PepsiCo’s Mauro Porcini on Design, Innovation & Purpose-Driven Brands

Thanks for having me. It's really a pleasure to be here with you today.

No, I had no clue at the beginning. I wanted to be an artist eventually. I love the world of literature and philosophy. The other dream was to be an author, a writer. But somehow I realized today that everything I was interested in was connected to this idea of creating something that will create some form of value for the people out there. Something beautiful, something useful, something interesting, something inspiring in a formal way that could touch the life of people in the humanistic field. You know, you talk about literature, philosophy, art, and this is how I approach design today. You say design and marketing. For me, design is closer to the world of creativity and art, and somehow finds a way to have a conversation with the world of business, marketing, strategy, finance. Marketing being the most creative expression, obviously, of the business world, but still being in the business world. And so our two worlds are colliding, and sometimes they don't understand each other. My role is the one of trying to figure out how to make them talk, you know, how to make them talk, to become a facilitator, an interpreter, a glue, an entity, myself, my teams that somehow connect these two worlds with all the potential that can bring to the table if they respect each other and they start to work in full synergy together.

Well, design, especially in CPG, in the mass market, has been for many, many years the beautification of packaging, eventually of products. It's not the design that you teach at design school. It's not the design that eventually you do in other industries where design is more of a competitive advantage, is more established in the industry, in the product category itself. And so yes, there has been many, many instances of tension between the two worlds. But I realized over the years, already many, many years ago, that my role was exactly that: understanding how to leverage the incredible potential of these corporations and the business leaders that somehow lead these corporations, and the resources that they have, the access that they have, the knowledge that they have. So again, I'm using this word respect on purpose because often the design community, the art community doesn't respect too much the business world, or vice versa. The business world doesn't respect too much the creative design art community either. You know, thinking that they don't understand how to create real value for a company, how to create real value for the consumers themselves, and so on and so forth. So trying to start from a base of respect, understanding what each of the different cultures and communities bring to the table, the amazing, amazing potential of what they bring to the table, but also the gaps that they have, and understanding, looking at the business world, looking at the gaps eventually they had, how design could help creating value where it was not there. As an example, something that is, I think, very tangible and very powerful in what design does for these companies. Designers are driven by what I like to call human centricity. They love to create value for people. This is what they teach you at school. They teach you to observe people, understand their needs, their wants, their dreams, their frustration, and then creating some solutions for those needs and those wants. These solutions could be products, could be services, could be brands, but you're always driven by creating something meaningful, relevant, useful, beautiful, something that creates some form of value for people. Then they teach you also that, by the way, you also need to make some money with those solutions. You need to, you know, you work for a company, you create your own business, and you need to understand the business world. But that's an afterthought eventually. In design thinking, it's something you consider from the very beginning. But in terms of inner purpose of these people, of these creative people, the first purpose is to create value for other people, and then you also need to make money with it. If you study business instead, they teach you to make money. They teach you to grow a business. They teach you how to create financial value for a company, how to leverage an asset called brand to create value for the company. But the primary goal is always the one of creating business value. Marketers, strategists, finance people, all the business community, the broad business community is there, and they get the jobs that they get and the big responsibilities they get because they're really good at creating financial value for these companies. The big difference between today and 10 years ago, 20 years ago, is that for the first time in history, financial value for a company is almost totally aligning with human value. We're creating real value for people. It was not the case 20 years ago.

Right. Today, either you give them something that is extraordinary from any standpoint: the best product, the best packaging, the best communication, the best service, best content too, right?

And the definition of extraordinary, you can find it in the Maslow pyramid because at the end of the day, we're all driven by that. You know, the basic is give them something that is functional that fulfills a specific need. They're buying something. They're buying a car to move from A to B. They are buying a beverage to hydrate themselves. Give them the base. Then there is, you know, you go up and there is what the brand stands for, what it means for you. You know, is self-expression, is your role within a specific community with your friends. How you look when you wear a Prada shoe, when you drive a Harley-Davidson, when you show up with a LIFEWTR water bottle, and so on and so forth. This applies, you know, when I was mentioning the luxury brands, obviously, you know, Prada, of course, Rolex, of course, Harley-Davidson, eventually, of course. But this applies also to mass market. Is the beverage you choose, is the snacks you choose, anything, anything is telling a story about yourself to the rest of the world. So that's the second layer that marketers and companies and designers of the world understood very quickly. You need to give functional values and you need to work on the emotional values as well. But what we're witnessing the past few years is the third layer of the Maslow pyramid, the top of the Maslow pyramid: purpose, something bigger than us. And so you start to hear in the past few years purposeful branding. You know, these brands, they stand for something. They need to give back. They need to help communities in a variety of different ways. There are a variety of, you know, social issues, and brands need to take a position, they need to have a point of view. They need to help the environment. They need to be sustainable. All of this goes up to the Maslow pyramid, to, you know, the dimension of purpose and essentially up there. So once again, it's all about understanding deeply people, understanding their needs. The Maslow pyramid is a good filter, and understanding that today you need to give them something functional, something emotional, and something purposeful to really satisfy them. And this needs to happen at 360 degrees in every touch point of the brand all the time.

