“ We used the world’s most powerful microscope to visualise how we can repair teeth.”

Our guest on this episode of The Persuasion Game podcast is Shafik Saba, Global Lead of Front End Innovation at Haleon.

He says, when it comes to innovation, you need to obsess over your brand’s core, and sometimes that means using a huge microscope to bring new life to a certain toothpaste’s core function.

Shafik believes the core of your brand needs that level of attention and, too often, being distracted by a new, shiny extension can lead to disaster,

It’s all about striking the right balance between innovating your core and stretching into areas you authentically belong in.

He also discusses marketing brands in different countries and whether or not there’s now too much choice on our shelves.

Episodes are released bi-weekly. Follow us on LinkedIn for updates.

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Want to know more about us? Visit our website here: thisistheforge.com

This is an 18Sixty production for The Forge.

CHAPTERS:

(00:00) Introduction

(02:22) From Automotive to Healthcare Innovation

(11:55) Balancing Core and Expansion

(22:16) Consumer Insights and Empathy

(23:38) Shopability and Design

The Persuasion Game is available on all your favourite podcast apps: https://link.chtbl.com/PersuasionGame

Episode transcript:

Shafik: The reason why 80% of innovations plus are failing is because they more often go away from the core too far.

Adam: Hey, Laura, how are you?

Laura: I am very jet lagged, but very well. How are you doing?

Adam: Welcome back from your trip to New York.

Laura: Thank you so much.

Adam: I loved your photo from the, was it the Empire State Building or the Rock?

Laura: You did! You got my clues. Empire State Building. Yeah.

Adam: Empire State Building. Yeah. Excellent. How was the trip?

Laura: It was exhausting and excellent, which is how New York always should be. Right?

Adam: Exactly! Exactly. So I’m really excited about this week, we are going to be talking about why innovations fail.

So after the pandemic at The Forge, we saw a lot of innovation briefs, didn’t we? With all those new exciting brands serving new needs and new occasions, brands like Act and Wild in deodorant, High Smile in oral care, Moth in alcoholic drinks. It felt like a really exciting time to be in innovation and lots of our clients were trying to respond to this, weren’t they?

So we saw a lot of innovation briefs come through. I think it might be fair to say that the tide has slightly shifted since then. I think that we’re now talking a bit more about core and renovating our cores. And we’re going to be finding out from our guest today, you know, if you are going to be in innovation, how to win, and what makes innovation fail.

Laura: Yeah, I think it’s great to face into this from a slightly more glass half empty point of view. Like innovation is always exciting. It’s often the favourite part of any marketer’s job. But we’ve got to be realistic that cost of living is hitting in a number of our developed markets.

We’re seeing baskets shrinking in categories that are really well developed and people are increasingly making really tough choices. Often our briefs are around the fight back against private label, for example. Talking to our guest today will be a really fantastic way of looking at both the joys and the pains of innovation.

Adam: Exactly. And so we’re thrilled today to have with us the global head of front end innovation at Haleon, Shafik Saba.

And just before we hear from our guest, a quick ask from us. We’d love it if you can tell one person about this podcast in the office or on a call today, or leave us a five star review in a rating wherever you listen to your podcasts. Okay. Here’s the interview.

Welcome, Shafik.

Shafik: Hi guys. Nice to meet you both.

Laura: Great to have you on board.

Adam: I think what’s really interesting about your career is that you started with a mechanical engineering degree, is that right?

Shafik: Yeah.

Adam: And then went into automotive engineering at Ford. What’s the key thing you took with you as an automotive engineer into your role as an innovator at a consumer healthcare company now?

Shafik: I think it was in the summer of 94 or 95, showing my age here, sitting in a pub on the Kings Road, and I watched an Audi TT and a Porsche Boxster Drive past, and they just launched and everyone went oh, they’re nice, really lovely cars. And at the same time I immediately thought, oh, I can’t afford it, and if I could afford it, I can’t insure it.

