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The CMO Podcast
The Consumer Insights Revolution with PepsiCo and Zappi | How to Turn Data Into Advantage
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- [00:00]
A
Hey, everyone. Jim here. And I've got some exciting news. The CMO Podcast is now on YouTube. You can now watch our conversations, not just listen. See the expressions, the energy and the insights that happen when we sit down with the world's top marketing leaders. Head over to YouTube and subscribe to our channel, the CMO Podcast. So you never miss an episode and be part of the community. So please check it out, subscribe and join the conversation. What if the smartest marketing play is not to move forward, but to zoom out? Deloitte believes the most powerful move a CMO can make is to look beyond the next step and see the broader perspective. That's what the Deloitte CMO program is for. A place to gain fresh perspective and connect with leaders who've stood where you stand together. Deloitte will help you see the bigger picture. So your next move isn't just fast, but right. Learn more about the CMO program@cmo.deloitte.com One.
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B
Of the things we do in our book is we define marketing. I never had to define it until when I moved to France for the first time. Was like, ques que c' est le marketing? And I was like, that's a really good question. You know, there is no French translation on the spot. Was like, well, it's the market, right? It's the consumer. So it makes sense. You are interpreting the consumer, you're understanding the consumer. So marketing, I don't care what you call it, as long as you're really prioritizing that consumer at the core of the company.
- [01:28]
A
Hi, I'm Jim Stengel. I've helped hundreds of major brands discover and activate their purpose. Because when a brand's purpose is clear, compelling and authentic, profit naturally follows. Each week, I welcome the CMOs, the chief marketing officers of your favorite brands, to speak to how their job is so much more than marketing. These leaders share their inspiration and challenges along with how they try to build a full, healthy and happy life in and out of the office. And it's that energy that reaches everyone they touch. And we're glad you're here to feel that energy and to learn from these remarkable leaders. So here we go. We are still in the first month of 2026, and I bet many of you have resolved to be even more consumer or customer centric this year. More human in your approach, outside and inside your company. Well, this show will help you on that journey to. Today we have a roundtable to discuss a new book, the Consumer Insights Transforming Market Research for Competitive Advantage. The Book centers on a multi year transformation at PepsiCo. Two of its four authors are senior PepsiCo executives. Today I am joined by four leaders who are at the forefront of transforming insights and analytics. First up, we have Steve Phillips, the co founder and executive chairman and Chief Innovation officer at Zappi, the leading agile consumer insights platform and one of the writers and architects of this book. Second up, we have Natalie Kelly. She's Appy's CMO and an experienced global marketing leader. She brings the CMO perspective on what leaders really need from insights when consumer expectations are shifting daily. Third, we have Catherine Melchior Ray. She has helped some of the world's most iconic global brands at Nike, Louis Vuitton, Gucci, Hyatt, Shiseido and Babel. She brings a sharp view on how global brands stay relevant market by market. And last, we have Stefan Ganz, the chief consumer insights and analytics officer at PepsiCo and a co author of the book. Stefan and his team helped build an internal platform called ADA which turned one off tests into a learning system that transformed how PepsiCo marketing and insights leaders work. So this is our conversation on how leaders are making faster, smarter decisions in a world where consumer expectations are constantly shifting and data is everywhere but too often disconnected. Here we go. Welcome all you beautiful people. It's great to see your faces on the screen. Welcome, Natalie, Steve, Catherine and Stefan to the CMO Podcast Roundtable. First, I want to start. Before we get into talking about books and customers and revolutions and all that good stuff, I want to start on a personal note to introduce the four of you to our audience. And I'd like to direct a specific question to each one of you to tell a story from your career related to this topic of understanding people and putting that to work for you. And Natalie, I'd like you to set the tone and start. And I believe I had this right. You started your career at AT&T as a Spanish interpreter. So what is one experience from that first job that helped shape the way you think about listening and understanding people?
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C
That's a great question, Jim. Thank you. So yes, I did start my career as a Spanish interpreter, mostly for immigrants in the United States so that they could access services from a lot of major brands, retailers, medical services, health care, insurance, et cetera. And the thing that really stuck with me all these years is, is that most of our communication challenges are not just about language. It's about culture, it's about context, and it's about what someone wants to do, their motivation. So that is something that stuck with me Whether I've been in marketing, I'm CMO at Zappy, been a VP of marketing at HubSpot, international expansion at HubSpot for many years. And I find that the same thing holds true. Whether you're trying to communicate with internal stakeholders as your audience or. Or with consumers more broadly, or in my case, with B2B tech buyers, it all holds true. It's not just language. It's about culture and motivation and intent.
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A
Beautiful. Steve, you started Zappy because you saw the gap between how fast marketers needed to move and how slowly research was operating. So what's the personal experience or frustration you had in your career that led you to start this company?
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D
Especially James Zapi was my fourth company. I've always been in consumer insight, but I've been a bit of a serial entrepreneur in consumer insight. And I was always interested in innovation, but we always innovated around two things, how we ask questions and how we analyze data. And I remember literally sitting in my garden with a glass of wine thinking, there must be something else to innovate around. Then I started thinking, what do clients moan about with consumer insight? And you'll know this, everyone wants to know what their consumers think and feel.
- [06:12]
A
Right?
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D
You'd be crazy not to want to know that information. But people used to moan it took so long and cost so much money. So I thought, okay, how can I make it quicker and cheaper? And the obvious answer was automation. And so the inspiration was I wanted to take an industry that a typical project would take four weeks and cost $20,000, and I wanted to make that four hours and $2,000 and maintain the quality. So that was the inspiration.
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A
So how have you done on that?