Well, first of all, the best approach to this is the one where you don't have a project. You start a project. Now you need to collect data, insights, and then you translate them into a brief. The best approach is when you have a team that is part of your organization and 24/7 these people, when they are at work but also in their private life, when they are with their kids, when they are having fun in a trip or at a stadium, they're always in the back of their mind collecting insights, collecting data, and trying to understand what makes sense for the company and for the people out there. So for society, for the people you serve, in three dimensions, the three pillars, the three lenses of design thinking. So what is desirable to people? What makes sense for the company? How you can transform that into a business? And all of these, how can you make it possible, the feasibility component, manufacturing, and then the feasibility of the product itself or the service or whatever is the solution. So imagine this is the first step before the project. You have people with different backgrounds, design, R&D, marketing, all the different functions that 24/7 their mind is there, fagocitating insights. And if they are inside the company, they understand perfectly all the dimensions because they understand the business model of the company, the brands, the consumer base, the manufacturing capabilities, the processes, everything. So you need creators within the company with that kind of background, cross-functional, to collect those insights. Now, it doesn't mean you need to do everything by yourself. You can and you should still work with agencies out there as many as possible in all the different fields, from insights to design to marketing to R&D. It's really, really important because they come in with different perspectives. Maybe they are exposed to different industries. They bring diversity of thinking within your organization. But if you have this richness of agencies around you, you don't have an internal team that does the same thing, a team of creators, a team of people that really understand the three lenses of design thinking: feasibility, desirability, viability, that scan the world 24/7 trying to collect insights and feedback and input and data to ignite that process. Then you're going to leverage those agencies at 5% of their potential because you're going to give them the wrong brief. You're going to judge their ideas in the wrong way. How many times, for the people from agencies and companies of any kind, you know, working with big corporations, how many times you come with great ideas and you have a business team on the other side or a design team on the other side that is not understanding your idea, that is not understanding the integrity of that idea, that ask you tweaks and modifications that don't make any sense. Sometimes, you know, they do make sense eventually. They have the right insights from a feasibility standpoint, from a business model standpoint. But by the many other situations they don't. And this is where the people that you choose, the way you grow them, the characteristics that they have for each of your functions within your company, and then the people in the agencies you partner with. Forget the name of the agency. You need to know the person's name, last name, and have really a relation with the person, understanding what is the person, because you're not buying the services of an agency. You are buying the services of human beings that are working with you. And this is why many years ago I came up with this list of characteristics that these people need to have. This is why a book that I released recently is all about the list of these characteristics. You know, what are those 24 characteristics that define these creators, these innovators, what we call the unicorns. Because you can have the best processes, the best agencies working with you, the best approach to everything you do, but if you don't have the right people assigned to those projects, you go nowhere. And now again, to answer your question, it's project-based, but then you want these people to think 24/7, you know, over the years about what you need to do. If they think in that way, then they will identify the right projects. They will have the right tools to drive the partners or their own teams in the right way in those projects. Everything will move in a different way. But you need specific kind of characteristics, and often we talk about processes, we talk about other things, but we don't talk about how these people behave, think, make decisions, and do everything, you know, in association to these projects.