So that’s an interesting need. Went back into the office on the Monday. I was working in the business strategy office at Ford at the time, and we kind of came up with a very simple proposition, which was an affordable, good looking roadster. This then became a strategy paper that did the rounds for a couple of years, got no traction, got very frustrated. Sitting back to being on the Kings Road going you don’t have to spend 30,000 pounds on a Roadster, you could do it differently.

And then worked with our design studio in Turin at the time, and we basically built a prototype, stuck it in the Turin Auto Show, quietly in the corner where no one would see it, and all spotlights went onto it. That was the sort of what was required to get the decision making going. And I think good design thinking is all about kind of test prototype, visualise, bring your ideas to life.

Cars aren’t communicated on paper, they’re sat and you touch them, you feel them. Everyone talks about what does the door sound like? What does the steering wheel feel like? How do you get pushed into the back of the seat when you floor it, whatever it is, right? They’re visceral, emotive things. So we had to build a visceral, emotive expression of the idea.

And I think in innovation now, wherever you work and in healthcare it’s particularly interesting, a bit difficult because of the rightful rules. When you’re testing new ideas, you can’t just stick things in people’s mouths or take this tablet and now you’ve got some new benefit, because you might be waiting for a clinical to show if that’s safe or effective and stuff like that. So it’s hard. But I do think AI can do an awful lot to rapidly prototype.

You know, it does simplification and theming and ideation brilliantly, but that prototyping that I think is just kicking off now and it’s fascinating to watch.

Laura: So there’s actually something to react to rather than just these kind of abstract concepts?

Shafik: Yeah, definitely.

So, yeah. So my one learning from the current industry would be just bring your ideas to life in the most visual, physical, kinesthetic…

Adam: Unignorable way possible.

Shafik: Unignorable in the corner, just there and shine a light on it yeah.

Laura: Sorry to start on a dour note, but it feels like a lot of innovations fail and it’s something we should probably face into when we talk about innovation today. Why do you think that is?

Shafik: Yeah, it’s a bit depressing, isn’t it? Something like 80% of innovations are cited as failing.

It all really starts in strategy and strategic choices. Where I work at Haleon which is one of the I think it’s the largest over the counter healthcare company in the world. We act like an internal consultancy to our organisation and we go around supporting our brands and our teams in global and local parts of the business with innovation challenges.

The ones that turn up to us with a really well-defined brief that is part of an enduring strategy that’s been proven out time, over time tend to have a really clear sense of who they are and who they aren’t, who their core target audiences are, their growth audiences, what are the boundaries of scope. They tend to have all the basics in place. The ones that you get worried about is when they kind of go, oh, I’m a relief brand, I want to move into prevention or recovery and really loose, open statements like that.

The second piece within strategy is having a really solid sense of what your core is on your brand. For me, the core is really what you’re famous for in the eyes of your consumers and probably where most of your sales are. We tend to see, when we look at brands, about 80 plus percent of our sales are in two or three core products, and even maybe 50, 60% in just the one hero product. Advil for us are one of our mega brands in the US on pain, has its tiny little terracotta pill and more than half of the sales are in just that one hero product.

So really having a strong sense of what your core is and continually loving it and finding ways to reestablish and reaffirm that leadership position. And then finally, capability. If we were talking about insight today I don’t think a marketeer, any marketeer around the world will disagree with that’s a skill that you need to constantly invest in, constantly be curious, watching consumers looking for early new behaviours, looking at all sorts of inspiration for insight. But we as innovators, we tend not to have the same reinforcement of core learning.

And something I’ve also spotted is you quite often get marketeers with good business degrees or science degrees or whatever degrees, but the people who are actually trained in innovation i.e. the design thinkers are the design guys. And they’re often brought in at the very end of a process where, hey, we’ve got an idea, design it, you know, what’s the pack design going to look like? What’s the logo? What’s the mode of action? What’s the benefit of visualisation? When actually what you want is those people who spent 3, 4, 5 years at uni studying design thinking, doing it actually in with you at the start.