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D
Well, you probably have to ask Stefan.
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A
Really?
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D
I think on that one we will.
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A
We're going to talk a lot about that.
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D
We've done okay. We've done okay.
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A
Good. Super. Well, Stefan, let's move to you. We go back. I've known you for, gosh, it's probably almost two decades now, and you have been around my friend Unilever for 15 years. You founded a consultancy that you eventually sold. You were head of strategy at interbrand and now PepsiCo for the past eight years. Wow. So what's the belief or assumption, Stefan, that from your vast experience that you upend it in this work you've done with PepsiCo, which we're going to talk about in Rethinking Totally Consumer insights and analytics?
- [07:19]
E
Yeah, great question, Jim. Indeed. If you listen to my career so far, I spent a lot of time as A marketer at Unilever and as a marketing consultant. And what I found, and frankly still find inspiring about the role I'm in that PepsiCo is that PepsiCo realized that for the, the opportunity that they had to really galvanize all that great talent and capabilities around the world in consumer insights, to really galvanize that and maybe one day turn that into a competitive advantage for the business. It was probably a good idea that they just found somebody who wasn't necessarily, let's say the best placed person as a consumer insights professional, but somebody who was able to galvanize all that resource and connect with internal and external partners, connect with the business well. And that's something, you know, the combined experience of consultancy, entrepreneurship, marketing at Unilever really set me up well for that. Most companies think that it's smart to promote the best surgeon to head of surgery, PepsiCo, all that, that was probably not the smartest move. And I'm still grateful for that because I've learned a lot along the way.
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A
So Katherine, bring us home here. You're the fourth of the four on this panel. You also have a book that's recently out about global brands and local relevance that you wrote with Natalie. So you've had also a super interesting career. You worked on a couple different continents. You worked in Japan, you've worked in France, you've worked on brands like Nike, Louis Vuitton. So the question for you is, what made you rethink how global brands can earn relevance locally? What was that insight that aha moment that made you write a book and to, you know, put that out in the world?
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B
I would say, as you say, I have a unusual career and I started it in Japan. So right after college I went to Japan and I was hired by Fuji Television. So before it's actually how I learned marketing was that I was working for a Japanese TV network in Tokyo. And then I actually took a trip, transferred to New York. But to be able to come up with ideas for the Japanese market, I had to understand it and I had to understand my colleagues. So Japan is notoriously difficult to understand because of Japanese. And while I had studied it in college, I wasn't nearly proficient enough to be able to understand exactly everything. So I actually really had to learn to listen with my eyes in addition to my ears. And I actually tell people, if you're going to go to Japan, don't worry about it. If you can't speak Japanese, I mean, it's certainly better, but you can understand what's being communicated if you Learn to listen with your eyes. And so I think that developed it really kind of turbocharged, not only my listening skills, but my instinct first just to survive. But I think that, you know, I learned to be able to. There's an expression in Japanese called kukiyo yomu and it's loosely translated as reading the room. And the Japanese are highly attuned to what is being communicated without words. And consumer insights is kind of that way too. You know, you have to learn to really develop your instinct and see what consumers are telling you, even if they don't know themselves and they can't articulate it themselves. So I think that became one of my core strengths for understanding consumers in any country and frankly in multiple industries. Because as you said, I then moved into Nike and Louis Vuitton and I did it in hospitality and then in cosmetics and ultimately in tech.
- [11:14]
A
A question for the four of you raised by Catherine's comment there. You all have worked in lots of organizations. How do you build the kind of culture Katherine talks about where people do read the room, people do listen, they look for non verbal signals. They are empathetic, if you will. They're willing to get out of their own head and into someone else's. Any wisdom for our audience about how you have done that, Steve? You look like you're eager to talk.
- [11:38]
D
I can talk about a little bit because of the businesses I've worked in and opened. Sapphire has a weird stick because it's a tech company, so it has half sort of go to market people and half technology people. And those two profiles, if you think about their personality profiles, are very, very different. So we've had to really adjust meetings, particularly for classically introverted personality type. Originally our meetings would have introverts and extroverts and the extroverts would wander through the meeting talking to each other and then make a decision. And then the introverts at the end of the meeting who were mostly the smartest people in the room, would go. That was a stupid decision. So we ended up starting to have initially silent meetings where at least for the first 20 minutes, a bit like the Amazon meeting, it was silent structure, put in ideas into an ideas board and then vote on those ideas. And it was only towards the second half of the meeting when you would listen to all of your colleagues effectively through your eyes rather than through your ears and the loudest person in the room. And that made a huge difference. And it's a technique I would strongly recommend if you have that mix of people.
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B
Wow, I love that. I really love that concept.
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A
Natalie, you're in the organization. Are you more of an introvert or extrovert? And how do you handle those meetings as Steve just talked about?
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C
Well, I'm actually an introvert, but a lot of people think I'm an extrovert for some reason. I think I've just gotten very good at disguising it over the years.
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D
You're in marketing, Natalie, you're supposed to be an extrovert.
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C
A lot of marketers are actually introverts too, but you know, there's such a thing as an ambivert.
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B
I don't know.
- [13:13]
C
Latest test I did said I'm still an introvert. What I would say is, you know, I started my career in AT&T in a fully remote job, but we spent a lot of time in person as well. So the job itself was remote. But we did on site training at AT&T in the headquarters of that office in Monterey, California. And how we spent our time was very intentional. We made sure that the time we spent together was going to be productive and had very clear outcomes associated with it and that enabled us to work remotely very well together. So I think every organizational culture is different, but I think at Zappi, the way we do it works very well. But we're a tech company, so we change very rapidly too. So we're constantly adjusting how we communicate, even internally, which I think is something all marketers can relate to.
