My Best Marketing Tips #7: Danone / Anirban Basu / Innovation Director
Danone’s Innovation Director Anirban Basu wanted to join marketing so much when he worked at PepsiCo, that he accepted a position that was largely inconsequential in the grand scheme of things. But it got him in the door, speaking to other marketing managers, and best positioned to take over a sabbatical cover that would teach him the basics. So, what were Anirban’s key learnings and what marketing tips can he share?
Anirban works at the cutting edge of innovation in specialised nutrition and believes that the combination of prevalent user-generated content with artificial intelligence holds the key to the future of marketing. He’s been looking into how machine learning can get brands important insights from UGC at a time when we’re all producing so much of it – as he puts it, we’ve “democratised creativity” thanks to TikTok! But, before getting into the future of marketing, we talked about some of the best tips Anirban got at the start of his career.
What is the best marketing tip you’ve ever received and who was it from?
“Learn to be brief. You should be able to present your concept in two words.” This was our challenge at PepsiCo from our then iconic CEO, Shiv.
How have you put this marketing tip to good use?
It’s interesting how hard it can be to say more with less time on air for us marketers. Coming from a sales background, I always had a tendency to speak a lot and make long presentations. So, when working on the Slice brand for PepsiCo, I kept getting asked what my concept was, in two words only!
After lots of brainstorming, we came up with Swayaamvar – a nod to a tradition in Indian culture where a young woman would choose her husband from a list of suitors. Doing a wordplay with the word for mango, we were suggesting that you get to choose your mango, just like she’d choose her partner. It was a simple and relatable concept – in under two words!
What marketing tips does the industry need most right now?
Always try to simplify your concept and make it idiot-proof. This is a lesson I learnt with Slice and I consider it to be true today, too.
The other thing, more of the moment, is looking at using artificial intelligence to help us gather useful insights from the content users are putting on social media. We’re all producing so much content, so UGC (user-generated content) has taken off massively, but AI hasn’t started to fully navigate this space.
There are some tech companies starting to look into active listening for audio markers, or identifying other ways to harness the information we get from UGC. I believe that this will help us pick trends and preferences so much more effectively. It can also help brands learn about their competition and target consumers better, based on the content they’ve allowed them access to.
This sort of valuable insight production is the future of marketing, and it’s just around the corner. I wish we’d had access to it back when we were working on Slice, instead of having to sift through all social media posts manually to check what customer preferences were. By comparison, it took us years to realise that customers were interested in nuanced products, like a mango shake. Soon, it could take minutes.
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