Look, I found myself 21 years ago projected in this world of corporations. I did my thesis actually in connection with a corporation, with Philips, on wearable technologies, and then I worked less than a year there, and then I created my own agency. But as you say, the first big experience was, you know, that was 3M, and I came in in a very junior position. And I was in the first few months not even design manager. I was design coordinator. I kind of funny, you know, even the title for the role I had. I was in charge of design for all Europe, for all the consumer business, and I was the design coordinator. That tells you so much of my, you know, of what the company, how the company... they didn't prioritize design, right? It was... design was not... Yeah. And I was 27, and what the company was asking me was to work on the aesthetic of a series of products. My background is in industrial design for the consumer business. So tape dispenser, Scotch dispenser, multimedia projectors, all the care business, cleaning tools with the Scotch-Brite brand, and so on and so forth. Very quickly I realized that if I was not helping, contributing, changing the culture of the company, the way the company was driving branding, innovation, I was going to fail because it was impossible for me to change the aesthetic of those products and connection to that change also the functionality and be successful with that if we didn't change the packaging, the communication, the experience, the way we were doing everything in the company with those products and those brands. But obviously I didn't have the authority, the job description to do all of that. So what did I do? Well, I started to work on what the company was expecting from me. So I was giving them the aesthetic of those products. Obviously a lot of marketers and R&D leaders were rejecting what I was doing. It was not part of the business model of the company, there were no money to do it. There was not the appetite for the risk associated to do those kind of things. But I realized that by finding few people in the organization that I came to call co-conspirators, I could actually bring to the market certain things that were really innovative. But that was not enough. Once again, in parallel, behind the scenes, I started to work to change the culture, to broaden up the scope of the design capability. By the way, the design capability being me back then, you know, and then I started to hire a few interns. But literally trying to show the company that to be successful was not about the design of a product. It was about redesigning completely the way we were doing branding, that we were doing innovation, and leveraging design and design thinking as a way to do that. So what 3M taught me and what I brought to PepsiCo 10 years later is the understanding that the chief design officer position is much broader than design. We call it design brief or design strategy, but at the end of the day there are business strategies, there are brand strategies, there are product strategies, there are strategies, and therefore as design leaders we need to understand the vernacular of marketing, the one of R&D. We need to understand how to connect with them, leverage them, but then we need to bring something to the table, and then you need to understand how to call this thing that we were bringing to the table. And I realized over the years that what we bring to the table is human centricity. Human centricity connected to the ability to make things happen. So it's the ability to translate those insights right away into prototypes, into products later on. And so this is a very useful kind of capability for a company because you have people collecting data, collecting insights, but also prototyping ideas. And those prototypes are very, very important to generate new thoughts, to help people from different functions work together. So to enable cross-functional work, to generate new hypotheses that then you need to test again. This is what design thinking is about, right? It's collecting data, insights, and then you start to diverge. You start to create many, many hypotheses and prototypes connected to that, and then you select a few and you start to test them, and you talk to people, you try to understand what is working, what is not. You test them both with external people but also within the company. You create prototypes and you have R&D and marketing and all the different functions coming in, and then you start to converge. An example I make in the book and I've been sharing for many years with my teams is this: imagine if right now I ask you to visualize a knife. You're going to visualize a knife. I'm going to visualize another knife. And many people listening to us right now, they're visualizing many, many, many, many more knives.

But if I prototype the knife, so if I make a quick sketch of the knife on a piece of paper, all of a sudden we're all aligned on what that knife is. So the first value of prototyping is alignment. You align the entire organization around an idea. How many times you are in a meeting, we talk about an idea, we all think we are aligned, and then we get out of the meeting room and everybody goes in different directions because we all interpreted that idea in a different way. But if you prototype, it could be a drawing of a product, but it could be a PowerPoint showing what kind of experience you want to create for your brand, or you know, is visualizing stuff. The first value you create alignment. Now, now we are all aligned around that idea of knife. We all see the same knife. The R&D in the room may come and tell me, well, I see that the handle is not very comfortable, is not very ergonomic. He may tell me that the blade is not sharp enough. The marketing leader may tell me that eventually the brand is not visible enough on that blade. We should make the brand bigger. This is the second power of prototyping. Essentially, you are enabling the organization to work together. You is really an enabler working together. It doesn't mean that if the marketer tells me the brand needs to be bigger, I should do a bigger brand. It means that I'm going to have an opportunity to have a conversation with another function, with another kind of background, to create the best possible product. Now, this happened in house, and then you bring it outside, and you bring it outside at the beginning, just bring the knife well in the right way because it's a knife, right?

