Chief Brand Officer Anuj Bhasin Gets to the Core of Gatorade

Neither the Portland Trail Blazers, the Miami Heat nor any other NBA team have announced where Damian Lillard will play this year, but Gatorade has a spot for him.

The former NBA Rookie of the Year and seven-time All-Star and All-NBA guard asked for a trade this summer after 11 years with the Blazers, with the team opting to draft young talent instead of trading for veteran help. In his new “Don’t Go Missing” campaign for Gatorade—developed by creative agency of record TBWA\Chiat\Day LA— Lillard is unfazed by any of it, simply delivering a public service announcement warning young players not to let dehydration take them out of the game. 

Any scolding is left to a cameo by football veteran and commentator Shannon Sharpe.

The campaign will partner Gatorade with Meta and The Weather Channel to trigger ads when conditions get too hot and stifling, with Gatorade’s new social and digital agency of record Laundry Service making its debut on promotion.

But the campaign also places the core Gatorade brand at the center of PepsiCo’s “Gatorade Portfolio” launched earlier this year. The parent company’s Fast Twitch, Muscle Milk, Evolve and Propel brands now fall under the Gatorade umbrella, as do Gatorade’s personalized Gx products.

Adweek spoke with Anuj Bhasin—who became Gatorade’s chief brand officer in January—about the new campaign, the importance of personalization to the Gatorade portfolio and why Gatorade still wants customers to be like Mike … even if he has a different middle initial. 

Adweek: With Gatorade’s scope having expanded so significantly over the last year, where does this new campaign and the core Gatorade brand fit into the overall marketing plan?
Anuj Bhasin: This product—core Gatorade— is at the core of what we do today. 

We have an expansive range of products that fuel performance, and core Gatorade is at the foundation of the brand. It is the most researched, scientifically backed product, with real science, real claims and real credentials—founded for an athlete need and athlete innovation, We’re trying to make sure all athletes have access to this and they know about it. 

What we’ve learned is that athletes are evolving. They are seeking more than just performance solutions and more than just solutions on the field of play. They’re looking for solutions off the field, they’re looking for solutions that are personalized to them. They’re looking for ways to engage with technology differently. So we’re evolving too.

What we’ve learned is that athletes are evolving … So we’re evolving too. 

—Anuj Bhasin, chief brand officer, Gatorade

While we have the core Gatorade … we are going to be expanding our portfolio. We’re expanding from performance into athletic wellness so that we can offer solutions [for] 24/7 athletes. 

We’re also taking that a step further and developing breakthrough innovation and technology platforms that enable us to take these new products we have in performance and wellness and personalize solutions to you in the digital space. Our goal is to fuel the future of sport, but we’re reacting to what athletes are asking for. 

Marketers are increasingly fixated on personalization, but Gatorade now has a broad spectrum of products it’s presenting to the public. How do you personalize that?
The Gatorade portfolio is an ecosystem of brands that can deliver a solution for any athlete at any moment in time.

We’ve been developing capabilities to deliver personalized nutrition training and fuel plans for years through the Gatorade Sports Science Institute. As part of that research, they have been developing scientific protocols and algorithms to determine what type of nutrition you might need personally, what type of actual training program you might need to meet your goals and how the overall fuel plan that you might put together for your performance might need to come to life.

These capabilities are available to consumers now through the Gatorade Gx app. You can enter what your goals are, and we can deliver specific recommendations on nutrition, training program recommendations and overall fuel plan recommendations. As we migrate forward, our aspiration is to deliver a personalized product that can be right sized for you. We’re investing in technology to help us do that: Things like face scan technology that can help us understand your immediate hydration levels and the capabilities to make products in the [direct-to-consumer] space that can be unique for individuals. 

Gatorade launched the Gx app and Gx Smart Bottle in 2022. How has the technology advanced since then?
It’s been in the market for about a year [and we are] able to deliver personalized nutrition to you individually [and] we can offer training programs to you individually.

