Mauro Porcini was hand-picked by former PepsiCo chief Indra Nooyi to become the company’s first-ever chief design officer in 2012. The mandate was to make the food and beverage giant one of the world’s most innovative companies. Since then, Porcini has leveraged design to create innovative physical and virtual expressions of PepsiCo’s brands in everything from product and packaging to branded experiences.

An Italian who lives in New York City, for Porcini the pandemic hit too close to both his homes in early 2020, when people in the US were still struggling to take the virus threat seriously. He tells us from his home in NYC, “It was first Italy that was worst affected and I was trying to tell everyone, ‘it’s coming, it’s coming’.”

In an interview with Brand Equity, Porcini shares his experiences and spotlights the role of design in helping brands to add value to consumers’ lives in good and bad times.

Edited excerpts.

How do you use design to elevate the role of brands in people’s lives?

I call designers ‘people in love with people’. We are a professional community of individuals that spend their lives analysing the lives of other people, their needs and their wants, and try to figure out the best solutions to their problems. Our job is to create something that can add value to their lives. This is what designers do.

So, in a moment where we need to put people at the centre of everything we do, design, by definition, becomes a very important asset for all companies.

We look at business, marketing and technology as enablers, as tools, not as goals. What we really want to do is to create something that goes in the hands of people and adds value to their life. This is how PepsiCo is leveraging the design function – to be as close as possible to the human beings that we serve.

Tell us about the new structure where functions like design, marketing, sales and ecommerce, all fall under one umbrella. How is it helping brands and you as the CDO?

It’s been a very important change that our CEO, Ramon Laguarta, introduced a few years ago to connect many functions of the company – from R&D to marketing, design and ecommerce. It allows us to build a seamless dialogue, collaboration and synergy that increases agility and efficacy of the teams.

It’s based on the understanding that we need a cross-functional effort and to be as agile as possible to really craft solutions that are meaningful to people. We need to leverage technology in the best possible way, but we also need to leverage data and the observation of human beings in the best possible way. We need to understand how to leverage our brands in the best possible way.

So, all of these areas are led by functional experts that know that area very well. But you can’t have multiple silos that struggle to work together, to connect and to create a dialogue. Putting all the functions under one umbrella means that you don’t connect with other functions just in a project, you connect with the other functions every day.

This kind of connection has been extremely useful for us to increase the sophistication of our solutions – products, brands, experiences and services, and to increase also the efficiency and efficacy of our work.

How do you see offline brand experiences evolving in the coming years?

I really believe that this pandemic is mostly amplifying trends that were already happening. But there are behaviours that are temporary and they will disappear. As soon as we can, we will go back to public spaces. The need to connect with others is very human.

The beauty of what’s happening is that we became more tech savvy. In many parts of the world people were able to finally get access to the online world. This is not true for every part of the population. We know that there are people who unfortunately don’t have this kind of access. But for many others, it was their first time experiencing new things. I think about my parents, for instance. They never bought anything online before. For the first time, during the pandemic, they bought groceries online.

People became comfortable with using their mobile devices in a different way. In the future, when we go back to our past lives, we can amplify the experiences we have in real life through technology. Because now people are more comfortable using these technologies.

There’s a degree of consciousness that has crept into consumers’ lives – in the way that they choose brands and consume services and goods. What’s design’s role in pushing the sustainability agenda forward?

Sustainability has always been at the heart of design. The explanation is really simple. We are people in love with people. We create something that generates value for the society, for the users we observe. That’s what drives design.

I have many friends, designers, in love with sustainability and working on amazing stuff in their own companies. But they don’t really understand what a company like PepsiCo does. They’re like ‘why do you work for PepsiCo? What about sustainability?’ My answer usually is this. I have the platform of a company that reaches billions of people every day all around the world. This scale and impact is just unbelievable.

Ramon Laguarta has really doubled down on sustainability. We’re working on many projects and initiatives and building a comprehensive strategy on sustainability.

Look at examples like SodaStream Professional and Gatorade GX, the investment in a variety of new materials that could reshape our portfolio in the future, the redesign of bottles – reducing the amount of plastic, the use of brand design in communication, for instance. For Pepsi in Europe, we have fully RPT (recycled) packaging. And we took over the entire bottle to just communicate this new major effort we’re doing as a company.

In multiple dimensions design can have a role – from product development all the way to communication and educating people on how to use and reuse our products to try the sustainability agenda.

In general, companies are trying to do the right thing. My company at least is trying to do the right thing, but there is an ecosystem. The company needs to play a role, but then we also need consumers to play a role. They need to recycle, for instance. They need to use the product in a responsible way. We need to emphasize the role of this ecosystem, the role of companies and consumers.

I really believe that we can change the game if we work together. We can do as much as we want in sustainability, but if people don’t buy the products we create, what can we do?

We need to understand how ready our consumers are. You need very high sensitivity on where the society is, and then incrementally take them with us. This is what we’re trying to do.

I’m very optimistic. Things are really changing. I see companies and corporations are really investing. I see consumer changing behaviours. The new generations are helping a lot. Schools are creating sensitivity. So the kids when they go home they say, “Mom, Dad, you need to recycle!” We are moving in the right direction.

Watch the interview here;

TIMESTAMPS

00:31 – Using design to elevate the role of brands in people’s lives

2:14 – How PepsiCo’s new structure is helping brands and the design function

04:52 – More on The Work

08:12 – The evolution of real-world experiences

12:33 – Next big thing coming down the line in terms of technology

15:31 – Design’s role in driving the sustainability agenda forward

20:38 – An Italian’s view of the Covid crisis as it was spreading across the world
–
Also read: Advertising during a raging second wave of the pandemic