Laura: Do you think there’s a role for rethinking sort of who owns what across different stages of the process?

Shafik: Yeah. I think some of the best innovators that I’ve been lucky enough to work with are absolutely brilliant at understanding people and motivations and behaviours, and they’re just naturally curious in that regard.

But they are equally passionate about the scientific sort of platforms and rigour and adjacent categories within them. As opposed to either the scientific guys go, I’ve got a tech, can you go and find me an insight? That used to be the case 20, 30 years ago. I don’t think we do that now as an industry now we’re all really good at identifying insights and then kind of retrofitting the science. But really it should be a meeting sort of 50-50 matching of birth. And I think in healthcare this is particularly relevant.

So the example I’ll give is the first time you sneeze, right? Let’s say it’s April, let’s say it’s March or April, and you sneeze. Is that a cold or is that an allergy? Most people when they have that first sneeze, they don’t know if it’s a cold or allergy. Should they reach for some antihistamine or something different for cold and flu? And similarly, if people have sensitive teeth, the majority of people who have it don’t know they’ve got it. They just know that cold stuff makes them wince and they go ouch.

And in fact, interestingly, every culture around the world has its own word for that thing. You know I believe in India, it’s ‘ghuli ghuli’. In the UK it’s a twinge. You know, we all have these idioms or these idiosyncratic words for it, but you don’t know what it is until someone diagnoses it. And so I think when you think about innovation, I think every category has its sort of unaware opportunity audience.

And we as innovators need to think about as much of what the science behind that condition or that that brand sphere of influence is as much as what the consumers are telling you they need and want and then you kind of end up with giving them what they think they want, but also surprising the stuff that they didn’t know they needed until you put it on their plate.

Adam: I think one of the really interesting things about healthcare is quite often you don’t know what you don’t know as a consumer.

Shafik: Yeah.

Adam: Until someone like the pharmacist or the doctor tells you to use something or your dentist you don’t really think about it. How do you kind of manage that I guess lack of consumer knowledge around some of the categories that you are innovating in?

Shafik: Experts to us, whoever experts might be are fundamentally important. And I would say it’s one of the things that we spend a disproportionate amount of time thinking about who are the right experts and then what is the right machine model behind to give them the right materials to ethically make the right recommendation.

So that could be a clinical paper with a graph that shows this one’s better than that, or it could be a scientific visualisation. Right? What we try and do is find really compelling ways to make visceral, call it kitchen sink visualisation, right? Or logic. Make visceral what the source of the problem is that explains the symptoms you’re having that ouch when you have something cold.

It’s harder in asymptomatic things like the immune system is not really, it’s an asymptomatic thing – you can’t experience until it’s too late and you have your first sneeze or what have you. So we’re always trying to find clever ways to visualise and show that. And then you take those materials to experts, you’ll then find their own way to independently use that to advise consumers.

Laura: You said that people who came to you with a really strong understanding of who their brand was, often had the strongest briefs and the biggest clarity for you. But you operate in categories like pain relief, where understanding of the category itself is so culturally driven. You know, whether that’s a preference for topicals or a sort of mistrust of manmade ingredients.

How do you marry that cultural nuance and the brand positioning in terms of defining what your innovation should be?

Shafik: Oh, that’s a good one. And that also speaks to the kind of the global, local way of operating in large companies, which seems to be quite cyclical. I think everyone goes in 10 year cycles.

I’m going to take a different pain relief brand because I know more about it. And that’s Sensodyne because I worked on it for about 10 years. So we have the same brilliant scientists making wonderful new products and toothpaste and mouthwashes and brushes and stuff to help people with sensitive teeth. We have the same creative idea.

