea, as you say, it’s a centuries-old category. Although it probably wasn’t called a category in the old days. There’s a storey that I love, 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 storey before that tea used to be sent in chests ’cause it used to be tea leaves and you pour it.
[01:12:43.990] – Shantanu S
Yeah.
[01:12:44.830] – Andi J
But if the chest of tea got wet or got, you know, 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, started brewing it in the tea bag. So apparently it was an accident, but may or may not be true.
[01:13:06.720] – Andi J
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 storey about the invention of the tea bag 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 wanna pull it out because it actually gets us into an interesting discussion. So just very quickly, here’s how the tea bag was invented. It was an American invention. Breaks my heart as a Brit. We’re a nation of tea drinkers and a yank invented tea bags. 1908, a guy called Thomas Sullivan was a tea merchant, and what he wanted to do, he was a marketer. He wanted to send samples to customers of new teas. 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 tea bag was born, by an American called Thomas Sullivan. So there you go. Enough of me interrupting myself. Let’s get back to the show.
[01:14:19.450] – Andi J
Innovation has therefore happened in that category at certain points before. You wouldn’t necessarily think tea innovation, but it’s underpinned 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?
[01:14:41.440] – Andi J
How do you respond to that?
[01:14:43.190] – Shantanu S
Well, Twinings is 300 years plus now. It was, it was kind of the category creator, or— yeah, Twining is the brand, the person Twinings, and, and the founding family is still involved.
[01:14:55.170] – Andi J
No, really?
[01:14:56.430] – Shantanu S
We did have 11th or 12th generation person of the family is still working in Twinings.
[01:15:02.540] – Andi J
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? You know, is there kind of resistance to wanting to change, or does that make it easier to change?
[01:15:14.350] – Shantanu S
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, 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, right? And 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, with the younger consumers is that ritual has moved on. People like us and, 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. Things like on-the-go consumption, convenience, functionality that you get out of your beverage, out of a drink, have started to drive that behaviour. Something that— and, and instant energy as well, where coffee really, really delivers. It’s, it’s driven to some extent by paucity of time, but that tea ritual is declining now.
[01:16:29.930] – Shantanu S
If that has been the heartland of tea, how does tea evolve now? And, and without losing the core, 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 brand like Twinings would not give away black tea and continue to innovate and bring in new experiences, new flavours, 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 hot brewed served cold. Yeah, so all these kind of new consumption habits which are driving beverage consumption is where tea can get into.
[01:17:22.940] – Andi J
You mentioned powdered tea then, and a little bit of me died inside. Really? Powdered tea, a thing?
[01:17:29.130] – Shantanu S
There is something that, uh, Twinings has been experimenting. And again, these are— there’s something which is being driven in the US because US is not really a tea market.
[01:17:37.290] – Andi J
Yeah, yeah.
[01:17:38.040] – Shantanu S
So the experimentation around tea is stronger.
[01:17:41.310] – Andi J
Yeah, yeah. I still think a little bit of me died inside. I hope it 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, you know, great brands, hundreds of years old, innovated with loads of different products, and most of them were misses until fairly recently. But you know, the history of Guinness over the last 40 years has been launching new product, killing it after 2 years. 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. How do you then start to get that information to go, okay, we’re going to go behind 1, 2, and 3, not ABC.
[01:18:44.530] – Shantanu S
You hit the nail on the head, Andi, and that’s, that’s a big one, particularly when you’re talking of large organisations and big brands. I wouldn’t disagree with what you mentioned. Some people say that it’s, it’s not a failure to, to pull out a market after 2 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 organisations or big brands, It’s important to be clear what is success, right? For a billion turnover brand, getting 10 million in sales or 5 million sales is not success. For a 50 million brand, that’s huge success. So, and that tends to kill innovation, or that tends to promote the behaviour of pulling out and labelling something as failure many a times. And then that’s, that’s my watch out. Right now, where it tends to work is when you are basing your innovation on a real cultural insight and an evolving consumer behaviour.
