We recently had an insightful discussion with Amit Doshi, Chief Marketing Officer, Britannia Industries Limited, on crafting purposeful experiences for consumers using AI-driven personalization. Amit is a marketing and sales leader with 20 + years of diverse business & capability building experience in key innovation, brand marketing, digital, sales, and customer development roles.
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In his previous assignment, he was Director, Marketing, and part of the Indian leadership and Asia-Pacific marketing leadership teams at Lenovo. He has worked with Perfetti Van Melle in the past. Amit Doshi has experience in Consumer (B2C), Enterprise, Small & Medium Business (SMB), and Tablet business units at Lenovo and brings a valuable understanding of consumers and markets across product categories.
The key takeaways from the discussion are given below:
Crafting Purposeful Experiences:
The Power of AI-Driven Personalization
1. How do you view personalization as a marketer?
Why do marketers do marketing? It’s for either short-term sales growth or it’s got to build a strong brand. In that context, if a marketer believes that personalization will truly add value, then one must do that.
But it’s very important to be mindful of the fact that one is not doing personalization just because it’s the new and shiny thing to do. For decades altogether, we have seen many successful businesses and brands being built on the back of absolutely no personalization. They were built on a very deep connection that is needed in the consumer’s life and the products being able to solve the problem.
Hence, I don’t think customers by default are necessarily seeking personalization. However, if the brand or the business does believe that they’re able to solve the consumers’ problem better or elevate the experience with personalization, they should go for it.
If they decide to take that pathway, technology plays an extremely crucial role. It’s very difficult to do personalization at scale without the aid of sophisticated technology.
Takeaways
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Don’t do personalization just for the sake of doing it. Do it when it is a part of your experience or what you’re trying to achieve ultimately from marketing.
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The role that technology plays essentially as it provides scale. It takes away the manual element out all your daily chaos and allows you to just execute without any distractions.
2. How do you see the future of personalization in marketing and the role played by technology?
I think it’s very important to be clear about the framing of the business problem that you’re trying to solve. And that’s one place where most marketers struggle. If you don’t know what you’re solving for, you will buy something that won’t eventually address your critical problem.
The second thing is to be able to understand and be very clear about what kind of personalization you’re seeking to do. The teams must put down what exactly personalization means to their customers and to their business. And what I would really look at is what technology provides that’s going to account for meaningful personalization. This means that something that the consumers will emotionally resonate or connect with. The technology that you choose should be robust and scalable enough to provide that experience.
The third thing I would look for is if the technology partner equally understands personalization and is committed to it. I can’t keep changing my technology every day. I want to be with a partner who’s also pushing the envelope looking at what’s the next or the new out there and is willing to put investment there to develop those capabilities.
Takeaways
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Be clear about what you want to do from day one.
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Personalization is about empathy and empathizing with your end user. If you understand what that empathy means and by working backward, you will know what personalization needs to do from that point onwards.
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Work with a partner that understands personalization and is continuously investing in R&D
3. How do you navigate the evolving media landscape to engage with customers at scale?
The media landscape is fragmented. Consumers are constantly switching contexts and they’re switching media. When they’re in these different mindsets, the challenge is how can we get into that realm and meaningfully connect with the consumer.
For most FMCG companies like Britannia, television is still extremely relevant. When you want to create shifts in consumer behaviour on a large scale in a market like India, it’s still the cheapest cost per contact media. It’s also effective and has a history of proven results over a long period.
But the way we approach things is that we look at it from the business problem we’re trying to solve. What’s my marketing or communication objective? Once you’re clear on the objective, you move to the next step to define what’s the extent of the change you’re trying to bring about.
Let’s say if you’re trying to acquire new consumers and grow penetration, what’s the order of magnitude? Are we talking about a thousand new consumers or 10 million? The media choices that I would make for a thousand consumers is dramatically different from the ones I would make for 10 million consumers. So, once the business objective and the order of magnitude are defined, the conversation steers towards the media.
There are three clear areas where we try to invest in digital, new media, and social media. The first is to go after niche audiences. The second is making sure that for our legacy and really large brands, we’re able to create unique and delightful experiences. And the third is to facilitate e-commerce.
Takeaways
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Define the business objective and the extent of change you’re trying to bring about
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Invest in various media based on the objective and the order of magnitude
4. What’s been the key to success for Britannia? How do you envision further leveraging AI to deepen brand engagement?
For Britannia, it boils down to making sure that we’ve got the right culture and the right ecosystem of people. All of this work has been done by the Britannia team that’s spent a lot of years at Britannia. It’s not that the changes happen from the outside, the change is actually being created and has been driven by Britannia themselves.
That’s the first thing. The second is to have the right ecosystem of partners. We’ve over a period of time expanded that ecosystem. We’ve got agency partners who bring in a very different set of skills. They sometimes complement each other and at other times challenge each other. As a result of that, we’ve been able to come to ideas that otherwise wouldn’t have been possible.
We’ve also expanded this ecosystem to include startups and new technology providers. That’s the mindset we’re trying to build, which is a learning mindset where we spend a fraction or a small percentage of our budgets. But with that small percentage, we try to achieve disproportionate change in consumer experience.
The third is the culture which values big ideas. If the big idea doesn’t seem achievable, we found that technology can make some of those ideas happen.
Coming to the point on AI or Generative AI in marketing, can I build Gen AI to do things more efficiently and faster? Can I do them cheaper while being responsible? If I have multiple marketplaces, marketing channels, and brands and if Gen AI can be that invisible assistant that can make all of that happen and make sure there’s more effective use of marketing dollars, that’s a great use case for Gen AI.
For example, when we created the chatbot with cricketer Ravi Shastri, where you could ask Ravi a quirky question, not only would you get a quirky response back around cricket in his style, but you would also get a personalized video voicing that. Now that’s an experience I can’t create without technology.
If someone presents to me a technology that’s leveraging Gen AI, these are the three questions I’m asking.
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Is it going to help me do things faster or at a lower cost?
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Is it going to take some work off the plate of my team members and make their lives simpler? Or is it something complex that I can handle it, but I won’t be able to handle all the parameters all the time consistently?
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Is it creating an experience that’s not been not been seen before or heard before?
So, if it’s answering one of these three questions, at least at this point in time for me, it’s a tick mark, but if it’s not, then I’ll save it in my drawer for a later time.
Takeaways
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The key to success for a company is to foster:
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the right culture and ecosystem of people
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the right ecosystem of partners
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a culture that values big ideas
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Leverage AI only after exploring different use cases and their potential benefits for your business
By Bijoy K.B | Associate Director – Marketing at Lemnisk
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