If you ask most people why they start using Sensodyne, the majority of people put their hand up and go, because my dentist gave me a sample. They diagnosed me and they gave a sample. So our advertising, which I would say is not super sexy, not super jazzy, incredibly effective. It’s, you could argue, it’s the gift that keeps on giving. It’s effectively taking that idea of an expert consultation and bringing it into your home through TV, digital, whatever media.

That idea has been enduring. But when we go and film those ads, they’re unique to every market. They’re local dentists, hygienists, local pharmacists, whoever is involved in that model. And so you have the same underlying science, you have the same underlying creative idea, you have the same underlying editing machine quite frankly, all the ads will go into a central place and be edited in a very efficient way. So you get those levers of scale, but you have that personalisation and then that allows for all the local language.

Adam: You mentioned the global local tension, which is obviously a clear one you have to manage. The other tension I think is this one between something you alluded to earlier, which is the core and then stretch. And I guess the tendency for marketing is to want to kind of often find new needs, new occasions, new benefits that they can target.

Shafik: Yeah.

Adam: How do you in innovation kind of balance that, you know, making sure that you’re nurturing your core or reinforcing that, but also giving enough headroom for the stretch stuff?

Shafik: I get really irritated at a lot of innovation conferences when they all go every great new disruptions are great new ideas. Like no, you obviously haven’t got any experience in the real world because the reason why 80% of innovations plus are failing is because they more often go away from the core too far.

I think it, and I’ll keep on saying this, I think it comes back to good strategy. If you have good, clear strategy, which is about choices, and as long as they’re enduring choices over time, you can then balance how much you invest in your core, and then when you have the conditions, the right conditions in place to go beyond that core, what I would call them, expand doing that.

We actually had a global conference a couple of years ago where I got a drummer in, because I like drummers, and used the analogy of a drum to brand strategy or innovation strategy where maybe the bass drum, which is constant, but maybe one every four beats. That’s your core. That’s speaking to innovation cadence, right?

That’s how often you need to hit your core with the right kind of love, right? That maybe it’s new claims, new design or reformulation, some sustainability upgrade. Try and bundle those things all together to be efficient. And then in comes the high hat or the snare drum, and that’s your one expansion or two expansions.

And really good brands balance that rhythm of hitting the core one in every four beats. Yeah?

And then they can introduce a high hat or introduce a snare, which will be the expansions, and that’s your cadence. And then when it gets quite interesting for us as a company, we’ve got slow, constant categories like OTC pain relief, for example, where the regulations are so strict as they rightfully should be, right? But therefore, the pace of innovation is much slower. So that that means that the sound of your drum kit might be much more on the drum, on the bass drum with the occasional high hat, and it’s a much slower, more chilled out rhythm, more like more

Adam: More reggae or dub, you know?

Shafik: Yeah, yeah, yeah okay. Whereas in oral health or vitamins and minerals, like our brands like Centrum, they’re like frantic. They’re innovating every six months. So that’s more like, I don’t know..

Adam: Trash metal!

Shafik: Trash metal, or you know, Prodigy or fast, whatever you want to, yeah, whatever your music tastes might be. But it’s a good way of thinking about strategy and therefore how often you protect your core versus expand.

Laura: What to you is a good example of a core innovation in a category where it’s hard to change?

Shafik: There’s one that we’re rolling out right now. When you are congested, I’ve just got over a cold. You can probably hear it my voice a little bit. So when you are congested, most people reach for tablets. And most people don’t know that actually you can take a nasal spray but the nasal sprays are much more effective because they actually go straight to the area of congestion.

The way they work to sort of open up your airways and stuff makes them much quicker and much more, they don’t have to travel around your body. Okay? So there’s a really good reason for it. Number one, barrier for that? People don’t want to stick something up their nose fundamentally. Yeah, and for those that have actually tried it, the experience is pretty god awful.

