Jason (00:40)
Hi, I'm here with my friend Yogesh Chavda. Yogesh, welcome to The Wise in Five.

Yogesh Chavda (00:45)
Thank you for having me.

Jason (00:46)
It's my pleasure. It's so good to see But before we dive into the questions that I've prepared, I thought it'd be good for you just to share your amazing background and branding.

research and insights. It's truly a really special journey.

Yogesh Chavda (01:01)
Great, well, thank you for first of all having me on this podcast. So my background is that my family's originally from India, but I was born and raised in Bahrain. I was there through high school in Bahrain before I moved to the US for my university education. Got an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering. I got my MBA in international business from the University of South Carolina. And then the craziness started from there. I spent 16 years, just over 16 years working at Procter & Gamble.

in consumer insights and marketing, I ended up working in six different countries in those 16 So I was fortunate enough to ride the globalization wave back in the 90s when it was really kind of like getting into full swing. After P&G, I went to Amway, which is a multi-level marketing company. I was a global head of insights and analytics. And again, I was traveling all over the world, mainly to Asia.

From there, I went to Kimberly Clark, spent a year there working on brands like Cottonelle and Kleenex. And then again, the craziness got even more crazier. When I started my own consulting company, I was consulting with some pretty big name companies like 3M and Apple and Whirlpool, But then Spotify found me.

So I actually transitioned into tech and I was the global head of always on marketing at Spotify. Did some pretty impressive stuff there with an amazing team. I went to Pinterest. I was there during COVID when COVID was starting and I led their entire content strategy and deployment during those dark days of COVID,

And then from there, I went a Danish hearing aids company called WS Audiology. So I was completely moving away, not only from tech, but in CPG, I was actually coming into healthcare and medical devices. And I was dealing with audiologists and I was dealing with the government, you with the VA and everything. So completely different space. So in the space of like 25 plus years, I was very fortunate to experienced consumer products, tech, healthcare.

medical devices and consulting to a certain degree. For the last couple of years, I've been doing a couple of things.

So after WS Audiology, I decided to become a faculty member at the University of South Carolina, where I teach classes to seniors and MBA students, mainly in marketing. And one of the classes I teach is called AI and marketing. Now, alongside my lecturing, I also have resurrected my consulting company where I've single-mindedly focused on trying to build a practice around AI and marketing, basically. So I've been heavily involved in building my own custom GPT agents.

And, not just, custom agents, also agentic models as well. So those are the two areas that I've been working to create like, you know, marketing specific agents. And then the third area, if you want to call it that is this whole space of synthetic data that's emerged in the marketing world. new to, supply chain and manufacturing, but it's definitely new to the marketing space. So I've tried to be a balanced,

thought leader in that space where you can use synthetic data and marketing and where you cannot use it in marketing. So in a nutshell, that's been my arc.

Jason (03:53)
Thank you for sharing your background. It truly has been an incredible journey. So off of that, I'm going to ask you my first question, which is, where do you find inspiration?

Yogesh Chavda (04:03)
Yeah, that's a great question. I would say that given my background where, not having lived in one place, for my entire life, right. And having moved around so much, one of the things that I consider myself to be is a third culture kid. You know, so if you don't know what that means.

is that you're of one heritage, you've lived in a second place, and then you move to a third place, and you are neither here nor there. So when people ask me, where am I from, it's a hard question for me to answer. Today, I would call myself an American, but if you unpack that, it becomes a much more deeper conversation. So I start with that point deliberately because one of the things that I

face all the time is that I don't have to go looking for places. I intuitively kind of like see all those tension points in culture or in situations that other people sometimes don't see simply because they've been so rooted in their world paradigm or their view from where they are. Me being a transplant, I'm constantly being in the gray area all the time. So that gives me the I would like to believe a unique advantage.

in being able to see things differently.

Jason (05:07)
I was thinking as you were talking about seeing things differently because...

you've just been in so many different places, you're not a creature of habit, you're a creature of disruption.

Yogesh Chavda (05:16)
Yes, yes. But if I'm kind of already built with that mindset of disruption, I'm going to be pointing out opportunities all the time. And some companies love it. P&G loved it, right? Some companies don't love it, right?

It's really an ingrained opportunity for a company to have people with, my kind of background simply because, I'm able to see things that they are not willing to see or they're unable to see. Right.

