PepsiCo's top marketer has signalled a shift away from a TV advertiser mindset to a branded content approach to marketing.
The FMCG giant, owner of Australian brands including Smith's Crisps and Twisties - as well as global brands including Pepsi, Mountain Dew, Lay's, Gatorade, Tropicana, 7 Up, Doritos, Lipton Teas, Quaker Foods, Cheetos, Mirinda, Ruffles, Aquafina, Pepsi Max, Tostitos, Sierra Mist, Fritos, Walkers and of course, Pepsi - says that shift has changed its own internal requirements.
Its marketers have to become super-marketers or face becoming stuck on the wrong side of a looming chasm, according to global CMO Frank Cooper.
PepsiCo is re-evaluating the capabilities required within its marketing teams on a global level but Cooper doesn’t believe in the generalist versus specialist debate. Somehow marketers need to find a way to be both.
Cooper, speaking on stage at Cannes with Effective Brands, outlined how the FMCG giant is changing the kind of people and skills it has within its marketing team because while marketers might be spending more on marketing than they did in the past, they are getting less return for their investment.
Things have to change, said Cooper.
“We have this chasm. On one side will be the people who have the capability for the future and on the other will be the people managing a slow decline, and that's the worst place to be,” he said.
“We started looking at what are the capability shifts that are essential for the brand and agency of the future. The marketers of the future we are trying to train are more brand curators than brand marketers.”
It underlines a deeper move in how PepsiCo thinks about its brands and is moving from being what he called “sponsor brands” that think like TV advertisers to “creator brands” that think like branded content creators.
One of the most significant changes PepsiCo has made to its marketing as part of its re-evaluation of the capabilities it requires was to create an in-house content studio so that it can “constantly create content” he said because “creating one or two TV spots throughout the year has become completely ineffective”.
There are arguments both for and against the idea of marketers needing to be either generalists or specialists, but Cooper believes the debate is a “false dichotomy” and that actually the two need come together and marketers need to be more interdisciplinary.
"We're looking for deep expertise but broad lateral thinking. You can be a data expert but you need to have broad lateral thinking that connects to the culture,” he said.
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