It feels like having a jet wash, car wash off your nose, half it goes down the back of your throat and all that sort of stuff. So it took us 10 years to develop it. Sometimes these renovations on your core can be quite subtle and take a long time. But we’ve, what we’ve done is re-engineer the packaging to make it much more inclusive and easy to use.

But actually the clever stuff is how they’ve changed the jet washing into a gentle mist that’s more effective and nice to use. So that’s the kind of, you’ve gone into innovation bubble and done your thing, but then how do you get it to the right people and the right point of influence? So, back to Sensodyne.

The number one reason why people use Sensodyne is because the dentist tells them. The same for people who have congested noses. The number one reason why they’re now switching to this is because the pharmacist is going, do you know those tablets are okay, but I’ve actually tried this. This is much, much better.

So it’s not just about the innovation on the core, but then it’s who are the right levers of people to influence that decision, that purchase decision,

Laura: What to you are the signs that a brand has stretched too far?

Shafik: If you’re into design thinking, you’ll know the desirability, viability, feasibility model, and you’ll know this of double down or increasingly triple down thinking.

What doesn’t get talked about is brand fit. And what market research methodologies I don’t think do a good enough job of, and this is a clarion call to the Nielsen’s bases, Ipsos of the world is really challenging the people who create this stimulus that you’re testing, are you the right brand to deliver that benefit?

I think we’re pretty good actually at defining needs and I think we’re pretty good at crafting elevator pictures and well structured concepts and AI is obviously facilitating that and accelerating that massively. What I don’t think we spend enough time for is looking at the lead measures on are you the right brand?

Are you the best brand to serve that? There’s two things really, which is, are you the right brand to deliver that shiny, new, exciting opportunity? And secondly, do you have the sufficiency to support and protect your core and in a sustained way, unlock these adjacencies? So the way I look at it is look at extensions and really ask yourself, are you the right brand to uniquely deliver that space in your life stage?

And then critically for big companies that operate their brands in 50, a hundred plus markets around the world, you’ll have different, what we call brand market life stages. So in those low share markets, maybe India, China, Brazil, something like that, where you’re more in the emerging cluster and you’re creating your brand awareness you’ve really just gotta focus on your core.

Just keep on reinforcing that core and don’t get bored, keep on growing that core till you hear critical mass. If you are in that sort of more competitive mindset. So I think about oral care or pain relief in Germany. For us, it’s a very challenging leadership market. You’ve still got to focus on your core because actually you are about protecting what makes you uniquely different and better. And then if you are in a leadership position, you might have a 20 plus share and that might be the number one position by a mile. Then you can still protect your core.

At least 40% of your, I’m sensing theme investment, sensing a theme, but then you can over two or three years establish these adjacencies or expansions still protecting your core.

And that’s why, that’s the analogy with the drummer who’s kind of got this bass drum beat that’s going constantly. While hitting a high hat,

Laura: I think you’re completely right. I’m wondering though, if it’s more challenging for established brands these days because one thing we’ve observed is when a brand has been category captain and has perhaps set the norms and codes of what that category is all about, say safety, reliability, quality, quite often those become a kind of hygiene level and what can then happen is a disruptive brand can kind of come in and steal, so almost piggyback on those benefits and then say, and we’re also sustainable or, and we’re also plant-based and seem to be the ones that are coming in with the new news and the kind of excitement.

So to your point about, you know, knowing what you stand for and, and kind of making sure that you’re still true to that, how do you manage that with maybe heritage brands where perhaps some of that equity is a bit more safe, less sexy than before?

Shafik: I’m going to guess when you work on heritage brands, sometimes people get bored of the heritage that made you famous in the first place. There’s a reason why you are big. It’s because you’re actually serving a large need in a credible, relevant, aspirational or whatever. However you operate in your category way. So be really proud of that.