[01:19:46.910] – Andi J
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 role of marketing, isn’t it?
[01:20:05.400] – Shantanu S
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 organisation storey here, but if you look at what, what are 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 2 years or 1 year’s time. I don’t blame the organisations. I have been there myself and I have myself cut pipe when it is not working to the expectations because organisations 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.
[01:20:55.990] – Andi J
So I think what you’re touching on is a real 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 organisation 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? You know, because every organisation I’ve ever worked with says they want to innovate. I think every organisation in the world wants to innovate. You’re listening to this podcast, you go, does your organisation 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.
[01:21:40.730] – Shantanu S
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 organisation says we want to innovate. Personally, and this is my opinion, Andi, and in full transparency, but what do you mean by I want to innovate, right? One has to go deeper. One has to double-click, triple-click on that. And 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, right? 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 organisations are set up to work on innovation in one singular way. There’s one pathway which is optimised for safety and risk minimization, right? Not for necessarily the other things.
[01:22:51.400] – Shantanu S
And many of the organisations, including the big and large ones, are trying to create those bespoke pathways for different innovation types. And I think that is part of the unlock.
[01:23:02.550] – Andi J
Can you do innovation properly while trying to do it in a risk-free way?
[01:23:11.390] – Shantanu S
Yes, you can. Easier said than done.
[01:23:14.660] – Andi J
Yeah.
[01:23:14.990] – Shantanu S
Though, uh, one, you have to dissociate the ongoing business risk when you— what, what an organisation is typically called disruptive or breakthrough innovation. And many of the organisations 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 organisation. Yeah, because when you have this different approach, it needs to be end-to-end, and the leadership decision-making and the behaviour around that incubator needs to be adapted as well.
[01:24:06.280] – Andi J
So there’s that, there’s different models, isn’t there? There’s, we have an incubator, you do innovation over there, and the Google called it the Moonshot Lab or whatever, right? 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 organisation and struggles. So the other way to do that then is, well, you keep organising innovation within the main body of the business and people do it, but then they often end up doing it kind of at the side of the desk and, oh, we’ve got, you know, peak quarter coming up for sales, 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 as well, the shades of grey, but in your experience, is one way better than another? Is it better when, like you say, when you’re at Dannone and Twinings and you’re in the, the little lab coming up with the ideas, or is it better when it’s part of everyone’s everyday 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?
[01:25:06.840] – Shantanu S
Yeah, if I had a ready perfect answer to that, it’ll be perfect, no? But it, it needs to be a bit bespoke. Now let me take two extremes to explain my thinking on this, right? One thing, as you said, is keep it as part of the day-to-day organisation and try to assign a team to do something disruptive and breakthrough thinking. In my view, that struggles, right? Because the entire mindset and behaviour and capabilities and skills as well that you need to do that is different from managing day-to-day business. And the pressures that the team doing that face is a bit of distraction. So I, I, I’m not a big advocate of trying to manage both simultaneously. Then the other extreme, which is incubator, I think that’s a good start. But where things can improve is having this clarity from day one, 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 I probably could— 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 organisation, because they are not— their superpower is not to think how to bring it back into a multibillion business.
[01:26:39.660] – Shantanu S
Their superpower is how to create something that will be super exciting for the customer in 5 years from now.
[01:26:45.280] – Andi J
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, right?
[01:26:55.300] – Shantanu S
Yeah.
[01:26:55.730] – Andi J
So you innovate and you come up with the great new product. So product B, this is fantastic. This is our new thing. People love it. Everybody loves it. This is great. 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 your, 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. We’ll just create you another metre of shelf to put your new products on. It’s like, oh great, something has to go. Yeah. 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?
[01:27:44.380] – Shantanu S
It has to. It has to. And the emerging technology and e-commerce and D2C actually is an opportunity in that space because you can test out things through D2C or e-com.
[01:27:57.960] – Andi J
Yeah.
[01:27:58.380] – Shantanu S
Much better, get to a scale or a replicable model, and then look at retailing.