Jason (05:39)
Well, I

think to where we are today, and we'll talk about AI and a lot of the different changes that are happening, not just, you think about what it's affecting already and what it could affect, it's really important to be able to see what's happening today, but also think about how that's going to affect the future, right? It's a little game theory in terms of what's happening, but I think it's a great trait to have.

And I know from the people who engage on the Wisory, it's very important for them because they're not coming to the Wisory for help me do the same. They're looking for something different. So I'm going to move on to our second question, which as we talked about, you spent the majority of your career in branding, consumer insights for some of these huge organizations and brands that are known to every...

Yogesh Chavda (06:12)
Yeah.

Jason (06:27)
P&G or Kimberly Clark, Spotify, Pinterest. What are some of the learnings and patterns that you've been able to see given the experience you've had at these companies?

Yogesh Chavda (06:37)
Yeah, know, there's so much we can talk about this. could be an hour long conversation.

Jason (06:42)
brought a cup

of wisdom. My cup of wisdom is willing to wait for your answer.

Yogesh Chavda (06:47)
good, good. Well, thank you for that. Well, I want to focus on maybe two or three specific things for this conversation, right? The first one that I would say is, successful brands tend to listen to their customers and they understand the tension that the customer is facing and they do something about it. That ability to understand those tensions and the ability to act on it are two

very different activity systems. And the more successful brands do both those things consistently. And they build a process around it and they basically make it their mission just to have their finger on the pulse. I would say that that's like job number one. Every time I worked on a brand that was unsuccessful or was struggling in its growth trajectory, so to speak, it was because there were people on the teams.

who thought they knew what the problems were. I know the industry, I know the people, I know the customers, there's nothing you can tell me about my customers that I already don't know. I've heard that from people, And then you see that the brand actually struggles as a consequence because they're working on assumptions that may have been correct at some point in time, but those assumptions may no longer be true. And in this world today that we're in,

where there is change happening so quickly, you cannot assume that the assumptions that you're currently working with will be there tomorrow. So you have to constantly be open and curious to be able to want to keep your finger on the pulse and then reevaluate your assumptions as you move forward. So that's the second thing. And the last thing I'll end with around big brands or successful brands versus unsuccessful brands is that you have to also

think creatively. We tend to search and reapply more often than we actually be innovative with truly, breakthrough thinking, so to speak, right? And I think that art has been lost a little bit and we need to go find that again.

because that's going to make the difference with all these new technologies that are coming online right now. AI is one of them. Bring in the metaverse, bring in blockchain, bring in the internet of things. All these things will start integrating at some point, if they aren't already. How do you envision your brand to offer new experiences, new ways to reach your customers and offer them a new value prop? That requires a lot more creative thinking than

being caught in the, let me go search and reapply what somebody else has done.

Jason (09:02)
Absolutely. Well, that's a really good point. I have a question for you, which may be hard to answer. Is that creativity due to the company, and their desire for stability, or is it due to the people who are working there who are, I don't want to say taking the easy way out, but maybe they're not pushing the envelope.

Yogesh Chavda (09:21)
Yeah, I think it's a function of both, So, company culture drives a lot of that for sure, right? And, having your internal processes and, having consistency, and managing risk is obviously part of the conversation. There's no question about that, right? And right.

Jason (09:35)
I mean, we all know

like Procter & Gamble, the Tide brand manager, you don't lose 0.1 % of market share, right? You don't do that.

Yogesh Chavda (09:42)
Exactly.

That's exactly right. You you talk about Tide, I'll give you another example, similar point. The marketing director for Colgate Palmolive was my next door neighbor when I lived in Venezuela, for example. And, Colgate's market share in Venezuela was 90 % or higher. And he said, Yogesh, if my market share dropped below 90%, I had to write and create multiple presentations that went all the way to the CEO as to why did my market share drop below 90%. So it's a big deal. No question.

And it's not only a big deal in terms of risk for the brand, it's also a big deal for the individual. It's a risk to their career as well. So you have to of like make sure that you are managing your career and you're managing your risk taking within the brand concurrently. And that's why you see what happens is that people pull back.

in terms of their innovation and they're basically trying to stay within the narrow path.

Jason (10:33)
So As your career has grown, and you've been a true leader for many of organizations, ⁓ who have you turned to throughout your career for advice and guidance, whether it's you're trying something new or you want to validate a path that you're about to go down? Do you have mentors or people that you would point to to

Yogesh Chavda (10:39)
Okay.

Jason (10:52)
to say they have helped me and maybe continue to help me.