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A
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- [15:44]
E
So what a great question, Jim. What I realized a couple of years into the transformation of the insights function at PepsiCo, you know, and also a couple of years into the partnership with Zappi. I had a number of people reach out to me, sometimes as references through Zappi, but sometimes also out of my own network. And they were really very much intrigued by what we were doing, and they wanted that too. And I've learned that sometimes it just, you know, I was, long story short, sharing this story and what, what more and more became like, you know, felt to me like the same story all over again. I was sharing the same story all over again. And I went to a conference and a lot of people came up to me and I told the same story to a whole room of people. And I thought this is actually going to be super helpful if we document this. And I think Insights functions in large organizations, often very underutilized, under leveraged, and also often leaders of those functions are often very frustrated by the fact that they feel they're not hurt. Right. And so there's a lot of energy there for people to drive progress. They want to have impact and they want to learn. So I felt it was really a great idea to capture that.
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A
So, Steve, you wrote this with Stefan and two other authors. What did you learn about Stefan in putting this book together and reflecting on your years of work together?
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D
I should give a shout out to both Kate Chard at Pepsi and Ryan Barry from Zappi, who other authors worked with us on the book. And I think from a zappy perspective, and from my perspective, we really wanted to give. We're a technology company. We wanted to give the technology story. And what I realized as we were going through the process was how small a part of the story the technology was. And I think particularly, and I'm sure you'll agree with this, Stefan, so much of the work was around the behavior change within Pepsi of adopting that technology. And HR particularly did a fabulous job taking the organization through the adoption process. And it's not, it's not about adopting a new technology, it's about changing a workflow. It's about moving from thinking your job is doing a piece of consumer insight to thinking your job is maximizing the benefit of the insight and the data that you have. And so that part of the story I thought was by far the most interesting. And it sets us up. I mean the great thing about the book is it sort of finishes at a connected insights layer and that has set us up and it set Pepsi up to really utilize AI on top of that data asset, a data platform that been built over the years.
- [18:31]
A
So we're talking mostly about this consumer insights revolution today. But Catherine and Natalie on about the same timing you released a book brand Global Adapt Local. So same question to you. Why, why were you compelled? Because this is not an easy lift to do a book. You all know that I've done too. I mean it's a big time commitment. It's hard to do.
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B
Yeah, I think, you know, I moved from working in multinationals to teaching at Berkeley, Haas Business School and consulting and I found that my students who come from all over the world are multi industry just like I was. And it's one of the most interesting and challenging things about managing a global brand is that balance between what has to be globally consistent to have a global brand, but what also has to be locally relevant to appeal to consumers all over the world. And you know, research shows that the vast majority of consumers want to buy brands that share their values and you value human values are universal but they come to life by culture, in culture. And so it's that balance that I think is so fascinating and interesting and helps people learn that there's a lot more about learning to understand the culture that actually helps you build the brand.
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A
So quick question for the four of you, what brand does that? Well, in your mind, Stefan, you have a few in your portfolio that I think are probably pretty good at that.
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E
Yeah, I agree. I'm a big, of course a big lover of brands and a big, let's say observer of brands that do it well. I think a brand like Lego does it extremely well. But I also do think that one of our core brands, Pepsi does, does an amazing job. Our brand lays, does very well as well. These are of course in foods and beverages. All relevance, almost all relevance is, is built locally. But you can leverage global platforms like the UEFA Champions League and like heritage stories and authenticity of the maker etc. But the local component is so important. Oh yeah, that balance Finding what I like to call the global might for the local fight right, and vice versa is incredibly powerful. That's also why I do the work that I've been doing over the last decades.
- [20:56]
A
I think, Natalie, yourself, who do you admire for getting this balance right or this mindset right?
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C
I should say one of the companies that comes to mind is Apple. I think Apple does a good job at this. Globally, it's very hard to find B2B examples. I find the best examples are B2C. We did include in our book a few B2B examples. Adobe is one, HubSpot is one. But the vast majority of the companies that really get this right and the brands that get this right are B2C brands, plenty of them to name.
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A
Why do you think that is?
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C
We talk about it in the book a little. You know, there is a different complexity in the B2B marketing engine. You know, you're appealing to a buyer committee, not just one person, although they're all humans. So there are some things in common. For sure. There are a lot of differences that we break down in the book in that vein. Another is just the surround sound. If you're marketing a B2B tech product, you have to think about so many more communication touch points, from the support documentation to the partner strategy to. There are a lot of different people, different Personas, different profiles in the B2B mix. I do think that makes it a little more complex. And in general, when you take a company global, you're adding complexity with each market that you add, adding more Personas. You can see how the complexity multiplies.
- [22:14]
A
Steve, who do you admire?
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D
Just going to be very generic and say Dove. So Dove is the only brand. When I used to do a lot of moderation of focus groups, you go anywhere in the world and you say the word dove in a focus group and people just go, oh, it's an amazing brand to get consumer reaction. Weirdly, there's only one other brand that I've experienced that does the same, which is Singer Sewing Machines, which there were so many weird conversations about Singers. So it was such a strong brand for such a long period of time and had so many sort of stories about your mother and your grandmother having one. And there were stories about the Germans not bombing Singer factories in the UK because they thought it was a German brand. And we did the same in Germany because we thought it was a British brand. And just a very unusual reflection on that brand.
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A
Sewing machines. All right, there we go. That's nostalgic. So, Catherine, bring us home who do you admire? I know you talk about a lot in your book, but who. What's the one that stands out for you?