[01:28:05.200] – Andi J
Yeah.
[01:28:05.610] – Shantanu S
And then, then that gives you more oxygen.
[01:28:08.520] – Andi J
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. Yeah. What’s the difference between the two when it comes to innovation? You know, I once interviewed, um, not for this podcast, but many years ago, I interviewed one of the UK’s most famous scientists, Professor Robert 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. Podcast tagline is makes you think differently. And he said, if you had endless money, you’d almost become lazy with it. Sometimes you have to bash ideas together to get better things. I think if you’re trying to innovate at Coca-Cola or Danone, you’ve got the safety net, you get paid at the end of the month, whatever happens and all that. A 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?
[01:29:08.960] – Shantanu S
I do feel challenger brands do it better, right? Where they struggle is once they hit scale. Now, 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. Yeah. And challenging. It’s something I’ve always believed in. And even when I was, say, 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 money muscle, retailer relationship, R&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 to make me think, okay, what is happening here?
[01:30:09.160] – Andi J
There’s an old story of 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 them too much money. And And it’s absolutely chucking it down, it’s throwing it down. And he stops at one of those guys holding, you know, 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.” And the guy in the Porsche, he’s sat looking at the guy in the lollipop going, “I wish I didn’t have the stress of having to tell 200 people they’re losing their 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 wanna be the other side. It’s how do organisations then tap in to make the best of that?
[01:30:57.410] – Andi J
If you think in a big organisation, the Challenger Brands have got this fast-moving thing, they come up and all the ideas are there, 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?
[01:31:15.470] – Shantanu S
There’s a learning, okay? There’s a common learning which I think both worlds can benefit from. And then 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 centred around conviction building for the founders or the small team that is leading it. For large organisations, it’s scale building. And risk-averse, risk minimization. So the entire mindset and behaviour is very different. And conviction building does not come through expensive research or huge amounts of data being bought. It’s, it’s an individual or a group of individuals’ conviction about doing something. Now, having said that, and something I had read somewhere, and I love this expression, is, uh, being anti-establishment is easy Till they actually become part of the establishment.
[01:32:15.880] – Andi J
Yeah.
[01:32:17.400] – Shantanu S
And most of these startup challenger brands get initial success by being anti-establishment.
[01:32:24.300] – Andi J
Yeah.
[01:32:25.110] – Shantanu S
The key things that they do very well— I mean, whether you’re talking Tony Chocolonely or Oatly, or in tea category brands like Tea Pigs— they really identify their enemy very clearly, and they go full-fledged against that enemy because their objective is 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.
[01:33:12.300] – Andi J
We touched on, on a previous episode, uh, BrewDog, who are really struggling with that. You know, they were the punk drinks upstart until the founder suddenly became part of the establishment and started having some interesting views. They started doing strange things to staff like sacking them, zero-hour contracts, because they were just part of the establishment. And they have really struggled with growing up because actually what they’ve done is grow old and And 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.
[01:33:49.820] – Shantanu S
It is.
[01:33:50.720] – Andi J
But knowing how to go back on that probably comes back to where you started with your first answer. Brand is not the same. I’ve forgotten the words you used. What did you say? It was brand is not the same as the—
[01:34:04.120] – Shantanu S
As the product.
[01:34:04.780] – Andi J
As the product. You’ve 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?
[01:34:11.440] – Shantanu S
Yeah, it is. And where I think big brands and organisations can really learn is the way these challenger brands make their choices, are single-minded about it, sharp about it, and stay centred on the culture. Now, something that I’ve always wondered in, in my work as well is— and let me narrow down to tea, where we discussed earlier, it’s kind of the core tea business is not really growing as much. And likes of Teapig 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, right, what Teapigs did? And then I love the expression from Teapigs— two expressions actually, uh, dust in a bag, right? It’s— you certainly completely deposition tea just like straight away. It just creates a different You think, look at tea differently, right? Yeah, smart line, but it talks. And then tea temples instead of tea bags. Yeah, transparency, recycle, recyclable packaging when multi-layered packaging has been a challenge in tea category, ethical sourcing. So things that big brands can easily get into, but That’s about challenging yourself, right? The lead brand or a typical Lipton Hero SKU would hate doing that.
