FutureWeek spoke to Xavi Cortadellas, Senior Director of Marketing for Athletic Equipment at Gatorade, part of food and beverage giant PepsiCo, about how the brand is tapping generative AI to allow athletes to design and personalise their their own squeeze bottles.
So what’s driving Gatorade’s approach to generative AI?
Athletes have historically been early adopters of athletic equipment personalisation and Gen Z also over-indexes when it comes to individualisation. As a leader in this space, these insights continue to fuel Gatorade’s innovation priorities – including leveraging AI. The launch of Adobe Firefly APIs and capabilities on Gatorade.com brings our bottle personalization offerings to the next level. Now consumers can create their own signature bottles in a hyper-customized way that historically pro athletes might have only had access to.
The tool is available via Gatorade iD, which is our free membership platform. By providing another reason for athletes to become a member, they have more opportunities to earn points and unlock benefits as they engage with the brand.
What motivated the decision to use the technology in this way?
Our motivation was grounded in four pillars – Personalisation, Loyalty, Approachability and Creativity.
- First, personalisation. As mentioned, it’s clear that personalisation is something that the younger generation is looking for and it’s been a key driver of our equipment growth and sales.
- Second, loyalty. We’re providing something of value to athletes, who are excited about a new way to customize their Gatorade bottles.
- Third, approachability. To some, AI can feel scary, but the Firefly integration on our website is easy to use and the thematics are uniquely on-brand for Gatorade.
- Finally, creativity. With Adobe Firefly, the creative possibilities are nearly limitless, and we had to think intensively about how to distill the possibilities into purely Gatorade experiences. Hard work by designers on the backend allowed us to then turn the keys to personalisation over to athletes while feeling confident that the bottles will look cool.
Could you take me through a bit of the journey you had taking this from conception to execution?
Gatorade has been working to modernise our entire digital ecosystem from web to mobile apps to e-commerce and even smart tech and wearables for the past few years.
Last year, we began offering enhanced athletic equipment personalisation capabilities on our website through Gatorade iD and this year, we saw an opportunity to tap into generative AI in a way that would be fun and offer more creative possibilities for athletes.
Has implementing generative AI yielded any unexpected benefits?
Unexpected benefit? Probably what we’ve already been able to learn throughout this process already. Athletes tell us a lot about their preferences when they design the bottles and we’re able to use this data to continuously iterate and put the best product out there possible. We also take insights and inspiration from the bottles the athletes design to create our commercial collections of bottles.
What safeguards do you have in place to ensure brand consistency and to prevent inappropriate or offensive designs?
Adobe Firefly is trained on Adobe Stock Images, openly licensed content and public domain content where copyright has expired. It is only trained on brand-safe assets.
What has been the customer response been to the AI-generated bottle designs?
We are excited to see that Gatorade bottle sales have grown significantly this year due to our expanded personalisation offerings. Since launch, the average sales of personalised squeeze bottles have increased 137% on Gatorade.com and average daily Gatorade iD signups have increased over 30%.
How does Gatorade see its use of AI evolving over time?
Future-looking, we plan to bring AI capabilities to other athletic equipment offerings outside of just our ‘Squeeze Bottles’. More to come!