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B
Well, the one that stands out for me and one of the ones that inspired the book is KitKat. And no doubt that's because I have lived so much in Japan and gone back and forth and, you know, it's such a great omiyage, which is gift to bring people. I even bring it to my students and I do a taste test, you know, and I bring all the different varieties. And Japan, as I learned in doing this research, is the country that has the largest number of varieties. It has sometimes 400 varieties of flavors. And KitKat is such a great example because everyone knows what KitKat looks like and everyone knows what to expect. And so it's an excellent example of this framework we talk about called freedom Within a frame where KitKat has very clear rules. There are three aspects that are the frame that they require. Consistency, the logo, the shape. Right. They're like fingers that can break. And the wafer chocolate mix. Beyond that, they not only allow, but they encourage their local teams to innovate in and around that. And so there are, you know, all kinds of stories of KitKat really leveraging local insight to be able to adapt the flavor profile and even the sourcing to the. To the local markets.
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A
My daughter gave me an advent calendar for this past Christmas season, and it's made by a Japanese company. And it's just all purely super interesting sort of exotic Japanese products and foods. KitKat was in the calendar. Yay. Which flavor actually was a cookies and cream, which is weird.
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B
Wow, that's interesting.
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A
Yeah, four small bars. Two were cookies and cream, and two were matcha.
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B
Nice.
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A
Okay, now listen, we're gonna get back on track. So the book, the Consumer Insights Revolution, you know, to me the headline for it was, you know, the old research just doesn't work anymore. And here's a great way to think about and a long case study with PepsiCo of to think about it differently. So I'd like Natalie to start us on this discussion.
- [25:09]
D
What.
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A
What do you think's the biggest thing that's still broken and how companies think about insights and analytics today? Because the story of PepsiCo in the book is about a company sort of realizing that and then changing it. And it's been several years at it. But what do you think is the biggest thing that's still a barrier?
- [25:29]
C
I think the biggest barrier is data fragmentation. All these different business units and brands and countries, markets are sitting on a gold Mine of data and it's sitting in little silos. And if they can just put that together in a unified way, they can leverage that data in aggregate. And we've seen this before with like CRM and other software. Once you get that information and that data into a consolidated platform, you can make use of it, you can democratize the benefits of it, but that just isn't happening yet to the degree that it needs to. That's, I think a big part of the Beauty of the PepsiCo story. You know, whether it's PepsiCo or any other organization that's doing that, even if it's bridging two business units and sharing that data and bridging two countries, you know, it starts, has to start small. It's a big change transformation initiative. But that is particularly important in the age of AI. If we don't get that data homogenized and defragment it, unify it, we don't start that process, we won't be able to make the best use of it.
- [26:36]
A
You all on the same page on that. That's the biggest barrier.
- [26:39]
E
Yeah, I think what I said before about building the global mind for the local fight, I think is super applicable here. To Natalie's point, we had every time teams were doing research whether an innovation was a good idea or not or whether an ad was a great idea, had a lot of potential or not in certain markets they got smarter locally, but nothing beyond that. And we've now set ourselves up by standardizing and digitalizing the processes and the data capture. We've set ourselves up to do what we call meta learning. Right. So we can, you know, at any point in time in those 175 markets or even more, I think that, that we have businesses in around the world. We're developing and also testing or learning about the effectiveness of all these different marketing activities. And when you can really put all that data that it generates into one pile in a meaningful way, you can learn at an accelerated pace. And so we're now at a place where the whole of PepsiCo gets smarter every time we test something somewhere. And that is also back to Steve's original ambition. When he sat in his backyard with his glass of wine and he thought up Zappy. The promise of making consumer insights work a lot faster, a lot cheaper is enabling this because in and of itself that's great, but it enables you to sell the tools and the standardization into an organization like PepsiCo. That then makes us better. And that's the big price. Right. The efficiency is great, but the reward of effectiveness is always bigger in marketing.
- [28:19]
B
Yeah, I think one of the things Steven said there that's really important is he said it allows you to sell it in. And I would say one of the biggest challenges is that companies may not really prioritize it at the core product creation or marketing creation center. One of the things that I struggle with sometimes in teaching young, ambitious future leaders is that they think marketing is basically promotion. They all want to go and be tech people. And I say, well, you know, where is tech getting its insight for the product it's trying to create? Like, oh, well, you know, they're trying to see what people want. I'm like, that's marketing. You know, one of the things we do in our book is we define marketing. I never had to define it until my team when I moved to France for the first time was like, marketing, you know, what is marketing? And I was like, that's a really good question. You know, there is no French translation, there is no Japanese translation. And so, you know, I on the spot was like, well, it's the market, right? It's the consumer. So it makes sense. You are, you're interpreting the consumer, you're understanding the consumer. So marketing, I believe, is that. And so I don't care what you call it as long as you're really prioritizing that consumer at the core of the company. And that can be, you know, innovating new drinks and it could be innovating new shoes and it can be innovating new tech services. So I think that. But you have to start with thinking about what problems are you trying to solve in the marketplace.
- [30:10]
A
Everyone seems to be chasing the next big thing, the fastest answer, the quickest win. But great CMOs believe the real power isn't in the speed, it's in stepping back to see the bigger picture. That's why everything Deloitte does in their CMO program, from their industry leading capabilities to their connected network of CMOs is designed to help you zoom out and gain fresh perspective. Deloitte will help you see the bigger picture together. Learn more about the CMO program@cmo.deloitte.com what is marketing? Could be a whole new show. Maybe we'll have round two of this for. Because it frankly is different almost at every company, which is different from other functions in business which, you know, we could spend a lot of time talking about that, which we will not do. Maybe we'll come back to that. Now this PepsiCo journey, that's the core of this book. The consumer Insights Revolution. Stefan, you're already talking about it, but you're a few years into this. And so I'd like you for our audience who most have likely not read the book. It's a tough question for you, but what did you do at a high level on this multi year journey? And then I'd sort of welcome Steve and maybe Natalie to comment on it. But take us through at a high level what happened in the company that I think has generated some amazing results which I'm sure you'll share as much as you can.