Then at the same time be really challenging of how you step change your core proposition. So back in the sort 2008, 9 timeframe, Sensodyne was about a 300 million pound brand, it’s quite small. You said Sensodyne- it did relief. Yeah. Colgate came out with a brand new technology that had us all shaking in our boots at that time. And we were looking at a bone regeneration technology that would repair bones, damaged bones, and your teeth and bones are a similar composition. So it was a really nice, interesting technology story of taking one technology from high science and putting it into a different part of your body and if you can make it work wow.

The first time we tested this concept, Sensodyne Ultra – the most effective, it was 97% cannibalistic. So really high scores, but basically it just does better what you’ve already done. When we looked at the word cloud of what was unique and different and interesting to people, the word repair just sort of stuck out like a, you know what you want on those word clouds is one thing to focus on. It was repair.

So we just flipped the proposition. Repair and protect was the idea, and it was about 80, 85% incremental. The point I’m making is when technologies reach in their S-curve of evolution in categories, reach their sort of plateau, and they kind of go through this, prove it works, prove it works more efficiently, prove it works more cheaply. Kind of hit that top of your plateau. What is the next technology that’s going to come along? And your scientists should be obsessing about all of that stuff. And that’s all about your core. It’s all about your core. And that particular product then probably gave that brand five or 10 years of just fuel, of giving you wonderful visualisations to scientists to show how it repairs from the inside out.

We use the world’s most powerful microscope in Grenoble, that has a beam of light that’s like 8 million times the beam of the sun or something, crazy. It’s like a mini version of the Hadron Collider. Okay. And this just shows you how you can really obsess about your core. Okay?

There’s this sort of one kilometre diameter research station where they do leading edge research on cancer and they age paleontological samples. And you got the weirdest bunch of scientists all grouping together. One of our guys set up a lab to say, how can we visualise what the eye can’t see and could get the most microscopic level of looking inside your teeth to visualise how we can repair from the inside out.

We turn that to some visuals, we show it to some dentists, they go, I’ve never seen that before. That’s interesting. That’s relevant, that’s credible. They keep recommending. That’s a really explicit example of how you can obsess about your core and go beyond just here’s another clinical trial, or here’s a smart marketing visual.

So it’s about really authentically obsessing about your core in R&D in marketing everywhere.

Adam: That’s a brilliant example.

Shafik: It’s a bit of a weird example.

Adam: No, but that’s one of those examples I’ll be using again.

Laura: I did not think the Hadron Collider would come to this today. I love it.

Shafik: No, you wouldn’t think of testing a toothpaste in a mini Hadron Collider, but that’s kind of what one of our scientists did.

Adam: Yeah that’s excellent. I think it’s really important. I mean, you’ve talked about these kind of two worlds, the marketers and the scientists. How do the scientists continue to know, like where the brand is heading so they can continue to research the right things? For example, with large Hadron Colliders and the rest of it?

Shafik: AI is wonderful and also post COVID with this sort of hybrid working, siloed ways of working. So much has changed for the better. But I definitely think the one thing that has suffered, and I know I’m not alone in this, is people have stopped going and spending time with consumers. It doesn’t have to cost money.

My dad, he is a minefield of insight when it comes to ageing and healthcare. So I speak to him and I watch him all the time and I just see insights. He’s the gift that keeps giving there, testing every product on him. Probably I…not literally, but you know, it’s having that curiosity and learning some of the fundamentals. So that’s what we need to do more of.

Here’s a random example. My son was applying to uni to do product design and he was given a 48 hour challenge, and it was sort of an inclusive design brief. So I just stuck a mask on him for an hour and I said, go and brush your teeth, make a cup of tea, make some lunch, and something else. And he just got firsthand insight on what it’s like to be blind. And then he used that insight immediately to get his. We used to joke, if you want to know what it’s like to be an allergy sufferer, chop a Spanish onion and then try and come up with ideas, because your eyes are streaming. There are lots of ways to empathise and just do that all the time.