We’ve actually developed training programs with a number of our professional athletes—guided training curriculum for you based on what your goal is.Then we can also enable fuel kits [to] be sent to your house on demand. They can be personalized for you, so if you’re training for a marathon, we have a kit that can be developed for you specifically and then shipped to you.

We’ve also recently added the capability—with our new Gatorade Smart Bottle—to track how much hydration you’re taking in throughout the day. It will remind you and ping you if you’re ahead or below your training goals from a hydration standpoint.

We have the Gx app sweat patch—available to consumers in the athletic channel online and at high schools—which is a patch you can wear that can tell you your unique sweat type and what your unique hydration needs are. We also have a range of Gatorade pods that fit into our Gx bottles that can be specified down to different ranges of carbohydrates and different ranges of electrolytes based on your individual sweat type. 

We’re selling all that on our [direct-to-consumer] platform. we’re embedding it in high schools, colleges and universities for some of our most elite athletes. Something that we’re extremely focused on with the Gx platform is our move into purpose and sustainability. We’ve seen with our athletic equipment business—it’s already [a] best-selling piece of athletic equipment at Dick’s Sporting Goods—and we are aggressively moving our portfolio towards sustainability, into a beyond-the-bottle franchise. 

How do you get consumers to buy into the Gx products?
We’re driving a lot of user acquisition through our in-person interactions, as well as through a lot of our grassroots activation in the high school community space. 

We have part of our team out in the field, regularly giving nutrition education to high school athletes, coaches, trainers to make sure that they’re doing the right thing for themselves as they learn and grow.

Broad-reaching professional athletes have been a cornerstone of Gatorade’s marketing for decades, but the expansion of its portfolio is taking it into more niche communities. Does that change the brand’s endorsement strategy at all?
We are absolutely working to open the aperture of performance and wellness athletic performance as a bonus for all athletes, no matter where you are in your journey. 

We are broadening and innovating in new spaces to bring in new users, to give solutions for individuals who haven’t had them before. But performance athletes remain our core and where we spend a lot of our time. We have a lot of our Gatorade Sports Science Institute team researching and embedded with athletes across the world. We’re developing specific solutions for individuals on the field with a number of our athlete partners, our team partners and our focus on working with the greatest athletes in the world and providing them solutions from from the minute we started working with them is never going to change. 

So we’re continuing to fuel a number of our great athletes from Serena Williams—from when she started to now—to Lionel Messi on this entire journey to an elite NBA talent like Jason Tatum.

Do the new brands in the portfolio bring in new voices?
We will be bringing in more consumers that are in elite sports and also in sports spaces where brands like Propel may play across the Gatorade portfolio. Michael B. Jordan is a great example of that. He’s an athlete at his core, but he’s a tremendous influencer and advocate for purpose and equity in sport, which is something we really stand for. So bringing him in as a powerful voice in the fitness community is something that really works well with Propel. And so we will be bringing in the right voices to help the brand broaden and resonate from a wellness and performance standpoint while remaining true to our core as well.

What else have consumers demanded of Gatorade in recent years, and how has it responded?
Consumers want more than just performance: They want wellness, they want performance, they want some personal solutions, but they want to be part of brands that are leading change and that are leading with a purpose mindset

We’re not just focused on our sustainable evolution … we really believe in the power of sports and we believe in that access to sports can create positive outcomes for the youth population across the U.S. There are a lot of cohorts that don’t have access to sports today, and we’ve really invested a lot of our resources and energy in beginning to change that to drive equity and access to sports for all consumers.

In 2021, we started our women’s advisory board to help us tackle the space around gender equality, and investment there. In 2022, we committed to a robust investment over the next several years and driving equity and access to sports. I’m proud to say, that last year alone, we were able to partner with over 1,100 different organizations and provide access to sports for over 250,000 athletes at the youth level that wouldn’t have had it otherwise. We’re investing a lot of our time and money to do that with great partner organizations, and that has resonated with consumers in a really meaningful way and is really true to who we are as well.