- [31:27]
E
Yeah, I mean this is not, there's always a risk of this sounding like kind of I did this right. Clearly this was a huge team effort with a lot of support also from key business leaders who saw the opportunity and the potential of this function to really add value to the PepsiCo business. What we've done is that we basically said like, look, we have got a, I've mentioned this before, we've got this great group of talent, we've got this great but yet isolated capabilities all over the world. Let's get together and define the, let's say five things that keep us up at night, the five things that we would all wish we were better at. And then you come with a pretty, actually now pretty predictable list of five key capabilities where everybody felt like, look, if you can organize our work in such a way that one on one becomes three, I'll happily be one of the ones. Right? I'll happily join in because PepsiCo, like most companies of this scale, is quite the federation, right? It's not like head office says we're doing it this way and that's it. So you have to like create your team and drive your alliance. And so yeah, we started building these capabilities, realizing that this was not something we could do ourselves. And so we forged partnerships like, like the one we have with Zappy, we have a few others as well. And around those partnerships like market leading, market changing capabilities formed in innovation forecasting and advertising testing for example. And we then started to roll those out in the organization. And what we quickly learned then is that the technology itself was important, an important enabler. But just a small story. Part of the story, and this is an area where I've learned arguably the most over the last couple of years. I naively thought you give some a better tool to do their work and then they'll magically change the way they work, change the way they relate with, with their business partners. And that is obviously now that's not the case. So we needed to Complement all of that with very intensive training, which we call the PepsiCo way of doing Insights, to really teach people to become business partners that they were now able to be instead of the order takers they used to be because they were so busy doing work and it took so much time and so much money to get the work done that now the work itself, you know, the actual running of the Insights work took less of their resource, they had more time and they have more time to do the work before the work and the work after the work to really make sure that the briefing is clear and that it's actually a meaningful thing to do research on and that once the research is done that the insights are shared and acted upon and leveraged. And that is an ongoing journey. And now AI is here and everything changes again. However, we now have the data foundation that we can train the AI on, which is invaluable.
- [34:32]
A
Do you have a big goal going into this? Was there like a big KPI you wanted to move or. And then I want to get Steve and Natalie to comment on the journey.
- [34:40]
E
I think there were a couple of KPIs, Jim. There were like, let's say creative effectiveness or KPIs, right? Which we improve with roughly 30%. So great. It's not that I got the goal like go out and improve this with this much percent, but it was obvious that there was a lot of room for progress. So I got a lot of freedom and was able to drive a lot of progress. We also invented our own KPIs. We started surveying internally, all like hundreds and hundreds of people that are internal customers of the insights function in PepsiCo. Marketers, R& D people, commercial people, sales directors. And we ask them every year like, you know, what do you think of this? Is this meaningful? Are you getting value out of this? And describe your Insights partner, what is he or she bringing to the game? And we saw a lot of progress in that as well. And arguably that that matters as much to me as the earlier mentioned KPIs.
- [35:41]
A
Natalie and Steve, you've been embedded with PepsiCo in this journey. You obviously work with other clients too. Could you comment on how you see this journey? PepsiCo, what stands out? What could others learn the most from?
- [35:52]
D
I think from a partnership perspective, and I'm sure Stephanie said this early on, Pepsi, I mean, we were a small tech company. Pepsi was a whale. We were a minnow, right? The thing that meant it could work. Two things, I think. One was that we shared the same vision. We both believed Consumer Insights was Broken. It could be a powerful differentiator, it could help drive the company forward. But if you're going to have that strong and ambition, you had to change everything about it. You had to change the technology, the data storage, but also the ways of working. So vision was one thing. The other thing was that we knew we had to make a decent time commitment to each other because there were bumps along the way where in a normal relationship might fall in that. But we said no, we're going to commit to each other. So it's that aligned vision and aligned and length of time commitment made a real difference in landing it because as we, you know, we thought it was a tech problem and it wasn't a tech problem. But then we also realized as we were going things like meta analytics is easy to say, but if you think about the world pre what we were doing, consumer insights, would you come up with a new ad and you'd say, can you test this out with young people in Thailand and find out whether they like it?
- [37:06]
B
Great.
- [37:07]
D
Any research company could go and test this thing with young people in Thailand. But when you suddenly have a large data repository, which is where we were getting to, you could ask questions like what type of advertising works with young people in Thailand? That's a question pre brief, let alone post production. So then you can start using that insight in many different ways, which makes it much powerful, but much more powerful. But in order to get there, you also had to have a behavior change where the marketers were asking different questions of data, different questions of inside people. And Stefan's teams had to start understanding the role they took can change. And that's how you, I mean every CEO in the world says they want to be, you know, consumer centric, but this is a way of driving it which has got, which is what makes the whole process so interesting.
- [37:58]
A
Natalie, anything to add to that?
