Marketing News 011 – GSK rebrand, AI bright as a 7yr old, careers for innovators, Facebook’s fall

The brilliant Melanie Farmer and I talking about the marketing news 🙂 00:00 Introductions 04:09 What has caught your eye in the way of marketing news? 08:41 GSK rebrands. 17:39 AI as bright as a 7 year old. 31:56 Boss careers for innovators. 40:03 Facebook’s fall ep. 27 Martin Henley 4:09 So what has caught your eye in the way of marketing news? Melanie Farmer 4:16 So two things. One is the move just recently from GSK, GlaxoSmithKline on rebranding to be a bit more like Tesla, they want to be known for science and innovation. So that just happened on the ninth of June. So interesting backstory, but that that rebrand of pharma into a we are innovators in science. The second story, is the career story but if you’re in marketing and what your career might be in net, which is slightly different to just running your business, but let’s say you’re really a marketeer. Seeing the journey that makes Meg Farren has gone on who was the Chief Marketing Officer at KFC, and then went to Asda, the UK supermarket chain, and then she’s just gone back, she’s just joined KFC again. But it’s interesting to me, her journey has been from a pathway of innovation, which is really where my organisation, that’s our hearts, it’s sort of mapping to the World Economic Councils list of what are the future skills that we need. So I think what it tells me is that in marketing, more and more you need to be have innovation skills under your belt, and in order to win because that’s where these people’s careers are, that their origins are in innovation, not in marketing, necessarily, and that’s, that seems to be kind of new. Martin Henley 5:46 Okay, interesting. Do you have a headline or a domain for that? Is there a particular thing you saw that from? Melanie Farmer 5:56 The Tesla one or the KFC? Melanie Farmer 5:58 The KFC one? Melanie Farmer 6:01 Yeah. So, if you if you put in cmo Farren returns as general manager that show Martin Henley 6:10 how do I spell Farren? Melanie Farmer 6:14 Fa double R E N. Martin Henley 6:16 Meg Farren returns as general manager. Okay, so you’ve got two very serious sounding kind of stories there. That’s interesting. Mine are a little bit more abstract, maybe, I don’t know, mine are I’m interested in this Google engineer who got fired or stood down after telling people that the AI chat bot has become sentient. So yeah, so that’s kind of interesting. And then I got a couple of things about the decline of Facebook, you know, we are really celebrating the decline of Facebook. So that’s, that’s my kind of two stories, but your sound was serious. I think let’s go with yours, this GSK thing, so we can, I need to sort this out, so it’s slicker. We do that. Was that? Melanie Farmer 7:17 Yeah, yeah, that’s what while you’re sorting that out, I wanted to reflect that, in Emma Warmsley is the CEO of GSK and she’s the first female to be a global pharmaceutical CEO. Melanie Farmer 7:36 Good. Melanie Farmer 7:37 If you look back at her history, she’s she’s got a kind of an, I guess, a really interesting journey. She’s, you know, she started at L’Oreal and, you know, sort of moved through that in was in Paris, and wherever, went to China. So she’s had it was a really interesting journey. I just thought it was quite interesting that innovation is what they’re trying to double down on. Is this the time, after the pandemic, science finally has its day in the sun in a different way? So you know, I see that this is where GSK Boeing is to say, science and innovation go together. And they often are separated. So there’s there’s science and then there’s inspiration sometimes these don’t get brought together in the way that there should be and I think this is what GSK is doing.

WHAT DO YOU THINK?