Sukhleen Aneja on digital transformation and innovation

We're talking about innovation and as I promised when talking to Gampati we thought we'd start off with your three-year-old daughters. How are they first of all? Oh, doing really well. And do you buy this idea, Sukhleen, that actually not knowing and having a fresh mind is part of a key to discovering the new? 100%. I think if you can just approach everything with zero preconceived notions, which is very hard, but I think it just allows you to experience everything from a childlike perspective. Because a child never questions, I mean he questions but is always intrigued by the possibilities. And I don't think innovation is ever going to be possible unless you have an open mind.

And actually just out of curiosity and staying with you, Sukhleen, because so much this is personal, right? As Gampati was saying, innovation is about the I. It's about the you, right? How have your two daughters made you fresher in your thinking just by being around them? I think the best gift they've given me is really looking at the power of observation. Because for them, they're discovering everything, things that you often see but don't see. But you know, when a child sees things, the amusement with which they see it, or the simple joy of discovering something for the very first time. I think just watching that makes you grow so much. So I think that perhaps has been their biggest gift they've been able to give me.

Well, I suppose in that sense, if you relate it to customers, right? A lot of this comes back to customers. If you can create that same sort of childlike delight, you know, when they unwrap your product or they apply your product, whatever, that's sort of the alpha and omega, isn't it? Absolutely. Okay, so here, you're hardly a veteran, you know. You are a veteran in a way, but 40 under 40, 30 under 30, no doubt 50 under 50, but you've got some way to go, yes, to clean on this. But, yeah, you've been across lots of different organisations. And without, it's always a bit invidious to compare one brand with another, but just talk about how your views of innovation have changed and how you've been through that journey across these great brands.

It's a great question because I, luckily in my career, had the good fortune of working with some of the finest organisations in FMCG who've been very pioneering and innovative in their products. So when I started my journey, I distinctly remember consumer intimacy is one thing that we immensely took pride in Unilever. You know, whether it was to go and live with your consumer or study them by being one with them, you know, and developing that empathy of being able to see the world from their eyes by asking the four whys. Every time you heard something, having the patience to distill the fourth why. But why do you do this? So that you can inherently get into the human motivations that drive people.

Was that hard when you were learning the trade, right? So in a country as diverse and as socially stratified as India, right? People that come, I mean typically a lot of people we have on the show come from very well-educated backgrounds. But a place like Unilever, you're right in the weeds of the argument. Was it hard to start to understand people? So I came from a background in sociology. So fundamentally human mind really excites me. And if you look at any marketing, the heart of marketing actually sits on Maslow's needs of hierarchy, right? So if you look at the world across with all the products that we consume, fundamentally it's all being driven through the Maslow's needs of hierarchy.

So at some level, if you're able to understand who we're talking to and what's the need that's driving them. And this is like shelter, food, etc. And then you can actually, and you know the way if you ask me in which way do I really believe the world evolved, is in the last two decades when I started my career we were still looking for that lowest common denominator, which could cater to a wide mass. So that the products had potential, you could create fewer bigger and scalable products. Today in the world of direct to commerce and even with the number of online brands that have come in, I think what we've been able to pay tribute to is niches. You're able to now create products for a specific bespoke niche and find an audience for it.

Okay, but just pushing back on that. On our last show we had Radha from Tata Starkwick, right? There's almost no one in the retail world that Radha hasn't worked for. His challenge to the marketers out there was actually the level of innovation in FMCG in India is not comparable to Japan or the US. Do you buy that or are you a bit more confident than he is in terms of what's coming out product wise? I think it's a journey. I think if you look at more evolved markets, the sheer amount of money that you invest in R&D is significantly higher. I think in India it is an evolving journey. I think today more and more organizations are spending money on investing behind R&D.

But I think unless we are not going to invest money in local manufacturing, sourcing of ingredients or even much more sophisticated packaging solutions, we won't be as pioneering as we would like us to be. That's right. So we can talk about innovation from a philosophical perspective, but it's economically indexed, right? No money, no honey if you're not putting money into R&D. Okay, but so with your experience, let's change direction slightly. You've been at the front end of any number of innovative campaigns. Which ones stick in your mind and why? So whether, you know, when I look at brands like Durex or Harpik, they were all pioneering within their categories.

And therefore advertising or creating advertising on them, which are fundamentally moving human needs of either pleasure and intimacy or sanitation are very primal human needs. I think those brands allowed us to create a lot of advertising which could really move emotions in the center of plate. But I think most recently in the last two years, having worked in a consumer tech company, I would perhaps talk about the power of content integration to make a brand mainstream. So recently with Goodlam itself, we have a brand called My Glam, which is our pioneering makeup brand. We were able to gamify the entire usage experience on both two mainstream shows in India, Coffee with Karan and Big Boss.

Big Boss is really like the prime nine o'clock show that brings the whole family together. We were able to gamify the experience of being able to create a look through a live show that was on in your popular television, but you could gamify the experience on your app. So I think that entire experience of being able to create a 360 content creation journey using tech at the heart of it was something which I thoroughly enjoyed. And we're kind of just at the beginning of this gamification process, right? I mean, you know, the metaverse hasn't even happened. I need to note to self, I need to get into this My Glam stuff to be a bit more like Coffee with Karan. But OK, staying on other campaigns.

So if you cast your mind back a bit, because you're a really interesting guest because you just about predate digital, right, when you started your career. When you look back then, was there a certain idea that innovation was easier before the clutter of digital? I think it's a great question because see what digital allowed us to do was to be able to create a two way communication. Unlike a world where on television it was broadcast, it was literally spray and pray. Digital allowed for a two way communication which the positive side of it is it allows you to innovate faster, get feedback faster and also listen to your consumers. I mean, like reviews and ratings make it instant on what consumers think about your product.

The hard part of it is that it also led to a lot of fragmentation and not just on product side, but also on media side, which definitely is a much harder problem for marketers to solve today than I would say perhaps it was a decade ago. That's very interesting. OK, home straight. Let's kind of go back to you. We started with you. Let's go back to you. A couple of questions. First one's cultural. You had the great good fortune to spend a year of your life in Paris, right? Is immersing yourself in other cultures important to innovation in your mind, Cyclene? I think it definitely helps. It helps you question your own dominant logic because there is so much of cultural conditioning all of us experience.

And when you immerse yourself in another culture, it forces you to unlearn completely because everything that you believe is a gospel of truth does not exist or is very different in another culture. So I think the process of being able to give yourself that jolt definitely forces you to come out of your own comfort zone. And I think just practicing that as a skill over and over again just helps you bring in a massive amount of humility because you are forcing yourself to see the world from a very different lens. Yeah, again, we're coming back to the same point that Ganpati made. It's kind of about you and how you invest in you. Final question here, Cyclene. Is innovation a young person's game?

I think innovation is definitely a curious person's game, but also a very hungry person's game because it does need you to be a bit of a contrarian. Because unless you question, you are not going to innovate and create something new. But equally, it needs you to be extremely patient and persistent because there are going to be perhaps more failures than success. Everyone talks about the success, but not the 99% things that fail. But unless you are persistent, you don't touch gold. Yeah, I think that's a great place to end because if a viewer is looking at this thinking that they can sit in their bathtub thinking big thoughts and waiting for the light bulb moment, they should probably get out of the bathtub. Completely. And get their act together.

Cyclene, you've been a fantastic guest. Thank you so much for coming on Trailblazers. Thank you Jasper.