- [38:00]
C
Yes, Jim, I would add that, you know, I have to take my hat off to PepsiCo for putting this book together with us because they didn't have to keep this competitive advantage a secret. And it really is a transformation journey that any company can learn from. When I joined Zappy a couple years ago and started to talk to our customers, we serve 350 global brands. PepsiCo is one of those 350. My concern was, okay, they've done this, they've been successful. How do we help the others achieve what they've achieved? And we started to learn about what this looks like earlier in the journey and we learned that there's a lot of friction between The Insights teams and the marketing teams. In a lot of companies, the insights teams often feel like they're not being heard, and the marketing teams often feel like, hey, they just want to rubber stick, I want to go, I want to run, and they're slowing me down. So we started to hear about that friction, and we created a framework and we actually created a maturity model to enable them to situate themselves. Where are you in terms of insights? Are you completely disconnected? Are you fragmented or are you already connected? Are you on that journey? Where are you on the journey? And what we realized is we surveyed the market at large to learn the majority of companies still are in a state of disconnected insights. Now, interestingly, we just re ran the survey this year in 2025, and it's shifting. More and more companies are starting to centralize. And we also asked a question that I think is related to what Steve and Stefan have shared. It's not just about the data. It's about the people and the relationships between the people at these companies. And what we found was the satisfaction between the marketers and the insights teams. The satisfaction with the relationship was much higher. For those organizations that said they had connected insights, it was 75% satisfied if they said that they were connected, it was 51% if they were at level two, which was fragmented, and 48% if they were disconnected. So to me, the value here is not only, okay, you can leverage AI more, get your data centralized. It's you drive more harmonious relationships and less friction internally, which means you can get more done, you can achieve greater success, you can grow your company faster. That's the ultimate business goal that this helps feed into.
- [40:18]
A
Katherine, there must be some things bouncing around in your head from this dialogue as you work with a lot of companies that are probably on the spec spectrum of being very integrated and very disintegrated. So what's your reaction to this discussion we've had?
- [40:30]
B
Yeah, I love the notion of one leveraging the data and having the marketers be able to be able to leverage the content. So I got a couple examples because it's always more telling when you see it in application. At Nike, I was head of women's footwear back in the day when it was footwear and apparel. Much smaller than it is today, but still, I looked over 12 different sport and fitness categories and we were. I mean, I'm. It's kind of embarrassed to say this, but it was the day when women's shoes were made and the expression was, am I not kidding? Shrink it. And Pink it.
- [41:11]
A
Okay, let's talk about Consumer Insights.
- [41:14]
B
Okay, Right. But we still had the largest market share in women's basketball. And WNBA started and, and I have a former athlete in college was just doing a lot of research and we discovered that women have twice as many knee injuries as men. Okay. Not surprising for two reasons. One, they have wider hips and there's something called the Q angle. The Q angle is the notion that when, because of women's wider hips, they're putting more pressure on those knees. And so they have twice as many knee injuries as men. And I know because I've had two myself. So you can change that with the insole, you can rebalance that external pressure. But we weren't doing it because, because we didn't do this research. Now this is enormous, revolutionary research. So we now for the first time created a woman's insole on a woman's last. And yet that was not the end of the story. So we were super happy about it. We took it to basketball players and we asked them about it. And we were so proud of this like brainiac ergonomic innovation. And we learned. I showed them the shoe. Like we look at shoes like you see in footwear stores and on most of the designers walls, there are posters of cars that are going horizontally. And the women said, may I see the shoe? I handed her the shoe. She proceeded to stand up, put the shoe on the ground and look at it from the top down. And that's when I discovered something that you wouldn't see in any of the data research, is that women were looking at it from the top down in the same way they would look at shoes at department stores in pairs on low staples rather than up on the wall. And so we realized that not only do we have to turn the inside of the shoe differently, but we also had to design the outside from a different design angle. The good news about that is that at Nike, Consumer Insights was always highly prioritized. And so it wasn't hard to be able to share those insights and have everyone go, oh my God, that is so awesome. We're going to change this and change that because it internally. At Nike, for instance, there are sales meetings and every season with all the new innovation that was coming out and the second most demanded session of people getting in and talking internally, the first one was obviously what widened campaign they were going to be doing for the new season. But the second one was Consumer Insights, people coming in and standing on stage. And yet they wouldn't just share data. They actually then went and they did films of athletes and talking to athletes and getting inside their brains and talking about what their challenges were, what their issues were. And that just brought to life again, the consumer, the athlete, and her needs for everyone at the same time.
- [44:07]
A
Now, I read in the book that during this transformation, you made a choice about two areas of focus, innovation and advertising. And you've kind of referred to that in the conversation so far. Now, that kind of looks maybe like an obvious choice. But was it an obvious choice or was that hard to come to those two areas of focus? Tell us about that.
- [44:27]
E
No, that was not a hard choice, Jim. And it's actually a great question because it brings me to a key benefit of these new ways of working that we developed, which is that for both advertising development, advertising idea development, and innovation development, let's say the old traditional Insights tools were quote, unquote, tests, right? They came at the end of a journey and then you did a test, and, you know, tests were expensive and time consuming. And then, you know, you would get a traffic light kind of answer, red, yellow or green. And then you were, you know, you, you went on with your thing. What we needed it was to transform our ways of working from testing to learning, Right? And so, because if you want to drive consumer centricity at all commercial decision points, then you need it at your fingertips. You don't need it at the end of a journey, you need it whenever you need it, needs to be very low threshold. You need to be able to do it cheaply fast. And these tools were particularly well versed for that. So this notion of going from testing to learning has become like a core tenet of the transformation over time to a much greater extent that I saw coming in the beginning, to be entirely honest. Yeah.
