Marketing teams are being stretched more than ever before and often overwhelmed with greater responsibility and shiny new AI tools at their disposal. How to reinvent the marketing function for the future was one of the key themes at the recent ADMA Global Forum and one brand that is ahead of the curve is PepsiCo.
Susan Press, the company’s marketing chief of beverages, sat down with B&T to discuss this transformation on the sidelines of the event.
Press manages a team of 12 and has given plenty of thought about how to make the function more effective and resilient for the future, particularly at a time when marketing skills gaps are widening, teams and budgets are being stretched, and the onslaught of AI technology and agents threatens to overhaul the marketing function as we know it.
Although PepsiCo’s beverages marketing budget has grown this year, many of the wider macroeconomic and technology challenges remain.
B&T wanted to find out more about Press’s thoughts on young talent coming through, whether training is adequate, AI technology and how she is reinventing marketing at the beverages and snacks giant.
B&T: At your ADMA panel you speak about the challenge of maintaining marketing fundamentals with all of the distractions that marketeers must contend with. What are your thoughts about young marketers coming through and their grasp of the fundamentals, and you believe this has shifted over time?
Susan Press: I’m privileged to have built a high performing team, and I think the difference in some of the more junior team members is that they are a little rough around the edges in the way that they’re constructing their thinking, but the thinking is there.
What I’m seeing is really great entrepreneurial thinking coming from a lot of our younger guys; they’re really living in the digital and social age. They know that inside out, but then it’s how do you ladder up what they’re bringing from that culture into a true insight, into something really rich that our agencies can then dig into that can drive our brands forward with.
B&T: You trained at Unilever, which is famous for providing world class marketing training. Do you believe that in-house marketing training has been lost in more recent times?
Susan Press: I hire people, not skills, because I think you can train most things, nearly anything from school. But you can’t create humanistic skills in people. We see 1,000 CVs for one job and there’s really a discrepancy that you can see of talent coming through the interview process.
You’re probably not getting the same level of training across the industry. I believe that urgency is taking over from capability to a certain extent and we’re all living in the short term. When businesses are challenged, it’s easy to cut off the things that don’t deliver short term objectives (like learning and development).
We’re incredibly lucky in an organisation like Pepsi, where we have an entire team dedicated to marketing transformation and capability. There’s so much that we can cherry pick from a development perspective, and then it comes down to making the time to prioritise that, which is a very big challenge, but a big focus of ours.
B&T: Managing workloads and resilience is important to you and you mentioned this notion of ‘ruthless prioritisation’. Can you explain a bit more about what that means at PepsiCo?
Susan Press: We are trying to create this behaviour where people feel able to just focus on one thing at one time. I think Covid was really bad for creating this notion of ‘multitasking’, which is a complete impossibility. We all know it. You can’t be focused on one thing, typing on your computer and texting and doing three things at once; you’re never fully in anything.
For example, at meetings I only want our team to invite the people who absolutely have to be there, and then put those who are optional in the CC, and don’t be offended if they don’t turn up.
If I see people sitting in meetings doing other work, I’ll call it out, because if you’re too busy to be here and fully present, I don’t want you here.
We’re trying to create this muscle of ‘we cannot continue to add more’, because what that is doing is diluting our ability to do things well, and to spend time thinking. Rather than overstretch, it’s about how we give people license to pull themselves back from it.
B&T: A theme of your panel of the ADMA Global Forum was how to reinvent marketing, particularly at a time of increasing pressure and technological disruption. What are some of the things you are doing at PepsiCo to transform?
Susan Press: One is making sure that our agency village (PHD, Special, Akcelo, Circana and Kantar) feel like an extension of our team. They own our business problems as much as we do, and so we regularly spend time with them taking them through our business performance, what’s keeping us up at night, and what we would like them to start thinking about so that we’re sharing our challenges. They really should be an extension of our team.
The other thing is creating champions in our team who have depth of understanding about certain things. So one particular area which is really interesting at the moment is the whole area of influencer vetting; challenges around privacy and brand reputation. We’ve got one person from the snacks team and one person from the beverages team who will be our influencer vetting champions. They’ll learn the process. They’ll put some of their brands through testing and then they’ll educate the rest of the team.
These are junior members of the team, and it’s a wonderful opportunity for them to be a key knowledge owner, to then share with me and more senior people than me, and feel like they’re got something really big to contribute.
So it’s about keeping the fundamentals or marketing, understanding which parts of the transformation journey are going to be most relevant for our business based on our strategy, and where our brands are in their development cycle, and then creating Champions of Change. There is such a good opportunity to evolve.
B&T: Given the challenging economic climate, are you finding more pushback on brand marketing investment given how short-term many businesses currently operate?
Susan Press: There’s not necessarily pushback, but it’s a harder belief system to grow.
Our CFO is also our general manager of beverages and I directly report to him, so I’ve been able to spend a lot of time with him to help him really understand it.
I need to talk in his language, which means I need to commercialise the marketing speak. He doesn’t want to hear about what you’re doing to drive distinction; that is too far down the funnel for him.
Our marketers need to be really commercial. We’ve talked a lot about the need to be technologically savvy today, but they need to be really commercial first and foremost because if you can’t bring what you’re doing as a marketer back to a commercial impact, of course you are going to be questioned why you’re doing it.
B&T: How has that impacted your marketing budgets? Have you managed to sustain or grow them?
Susan Press: We are lucky because there is a belief in organisations like Pepsi that brands are built over time and the investment must be sustained. In beverages we have seen some growth.
B&T: Tell me about your team and how you plan to evolve it for the future.
Susan Press: We’ve just done a bit of a revisit, and we’ve brought in a couple of new people into the team, which is really exciting. I think we’ve got what we need at the moment, and we work closely with global. We’ve got a media team that is shared across snacks and beverages, so we can lean on them for media transformation.
We have a lot of specialists that we can lean on in partnership to make sure that we’re covered for the transformation opportunity. Who knows what will happen in the next couple of years, but right now I feel like we’ve got the people and the structure that we need.
B&T: How is PepsiCo embracing the AI opportunity within your marketing team?
Susan Press: We definitely are, and one thing that really struck me about (a panel that discussed AI at the ADMA Global Forum) is that you need to have a strategy behind it.
We’re all using it. We all are creating so much efficiency with it, even just the simplistic stuff, like taking minutes, creating PowerPoint slides, creating imagery, stress testing, case studies and things like that. It’s very heavily used within the team, but there is a big opportunity to be a bit more strategic. This is definitely happening at a global level, and we need to localise what that means for us.
B&T: Finally, when we look at the marketer of the future, what skills do you think are going to remain really important as the function evolves and is disrupted by technology?
Susan Press: It will continue to be important to really understand the art and the science of marketing. That encompasses everything from creative excellence and understanding how to unpick a piece of creative, to knowing whether or not it’s going to answer your brief, all the way across to your commercial ROI componentry. How to maintain your holistic marketing capability is going to be really important.
Marketers will need to know how to maintain your foundations of brand marketing and cherry pick the new age technology stuff that matters most for you. Also, not trying to do everything, that’s going to be the breaker. If people just continue to try to do everything, we’re all going to crash in a heap and there’ll be a crisis of burnout.
