ChatGPT will give creative professionals time to think out of the box: Chirag Gander

The Minimalist is a leading Mumbai-based digital and design consultancy and a creative solutions group that works with global brands on UI/UX and integrated marketing solutions. The agency recently won the digital creative mandate for Schwarzkopf India, as well as the creative and social media mandate of Rio Boom, a new age, Gen-Z energy drink brand.

In conversation with Adgully, Chirag Gander, Co-founder, The Minimalist, speaks in length about the agency’s brand communication roadmap, engaging with the GenZ TG, how tools like ChatGPT can help in creative ideation, some notable work done by The Minimalist, and more.

What is your brand communication and brand design roadmap for today’s audiences, specifically the GenZ?

With respect to GenZ, we have actually done a lot of intensive research around what excites them. There are certain things which we have seen – I think GenZ wants the brands to be very transparent with them. The Gen Z is also a lot about instant gratification, they want things right now. That is one of the reasons why a lot of GenZ people are getting into things like crypto, because in crypto things can go up and down very quickly, and they want quick results.

Then, there’s another aspect around their digital visual identity. If a brand is rewarding them with something which adds to their digital identity, they get very excited – if someone is giving them some level of, let’s say, Avatar, which they can brag about, or there are some brands, specifically tech savvy brands, that have been giving some NFT or some climate change tokens or something. We have a very detailed research document around how we have been building campaigns and designs for GenZ.

What is your opinion regarding AI tools like ChatGPT? Is it a boon or bane for a product design service agency?

According to me, ChatGPT is incredible. It is an innovation that I am really happy about. I’m privileged to live in an era when such innovations are happening. Overall, it’s a great thing for creative professionals, because it will take out a lot of time from the mundane tasks which people are doing, like writing basic things, and it will give people a lot of time for thinking out of the box. It will actually give people time for big ideas. I think people who genuinely understand creativity, who genuinely can come up with some solid, big ideas, it’s a great tool for them.

Even in terms of a user, ChatGPT has recently launched some plugins. Now with ChatGPT plugins, you can just type things that you want, such as cooking a particular dish, wherein ChatGPT will suggest to you the ingredients, which you can then order with the click of a button.

I think things will become a lot more user-centric. Like how grocery shopping was earlier about going to the market physically and getting the products, but later one was able to shop via apps. In the app there were so many distractions. But now with the plugins coming in, everything will just become text based. So, I personally feel that it’s a great disruption and something which will make things a lot more user-centric.

How is The Minimalist offering a perfect blend of performance marketing and brand marketing to its clients?

I think in terms of performance marketing and brand marketing, in the last seven and a half years of our journey, we have built a very strong expertise in terms of being creative. And being from an engineering background, we have started leveraging a lot of very strong insights around data, such as how to do the perfect attribution for brands using artificial intelligence and machine learning. Now, we have been building full funnel campaigns for some of the biggest brands out there, and the entire data driven approach is something that really differentiates us. Apart from that, we are also heavily focused around figuring out the right insights through the research that we have been doing and putting the right communication forward. So, I think that is something which actually is working for us in terms of delivering full funnel solutions.

How have the last few years been for The Minimalist and what are the significant changes that the team has witnessed?

The last couple of years have been full of big changes, not just for The Minimalist, but for the entire industry, because COVID was the trigger point when brands started going very aggressive on digital. Even after the entire COVID wave subsided, brands saw a lot of ROI coming in from their investment in digital if they actually kept continuing. So, I think that there was a big shift and with the entire movement towards 4G and 5G, a lot of video content was becoming prominent. Data is something which started coming in, gathering at a larger scale. These were some of the big changes that we have seen overall. And we have been executing some of these things in very interesting ways for some of the brands that we have been working with. So, I think the last couple of years have been quite disruptive overall.

What are the new projects or some of the notable work that you have done in the past? Please elaborate.

There have been a lot of very interesting campaigns that we have been doing. Some of the notable ones include a campaign executed for Neiman’s, which is a new age D2C shoe brand. We have recently onboarded a few other brands like Rio Energy Drinks. Then we executed a campaign for the Tata Consumer brands. We have boarded a brand recently, which is a joint venture between Interglobe Group and UPS, called MOVIN. We have been helping them with their entire marketing communications on digital and on mainline across channels. Apart from that, we are doing some very interesting work for Tata Cliq Luxury on social media and redefining how luxury should be marketed on social media. We have been executing some events for them, like a lot of provocative social media campaigns.