[01:35:38.610] – Andi J
And even then, probably the margin on that product is slightly smaller than the margin on a Lipton’s, which to Teapigs is still great margin, but to Lipton’s is actually— you multiply that across our balance sheet, the whole board’s going to get sacked for ruining shareholder value. And you know, these are the decisions, is it’s never just about how that product shows up, is it? It’s always more difficult than that. What I’m intrigued in is you’ve got obviously a very small company now. I said very small, but you know, a startup with your wife.
[01:36:09.090] – Shantanu S
Yeah.
[01:36:10.150] – Andi J
What lessons, what sort of 2 or 3 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?
[01:36:28.680] – Shantanu S
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? It’s essentially a new health and wellness platform we are building, which is a combination of— it will be a learning platform, a credible, 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 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, this is a very attractive space today, and, and 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? How can I— who’s my enemy? And I don’t have an answer yet, right? Because I do believe and totally respect the pharma industry because they have a role in life of the consumer.
[01:37:47.900] – Shantanu S
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, that’s a work we are currently on the journey.
[01:38:00.410] – Andi J
Yeah. And is there anything about, you know, you talked about finding the, you know, the customer and being able to position for that particular group. Has that— 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’s fine. You’ve got a targeting problem. You’re trying to target 7 different customers and every one of them’s 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. You’re targeting problem, not positioning problem. Is that where you are at the minute? Are you still trying to sort of narrow it down to go, these are the groups of people we want to help, or because it’s Health4U, it’s still quite broad. You’ve hit again the nail centre, because that’s, that’s very exactly where we are reading your mind.
[01:38:56.240] – Shantanu S
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, it’s again the pilot approach. And, and, and what is very interesting as well, and you have, you have been in that space and talked to a lot of people in that space, is how AI is helping in this.
[01:39:29.700] – Andi J
So are you— I’m, I’ve seen some great things about synthetic research. I’m still, I’m not, 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?
[01:39:50.230] – Shantanu S
No, I, I don’t want to go there yet, right? Because I am still very much a believer in you need human oversight and you need human feedback, not synthetic customers. Now, and this is linked to what I’ve seen working in organisations, larger organisations, right? Now, if you think— let’s take a step back. Think of this: whenever any brand, any organisation 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, looking at reports, etc., etc. Traditionally takes huge amount of time and effort and also money to buy access to all of that information. That’s where AI is good at, right? That’s where 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, good result out of that, right?
[01:41:09.260] – Shantanu S
Now, watch out, is it is dangerous to assume that you’ll get something ready to execute. But from again an organisation’s perspective, and if you think back, right, organisations 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 a bunch of 80% ready, 20, 80% ready concepts, I’m in a better place than having spent a lot of time and money with 3 perfect-looking concepts. And that’s where AI really brings value.
[01:41:45.590] – Andi J
Yeah, brilliant stuff. Well, look, before we wrap up, I ask everybody if they can recommend a book, a resource that would maybe help their thinking in this space. So anything you’d recommend?
[01:41:56.730] – Shantanu S
Yeah, of course. I mean, there are 2 ways I I look to this question, there is one thing of— there’s a lot happening around marketing and innovation here 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 judgement and knowledge and analysis base. To stay tuned, I think the likes of Marketing Week, The Drum, The Grocer are good resources. The Drum gives a more global perspective. Marketing Week and the grocer retail marketing in, in the UK. On reflection, and I have— 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— Cannes Lions is one, right? Look at the winners and back analyse 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, that’s a better way to learn.
[01:42:59.300] – Shantanu S
And then top it up with the books you want to read and the kind of models you want to refer.
[01:43:04.210] – Andi J
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.
[01:43:12.010] – Shantanu S
Thank you so much for having me, Andi. Lovely to talk to you.
[01:43:14.720] – Andi J
Thank you.