Gatorade: Customization Reinvents Future Market

▲Click “FBIF食品饮料创新” inblueto follow

Reply number “3″to join in F&B WeChat Group

Written by: Anna Yao

Edited by:Wilbur Zhu(WeChat ID: aotokuer), Anna HU,Vicky Gan

Everyone has his own way of sweating. Aiming at helping athletes to perform better, customization is exactly Gatorade’s future.

On April 20th, Xavier Cortadellas, Gatorade-Head of Innovation and Design shared with us Gatorade’s Gx the Sports Fuel Customization Platform, which includes new packaging forms, tracking technology and an integrated digitalserviceat FBIF 2017.

History of Gatorade: Scientific Research Helped Athletes to Perform Better

Create a drink for hot and humid environment.

When talking about Gatorade and Gatorade’s future, we are supposed to learn something about its history at first. Gatorade was first established by a group of professors living in Florida, who found that athletes there were unable to finish the matches because of hot and humid weather and then decided to create a sports drink, which contained water, salt and sugar, providing solutions to the athlete as well. This exactly solvedthe problemfor athletes.However, without scientific support and resolutions, this could never become a product but an idea.

Every athlete is unique.

After 50 years of establishment, Gatorade put up with a conception: Eachathlete is unique, the way of sweating varies from person to person. Nowadays individualization is of great importance to sports, the equipment has already been personalized, but solutions to making up the water loss is ignored. Focusing on this issue is exactly what Gatorade cares about, an area withouttoo many companiesinvolved in . To be creative in these three aspects, firstly athletes are of the most significance, secondly all the innovations are based on science and techniques, and thirdly they are going to be applied to the development of sport matches.

Experimental innovation? Move your laboratory to the sports ground!

Chances are there that you are able to modify your plan when errors appear in your experiment, which makes it possible for you to learn a lot. To identify the substantial problem, you are supposed to be in the stadium personally. And then you should improve your product constantly,individualize the athlete service. For instance, you are required to offer exquisite statistics to help athletes to enhance the efficiency, to win the competition for the professional athletes, but for the high school students, things change a lot. It is great that you have a creative idea, but it is supposed to be feasible.

Presence of Gatorade: Gx the Sports Fuel Customization Platform

The first step is detection, before designing an individualized sports drink, you have to figure out what will be the best for the athlete.You should have a good command of their health condition, so there is theGx Athletes physical condition list.This table is able to demonstrate how much the athlete is supposed to drink and what is the best recipe. Every athlete has a particular table of their own.

When we have already known the demand of our consumers, the question goes to how to produce our products in an advanced way. Mass production and customization, trying to solve the problem through packaging innovation, is probably what we think most highly of. Gatorade tries to customize the bottle with the Bottle cap, the body, little pills and packages through some technical ways, in order to fit every athlete.

Another important thing is to track, knowing how much the athlete drink. So here comes the concept of intelligent bottle, with scale in it, being able to demonstrate how much the athlete has taken in in real time.This is absolutely attributed to the sports science.Perspiration patch is another technique, which indeed detects the perspiration condition of the player, concluding the particular trait of the way they sweat. Learn every single piece of information of athletes, sort them out and then do analysis on the health digital platform we founded, helping athletes to better make up the water loss. Putting up with some customized water replenishing solutions is exactly the core of Gx Spots Fuel Customization Platform.

Future of Gatorade:Personalized Customization, Technique Leadership and Experience Marketing.

For Gatorade, insight is especially crucial to building up a platform which is able to offer customized service on a large scale. And Gatorade knows exactly what is better. This platform, taking advantage of sensor and wearable technology, calculating what nutrition the athlete needs, is expected to make Gatorade the technique leader. Customers nowadays show preference to creative brands, as Gatorade is no doubt intended to win consumers’ love, experience marketing is of great importance. Since 2016, Gatorade has launched the Sports Fuel Laboratory and a series of activities in order to inform our customers what we are working at.

Four Suggestions for Innovation:

1.Identify your problem and core consumer

2.Come up with the core solution

3.Adapt your solution to your audience

4.Consider the ripple effect

Xavier pointed out that, innovation is not a linear but an interactive process. You may be inspired again when reviewing the questions of your core consumers as well as core problems, and then come up with new solutions.

Exclusive Interviews

FBIF Shirley Liu:Gx the Sports Fuel Customization Platform was tailored for professional athletes, whetherordinary people can also sharethe benefits of high-tech products designed by Gatorade?

Xavier: We always say that Gatorade serves for athletes. Indeed, we serve for athletes in every area, including NFL and NBA. However, when you enter into the gym,everyone who is doing sport is our athlete. We do innovations for all of our consumers.

FBIF Shirley Liu: Not only Gatorade, many other companies like Nestle and By-Health are all aware of the importance of customization and have established their own platforms and institutions. What do you think of the competition resulted from it? How will the food and beverage industry be influenced by personalized competition?

Xavier:For modern consumers, customization is a trend. Today I also introducedthe Gx customization platform and the benefits it will bring to the players. Players can express their needs. They can not only choose favorite flavors, tastes, but also depict their own names. Therefore, personalized customization can be truly helpful to brand innovation and upgrading,helping us to get close to athletes and consumers.