- [45:41]
D
And I would add that as an Insight professional, it was very frustrating because, particularly with ad testing, but also innovation testing, people would moan, and understandably so, because in some ways what you're asking them to do, right, so you've come up with a piece of copy or, you know, an animatic, and you say, I'd love to hear what consumers think about this. And what did the Insight department have to do? They had to say, great, we'll go and test it. Can you just stop developing any of your ideas for the next four weeks and wait for us? That's literally what we were doing, and we're doing the same in innovation. And so of course, people didn't. They just carried on working and then we come back to them four weeks later or six weeks later. And go, haha, this is. And they're like, yeah, but we've moved on, you know, and that's just not useful. It was also highly political because you'd only test one thing once and people would be sort of hanging around. Whereas actually what we wanted it to be almost make it each individual project less important and just as a way of learning about how consumers think and feel about your idea so you can take some insight and adjust and play and move on without it having to be a big song and dance and you know, a bit a big political presentation. We really wanted to enable the creators and that was a really core thing I think for me because I've got lots of creative friends and. And they would moan consumer insight. And I was like, I've got to. I want to make creators love consumer insight. I'm not quite sure I've managed it, but. So that's certainly one of the ideas.
- [47:11]
A
Yeah. When we brought Wynn and Kennedy into P and G years ago, they basically the part of the deal was we're not going to do research the way you guys do research and if you force us to do PNG research, we're not working with you. So no, it is a hot point for creative people, as it should be. But I think we're making progress.
- [47:34]
B
Hey everybody, this is Andrea Sullivan, the CEO of Vive and we produce the CMO podcast and are so excited to have partnered with Jim Stengel for so many years. Wanted to tell you a little bit about something that could be right for you. Vive is a program for entrepreneurs and business leaders who want to get more out of their life and become their best and happiest selves, both personally and professionally. We have a 12 month program that allows people to meet up with some of the best business leaders out there and additionally experts in the wellness sector so that you can learn how to nurture yourself. So we teach things around, sleep, optimization, meditation, all those good things as well. Please reach out to us at Podcastsy Co to get more information. That's P O D C A S T S at V Y V E Co. Thanks for listening to the CMO podcast and hope to talk to you more about Vibe.
- [48:33]
A
Stefan, you say in the book, I'm going to quote you that the split between consumer insights and marketing will disappear. So could you say a bit more about what you mean by that and I'd like the others to react to that.
- [48:44]
E
Yeah, I think when I started in this role eight years ago, my official job title was Chief Consumer Insights and Analytics Officer. Analytics at the time was something that a few men and women did on a certain floor, this third floor in that building, somewhere in the corner. And of course, as we all know, analytics has become this part of everyday life, of everybody's job and we all take that as very self apparent. But it wasn't even as recent as 8 years ago. I think consumer centricity or customer centricity is quickly becoming table stakes.
- [49:19]
D
Right.
- [49:20]
E
I think especially in the agentic era that we're about to enter, right. We're still catching our breath from transitioning into the digital era of marketing. The agentic area is firmly knocking on the door, if not already has a foot in the door for a lot of businesses. I think a lot of work that we now consider to be core to the marketing and or insights functions are going to be done by agents. And I think the areas where humans really continue to add phenomenal value is very much in areas that we're talking about today is in really understanding, for lack of a better way of saying it, in reading the tea leaves. And I think of course you make the case that there's an AI machine out there that can read tea leaves better than I can. Maybe there is one day. I haven't seen it yet, but I think back to the point of where do humans add the most value in this whole process of bringing an idea to markets, whether it's a product or communication or advertising idea. I think that is going to be a lot about consumer, what we today call consumer insights work. And there are aspects of course of marketing work where that will be the case as well. But I see that converging more and.
- [50:44]
A
More reactions from the panel.
- [50:46]
B
Okay, I'm eager to jump in here because I think consumer insights is a part of marketing. I've always thought of it that way and in fact I get irritable if I'm in a company where it's, I understand it's a part of marketing. Marketing is vast, as we talked about earlier, but it has to be a part of that. And I do think that AI can help you, but there's a part of it embedded in this that you know is true for all of us in this very conversation. For many of us it's probably so assumed that it's hidden. But it's one of the reasons Natalie and I wrote this book is about culture. Consumers live in culture. And if you're, when you're, when a local team is understanding their culture, sometimes you have to, they're consumers. Sometimes you have to explain that out to various levels, to different people in the organization at different levels there. And so the cultural part of it, it's part of it that can be embedded and needs to be explicitly stated to be able to leverage the opportunities and overcome the challenges of those differences.
- [51:58]
A
Now, I believe our audience, many in our audience, have made a New Year's resolution this year to be more consumer centric. Okay, who doesn't make that resolution? So with this great panel, with all your very interesting backgrounds and perspectives, what's one thing you would recommend to a CMO senior marketer, Senior Insights person listening today? What should they get going with? What's your advice to move it forward on being a more consumer, customer centric culture or organization?
- [52:30]
C
For those CMOs who don't have the Insights team as part of marketing, I would strongly recommend make new friends.
- [52:37]
A
Good, Natalie.
- [52:38]
C
Make the Insights teams your best friends. And you know, we talked a little bit at the start about how some of the smartest people in the room might be the most quiet and they might be the most introverted. Draw them out, you know, get their insights, get their input. I think it's a relationship challenge internally. At a lot of organizations, Consumer Insights is the name. If you want to get closer to consumers, go to the consumer Insights team and build that relationship. Make new friends and you'll get closer to the consumer.
- [53:05]
A
And even if they are inside the marketing team, go further with it. Right. So I love your advice. It's very pragmatic, it's easy to do. It doesn't cost a thing. It'll make you better. So, Steve, how about yourself?
- [53:16]
D
Yeah, I have to just start with the data. I think large organizations, a lot of the marketing teams are sitting on a lot of data. That data used to be a bit powerful and now in the age of AI, it is your competitive advantage. So it's become enormously empowerful. You have to get that data connected. And once you get that connected data, then the leverage you can take from it is just enormous. You can start building better products, building better advertising campaigns, making more successful brands, simply making more money. So think about the data foundations fundamentally.
