From search to serendipity: Why the new CPG playbook needs connection architects and pulse planners

New Delhi: The Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) industry, a multi-trillion-dollar pillar of the global economy and India's fourth-largest sector, has for decades run on an unchanged playbook. My career has given me a unique vantage point on a fundamental shift.

I spent several years at Google, the world’s greatest "intent" engine, a place where people go to find what they know they want. Today, I lead CPG partnerships at TikTok, the world’s new "discovery" engine, a place where people discover what they never knew they needed.

For decades, the CPG playbook was built on intercepting known intent (Search). But in a world of infinite choice, the new frontier is about manufacturing serendipity, that joyful, unexpected discovery (as your original doc noted).

A new generation of brands and category-defining business models are being built in under 18 months, not on physical shelf space, but on a new, agile operating stack - what my good friend over the years - Ankit Desai, Global Head of Media & Digital Marketing at Marico refers to as a "Brand Operating System".

This new system is an interconnected loop. It runs on three interdependent pillars: Serendipity (manufacturing cultural discovery), Scale (fusing entertainment and commerce), and Systems (the intelligent and agentically connected tech stack).

1. Serendipity: Manufacturing Discovery

The old playbook was about top-down, polished perfection. The new one is about bottom-up, authentic participation. The blueprint for this new model is Goli Nutrition. For those who may not know, Goli is a US-based supplement brand founded in 2019 but it exploded into a goliath, with estimated sales of $450 million since Mar 2024. Their "overnight" success is a masterclass in manufacturing discovery. Instead of hiring a few global celebrities, Goli built an affiliate army of thousands of micro-creators.

They incentivized them with gamified dashboards and lavish rewards, iPhones, yacht trips, cash bonuses. This didn't just automate payouts; it motivated a creative force to generate hundreds of thousands of authentic videos. They effectively traded creative control for cultural connect, and the results were staggering: Goli became a top-selling brand on TikTok Shop, with reports showing revenue surges of over $4 million in a single month for their nutrition supplement gummies.

I see this power daily in Indonesia. We see it when Bakmi Mewah (a premium noodles brand) uses raw, authentic creator videos of people simply eating their noodles, generating millions of views. We see it when “Somethinc” uses its "Angry Skin Cell" animation to make skincare science a piece of entertainment. And we also see it in “Blu by BCA’s Kastamer Ngablu (Customer is Angry)”, which uses native, platform-specific humor to have people discover a bank. They aren't just placing ads; they are engineering discoveries.

2. Scale: Fusing Commerce and Entertainment

This flood of serendipity creates a new, massive challenge: continuously fueling and capturing demand. This is Scale.

The old model separated building the brand from selling the product. In the new playbook, marketing and distribution are fused. Goli’s viral success on TikTok didn't just build brand awareness; it drove sales across their entire ecosystem. This "halo effect" drove organic traffic to their Amazon and Walmart listings, while TikTok Shop closed the loop instantly, turning entertainment directly into a point-of-sale.

This "shoppertainment" model, which I see dominating in Indonesia, is the new scale. Take for example the Kelaya Hair Treatment’s 24-hour live-shopping marathon. The "See Now, Buy Now" model fundamentally disrupted traditional retail markets. This is where the media itself becomes the marketplace.

This new reality fundamentally disrupts the typical media agency model that CPG brands have relied upon. The new system requires a Pulse Planner obsessively observing the shopper behavior and shopkeeper tactics to optimize the story arc and real-time GMV, instead of the typical Digital Media Planner analysing fragmented reach curves.

3. Systems: The Intelligent, Composable Stack

This entire system of serendipity and scale is chaotic and impossible to manage manually. It only works on a foundation of Systems, the most critical and overlooked pillar. New brands don't build from scratch; they architect a composable tech stack. Goli Nutrition’s operating system is a prime example. They built an engine by connecting best-in-class cloud services:

SaaS Tools: They used Shopify for their e-commerce backbone, specialized affiliate management platforms to manage their creator army, CRMs like Klaviyo for retention, and ERPs to handle the immense supply chain load.

Artificial Intelligence: They used AI for predictive maintenance in their manufacturing to ensure they could meet the demand that marketing created, and now use AI to generate marketing content without a studio.

The next evolution is an engine that can think. This is Agentic AI.

Consider this case from Indonesia: a major consumer healthcare company who deployed an Agentic AI framework. A Social Listening API flagged a crisis - consumers on TikTok were dismissing their sensitive toothpaste as a mere "analgesic" (painkiller), not a real solution. The agentic system cross-referenced this with their CRM,Market Scoping tool, Creator Content Suite and Governance Tools which are all connected via an API fabric feeding to a Generative AI Ad Tool (ex: TikTok's Symphony), which in return generated multiple contents. The best concept - a fun video explaining the "root cause benefits” was rapidly produced and auto launched via the Ad Manager API. The result was a viral campaign that resolved the consumer concern. They didn't just make an ad; they built an autonomous system that could listen, understand, and create conversation at the speed of the consumer.

The New Mandate: From Brand Marketers to Connections Architects

We are at marketing’s "API moment." The future isn't about buying one monolithic "cloud"; it's about connecting best-in-class services. My own experience building a generative AI app from a wireframe validated to me: the Marketer must now be the Connections Architect.

A Message to CPG Brand Marketers in India

For my colleagues in India, the parallels are unmissable. Indonesia's dynamic $102 billion, mobile-first CPG market, where digital-native brands in beauty and FMCG have successfully challenged legacy giants is a direct case study of this new playbook built on Serendipity, Scale, and Systems in action.

India's CPG market is already a $200+ billion giant and one of the fastest-growing regional markets in the world. It’s time for more brand marketers to step up as Chief Connections Architects and build many thousand “Goli”-sized stories.