Laura: I loved what you said about empathy and really getting into the consumer experience. And last week I was in America looking at shelves. And for the first time I thought, I wonder if we’ve reached peak stuff? There was so much choice, so many brands, and I didn’t feel like there was the energy in shopping that you would’ve seen, you know 10, 15 years ago. Now arguably that’s driven by digital,

but also things are really expensive. You know, and you look at the price…

Shafik: Especially in the US.

Laura: Yeah. And I think for the first time we’ve seen US baskets shrinking in some of our key categories, which is really unusual.

What kind of challenge do you think that prompts for innovators?

Shafik: Yeah. And more is not better. I remember reading Barry Schwartz’s book, the Paradox of Choice, I think in 2004. Love that book.

But one of the things that struck me was if you are thirsty, someone is offering you coffee or water, you’ll be happy in your decision. But if someone lifts off 20 different things, you’ll be going, oh, I just have a glass of water. You’ll be less satisfied with your final decision. That is the paradox of choice. And yet the commercial machine is not necessarily set up to deliver that.

It’s easier to get higher incrementality scores on an expand opportunity in innovation, but actually you’ll get more true incremental sales growth that you can bank from protecting and loving and growing your core. So you don’t necessarily need more stuff.

So one of our, Otrivine actually, the brand that I spoke about, the nasal spray before, one of its barriers before… back to good strategic planning should know what the clear target audiences and behaviour change as you’re trying to drive, some of your other podcasts speak about that very eloquently. And then what are the clear known barriers to that? Now what you’re talking about is shoppability, which is a very common barrier. So making, first of all, when you’re at your 10 foot, you are further away foot. It’s like brand blocking. Okay. And does your brand look old fashioned and tired?

Well, Otrivine did, and so it renovated itself, made it more modern, got a better brand block, and then secondly, through a turf analysis, it worked out which were the power skews that consumers wanted. And then it made the pack design reflect that turf much more clearly. Net net. The markets that did this, essentially a design restage saw massive levels of growth.

I won’t say numbers not appropriate, but decent levels of growth just from a pure design restage that made it easier to shop the shelf. But there is an inherent tension in the world, which is stuffing more product in and retailers going, we don’t want more product. You know, one in, one out. You know, all the usual discussions that have have to happen.

Laura: This is fantastic. We got so much out of it. Thank you very much.

Shafik: Yeah. Cool.

Adam: Laura, what a guest. I absolutely loved that interview. What did you think?

Laura: I really enjoyed it. I really enjoyed the provocations, particularly around talking about the core. I think it was really interesting to interrogate the question about what the core actually is. I think it’s quite easy for us as marketers to gravitate towards the next shiny thing, which I think was Shafik’s own words. And sometimes that can mean seeing core stuff is a bit boring and basic. But he gave us so many different ways in to think about what the core is and what it stands for.

Adam: It’s a bit like what Amit Singh was saying when we had him on the podcast, talking about the core being an idea, you own.

Or it might be an occasion you own or a benefit that you own or a need that you own. And he was saying that you’re a big business selling a lot of products because you are solving a problem in people’s lives and not to lose sight of that problem that you’re solving,

Laura: But also that it could be so many different things.

It could be an access point, it could be a way of explaining a benefit. It could be a new claim. It could even be a way of sort of evolving into a new space. But you know, one that really leverages the existing equity and kind of premiumise it or makes it more accessible. I think that actually gets a lot closer to what people would traditionally think of as innovation, and it’s a lot more sort of sexy and exciting.

Adam: And shopability. I mean that was, that was really interesting, wasn’t it? You know, making sure that once you’ve done all this hard work, making it easy to understand what it is and how to find it and, and how to use it.

Laura: As someone that spent 30 minutes trying to find a soft drink, admittedly with a lot of jet lag in the US the other day, I would a hundred percent advocate for shopability, and I loved what he had to say about design being part of that process.

Adam: Absolutely.

Laura: Well, thanks for another great interview and we will see you next time.Adam: Great to see you, Laura. Speak soon