You know, let's say, let's make another example. Let's bring the packaging of Pepsi in the store in front of your office. You put it on shelf and you see how people react. You take it to your friends, who are people you know. I've been doing this, for instance, with Pepsi when we're redesigning Pepsi. Obviously, you know, there is trademark issues and everything. So you need to be careful you show it to. I've been sharing the different ideas, the different designs with so many people over the years who are developing the brand because you again collect insights, so internally, externally, and you start to tweak. So I'm mentioning this because then obviously at a certain point you have more formal tools, qualitative research, quantitative research, but you need to arrive there with a lot of conversations already. You know, it's not, oh, I designed something on a piece of paper on a computer and now I send it to somebody that is going to test it for me and then I'm going to get the report back. That doesn't work. You need the nuances of the conversations from the very beginning. It's an iterative process. Prototyping helps so much. And then finally, prototyping excites people. You know, you go to your boss...

Yes. So you bring it to your boss, your CEO, your investor. If you are a startup, you know how many ideas these people see every day? There are many requests for funding, for a project, for an initiative, for any kind of thing they receive every day. But if you go there with something that is visible, that is beautiful, that is functional, that is tangible, people get excited. And most of the times when we arrive with prototypes, the problem is actually the opposite. They tell us, well, when can you make it possible? When...

So we call it the power of the shiny object. And this is very powerful when you need to unlock sponsorship or resources.

It's very complicated, and that's why going back to what we were saying earlier, you need people in house that are anthropologists 24/7 because this is not one day. You wake up and you're like, okay, let's see if this brand needs a redesign or not. This is a process that is going on. It's conversations with people. You need to fine-tune here. You need to really be in tune with a brand and with the people you serve to understand what to do with those brands. When is the time to push, when is the time not to push, you know, when to change, when to evolve, when to tweak, how disruptive you want to be. And so again, it's culture, it's empathy, it's connection with people all the time. And like this happens in everything in our life. When things go well, when your company is successful, when your brand is successful, it's so difficult to change. And this is the problem often for these big companies that are doing very well. Eventually they do very well because of other levers, because they have mass distribution, big barriers to entry, patents, you know, many different reasons. But eventually the product or the brand after a while gets obsolete, and these companies may be blind to the need of change because they're so successful. And when you are successful, it's difficult to take the risk to mess up the success. But you don't see that eventually by changing certain variables you could be even more successful. And now comes the beauty of this brand. When you have a brand that is worth billions of dollars and reach billions of people every day, if you do the right change in design, in the design of the product, the brand, the uplift could be massive. You know, the potential is big. Not just for the company. I mean, for the business people listening to us, obviously, yes, you're going to create a lot of business value for the company. But if you're driven by purpose, if you're driven by human centricity, if you're driven by creating something positive for people, the planet and society, the uplift could be massive for people, planet, and society. You know, look at, you know, our industry in...

CPG in general have had problems with the amount of packaging we generate. But I've been more successful in driving sustainable initiatives in removing plastic bottles from the environment and really helping the environment through the platform of PepsiCo because the initiatives we're doing were at a scale that I could have never done with a startup if I was starting things from scratch. So this is, I think, a powerful example of the power of scale associated with purposeful innovation. And for many people that want to do, you know, the right thing, that are trying to help society to create better products and so on and so forth, a bunch of them should keep creating startups because we need them and they push also the big corporations to be more agile and do more things and everything. But a bunch of them should consider being corporations too. Because if you find CEOs and executive committees that are okay with changing direction, trying new things, being more purposeful with being more sustainable, then you can have a lot of fun. I mean, under Ramon Laguarta in our company and PepsiCo Positive, everything we are doing to drive purposeful branding and sustainability.

It's been fun for us designers to be part of it and push something that we have inside. I mean, when I joined PepsiCo 11 years ago, I came in thinking, 'Wow, I'm going to help this industry be more sustainable. I'm going to have this industry be more cool also because that's a part of our, you know, design background as well.' And so, and I'm still here today because this is happening and it's happening at scale. And so often people ask me, well, after 11 years in the company, where do you see yourself in the future? And you know, and the truth is that myself, my team, especially my leadership team that's been with me for a while, most of them from the beginning, we are all driven by something that is so much bigger than our job description or specific projects or my performance review year on year. We see PepsiCo as an amazing platform to do something that is much bigger than Pepsi, is much bigger than the industry, is to reach as many people as possible out there and create something valuable for them. And it goes once again from more sustainable, healthier, or eventually more fun, more enjoyable, elevating the entire industry, the aesthetic value of the industry. There are so many different things that we can do and that we're doing and that generate a lot of satisfaction and fun.