Yogesh Chavda (10:55)
Yeah, another great question. And I know the reality is that I found that I had to categorize different areas in my professional life and then find people who I could trust, who could give me the right and sound advice for those particular areas. So for example, when it came to people management or

difficult situations with direct reports I needed somebody to be honest with me when those situations were right. So that's just one example. When it comes to things like AI or innovation,

honestly speaking, there aren't that many people out there who are on the forefront. There's only a handful of us who doing it right now. And we've kind of like created our own little community in that sense, right? So what I've done as a way to manage the situation is I have about three or four individuals that I go to, to bounce off ideas. They become my sounding board.

And I have another community where I don't go to them for advice on the idea. I go to them to say, Hey, I built this thing out. What do you think about this as something that you would use or not? And they're giving me a very different set of perspective as to whether it's commercialized enough or is it missing things that they would need because they're not really in the AI space anyways. So I bucketed my, network in that sense.

so that I'm able to go to the people that can give me the advice for the specific thing that I'm actually solving for.

Jason (12:12)
So Yogesh, I'm going to move now into talking about your experience on a global level, which how many countries did you live in? How many countries did you work with? Dozens?

Yogesh Chavda (12:22)
Yeah, so I lived in six countries. I lived in Switzerland, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, England, US and Venezuela. Obviously I lived in Bahrain as a minor, but professionally I worked in all those other countries, right? And I've worked on or worked in a total of 50 countries overall.

Jason (12:42)
Wow, incredible. so working across 50 countries, how do you build an approach or strategy that can be local, for those countries, but also stay true to the core essence of the brand that you're representing, that you're promoting.

Yogesh Chavda (12:50)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, so you have to start local because consumers are local, right? So you have to sell locally, right? That's job number one. So knowing how to market and sell within a country through a particular channel, all those things matter a lot. And I would never ever diminish that part of the conversation. Now, as you become more of a multi-country company, then become a regional company, then become

multinational company, and then let's say become a global company, right? Your scale keeps on changing, right? So what you cannot afford to do is to try to replicate a winning model in one country, identically in other places. It will not happen because the culture is going to be different, consumer behavior is going to be different, the trade channel may look very different, all those things start happening. So you have to think structurally differently.

And the competency changes dramatically depending on whether you're working in a local, regional, or a global job. So I mentioned the local side already, but let's talk about the other end of the spectrum, which is global. You may be working across 60 countries, 100 countries at the end of the day. So you cannot be getting involved in the nitty gritty of any local country because there people who are to be managing that for you anyways. So what you need to be thinking about is what can I do to enable their success

not this month or this quarter, but let's say next year or the year after. Right. So you have to be planning for what can happen that would work across multiple countries concurrently for the next three to five years. That means you need to be thinking about where is the market going to be in five years time? How will I position my brand in the in the next five years? What kind of innovation do I need to have? What kind of regulatory environment will I be operating in? Whatever it is.

You have to be thinking at that level to be able to plan things out and say this is the roadmap that's going to be there for the next five years. So, you you have to go build that out. You have to first, ideate and, build a vision, but then you have to build it out. And the third thing is going to convince all the markets to say, are you bought into this vision too? Because if they're not bought in, nothing's going to

So that's what's required at the global level. And it's a skill set because you have to think about the fact that, hey, Venezuela is asking for this, but Turkey is asking for that. Is it actually the same exact thing, just called differently? Or is it the case that it's truly different?

So being able to find those nuances and understand what those differences are, you have to then basically build what I call the toolkit and the framework. And then you have to give the regions and the markets the space to go and adapt your toolkit to their local markets so they are able to go and win in the marketplace.

Jason (15:34)
So I want to ask you a question as it relates to AI because we have the roundtable coming up July 24th with you and Priti and Elizabeth. And as you talked about before, all the work that you've done in research and insights on a local level, on a global level across different product sets, what do you see as this next evolution now that AI is starting to become?

more more of reality.

Yogesh Chavda (16:01)
Yeah, I would say there's actually so much opportunity that's out there that people are only scratching the surface on right now. OK, so let me start first with experiences. Now we're to the insights side of it. On the experience side, especially in global companies, when you're designing global propositions or innovation, you tend to pick five or 10 countries as your top markets and you

consider them as your key customers, everybody else has to follow. With AI, you can now expand that from your top 10 countries to the top 60 countries. And you can figure out how to adapt your experience across all of them and create customization because AI allows you to do that. That's a new value add that you can go create. number one.