- [53:49]
A
First step that you've learned in getting it connected. What's the first thing people need to do?
- [53:53]
D
The first step is identifying all of your data and where it sits. I mean, you can't connect it until you've done a data audit effectively. So you start with a data audit and then you can build from there.
- [54:05]
A
Catherine, your advice?
- [54:06]
B
I think we need to walk the market. I think we need to get out of our Offices, get out of behind cameras and watch consumers and look again for all of the little nuggets that are less explicit. Challenge yourself to go out there and discover something new that you'd never seen before. Try to look at it differently. Question your assumptions and I think. And then share that with other people and see if you're both seeing the same thing. Because chances are two people in the same team working on the same objectives are seeing different things, and there's enormous opportunity there.
- [54:45]
A
You know, it brings up a memory for me going way back when I was part of the new management team at P and G. When Lafley came in as CEO, we instituted a ritual where every time the senior management met, we would do a half a day of immersion into some group of people we didn't understand.
- [55:00]
B
I love that.
- [55:01]
A
And then we would come back and share what we learned and we'd split up and then we would whiteboard it before we started looking at the numbers and talking about the quarter and all that stuff. Very powerful message to each other and to the organization at large.
- [55:14]
B
Yeah, Yeah. I think, you know, it's really great when senior executives do that because they're showing that they are constantly learning, too, and that we all are seeing different things and respecting that difference. And in that respect of difference, we multiply the opportunities.
- [55:32]
A
All right, Stefan, bring us home. It's been about an hour. Great discussion. People are making New Year's resolutions. Help them out here.
- [55:39]
E
Yeah, I think Insights leaders in companies can make a huge contribution by showing the company that everybody is spending too much time looking at their rear view mirrors and that there is a lot of value in looking at predictive indicators of business. Look at the household penetration development instead of last week's sales. Or. Yeah, look at them both. Right. But that, I think striking that balance. Right. Is incredibly powerful. And people, you know, that is not a natural thing that comes to a lot of business leaders. A lot of business leaders. Look at last week's sales and we'll extrapolate from there. Insights people have access to a lot of predictive indicators. Let's leverage those more and more.
- [56:23]
A
All right, final, final question. I don't know if you're resolution people, but is there something about this coming year that you want to do differently? Challenge, push, innovate?
- [56:33]
D
Yeah. I'm an AI obsessive, particularly on the power of our data. So synthetic data will enable us to be able to answer any question any marketing person or any business person has in the organization because we can massively multiply the amount of Insight we have and then pushing that through agents means that our insight can be available anywhere, anytime, to anyone who needs it.
- [56:58]
A
Love it.
- [56:58]
C
Natalie, My resolution for marketing in general is to bring the fun. You know, I feel like there has just been so much that people have gone through in society and in our work life and with changes ever since the pandemic, that we need to find the fun again and bring that to customers, bring that to consumers, you know, give them some energy, give them some positivity.
- [57:18]
A
Stefan, resolution next year.
- [57:20]
E
Yeah. I think there's a huge opportunity for optimism, a huge need for optimism in today's world. And I think our brands and our work can really drive that and offer that as options for people. And I love that.
- [57:36]
A
Catherine, last one.
- [57:37]
B
Yeah. I think we need a lot more empathy in the workplace. And I think this kind of came out of the pandemic where there was a lot of it and then we got all back into working faster, smarter. We're using more and more tools, and I think that, that in order to keep our brains exercised, one of the things that only humans can do is connect with each other and reading nonverbal communication. AI will not do that. It cannot do that. Culture is its Achilles heel. And so we need to. The more we learn to embrace technology, the more we also have to embrace our humanity.
- [58:18]
A
That's a good place to end this conversation. Thank you to all four of you. It went to great places, so I appreciate it. You taking time to share this with people coming into the new year. I think it's very inspiring and very pragmatic.
- [58:32]
D
Thank you, Jim. Thanks, everyone.
- [58:34]
B
Thank you.
- [58:35]
E
Thanks, Jim. This is great.
- [58:38]
A
That was my conversation with Steve, Natalie, Stefan and Catherine. I want to close this takeaway round with a comment and quote from each guest and I want to amplify on on that a little bit. So the first is from Steve. He said, in the age of AI, your data is your competitive advantage. Steve's resolution this year is clear. Connect your data. Once your data is unified, you can unlock better insights, better decisions, and ultimately better growth at speed and at scale. It's all about your data. Next takeaway from Natalie. We need to bring the fun back. Natalie reminded us that after everything teams and consumers have been through, brands need to enjoy, inject more energy, optimism and humanity into their work. Fun isn't frivolous. It's fuel for growth. And then from Stefan. There's too much focus on the rear view mirror. I love this one. Steffen challenged leaders to balance what happened last week with what's coming next using predictive indicators, not just past performance to drive smarter, more forward looking decisions. And finally from Katherine the more we embrace technology the more the more we must embrace our humanity. Kathryn's resolution is about empathy, reading the room, paying attention to non verbal signals and remembering that culture and human connection are things technology still can't replace. That's a strong set of resolutions for 2026 for all of us to carry into this year ahead. That's it for this week's episode of the CMO Podcast. As always I would be to glad grateful if you shared our show with your friends along with subscribing and leaving a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen. The CMO Podcast is a Vive original production. The views and opinions expressed by podcast speakers and guests are solely their own and do not reflect the opinions of our sponsors or its personnel nor do our sponsors advocate or endorse any individuals or entities featured on the episodes.