Name: Brainstorm Design 2023: Yes, We Can: Reimagining An Iconic Brand
Uploaded: 2023-12-06
Duration: 21 min 35 s
Description: Mauro Porcini, Chief Design Officer, PepsiCo (appearing remotely) In conversation with: Alan Murray, FORTUNE

Mauro Porcini, Chief Design Officer, PepsiCo (appearing remotely) In conversation with: Alan Murray, FORTUNE

Brainstorm Design 2023: Yes, We Can: Reimagining An Iconic Brand

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What an inspiring conversation that was with uh Andrew Lazaro and we're now going to have another equally inspiring conversation with another iconic figure in the design community. Mao Porcini joined Pepsico in 2012 as the company's first chief design officer. Uh since then, he has, as I said, become an icon in the world of design and really become the model of how you make design permeate a giant company like Pepsico. Over at 125 year history, Pepsico has maintained a deep connection to pop culture even as it attempted to foster what the company calls a bold challenger mindset. Today in the digital world, it presents even more unique design challenges for any brand, but for especially for one as pervasive as Pepsico. So how do you do it? How the design team honor a brand's rich heritage and simultaneously embrace a complicated blend of the physical, virtual social media, even the metaverse. Please welcome Maura Porcini who joins us from New York to walk through the challenges and responsibility of overseeing a beloved global brand. Mar Thank you, please. Hi, everybody. Hi, Alan. I wish I was there, but unfortunately, I'm here in New York. We wish you were here too tomorrow. But uh but you're very large on the screen. So it's almost like it's better than being here. We, we, we, we see you in, in, in, in full living color. Thank you. So, look, I already said you're an icon in the design community. But how did you get there? Where did Mara Porcini come from? How did you decide to get into design? And why? Well, I bumped into design almost randomly by coincidence. I, I wanted to be an author or an artist when I was a kid. And out of necessity, I come from a humble family. We didn't have the money. Uh My family didn't have the money to support me after university. I needed to find right away job as an artist or as a writer was not that easy back then in Italy. And so a friend of mine, somebody who was studying in high school with me told me about this new faculty that they just opened in Polytechnic of Milan, a cool design. So I was like, OK, let's try the test to enter uh this faculty. I did it iiii I entered the, the faculty and I discovered a word that I didn't even know it existed. It was fascinating. It is exactly what I always wanted to do. Uh And it's so similar actually to what I wanted to, what I wanted to be as an artist. Or as a, as an author, I realized it later. Uh being a designer, being a writer, being an artist, being a storyteller is all about understanding people, understanding what they need, what they want, what they desire and creating something that can touch their lives, that can touch their souls, that can touch their imagination, their brains. And so this is what I've been doing all these years through my designs. But also, you know, when I write books or when I, I'm on the stage right tonight with you or this morning in your time. So beautiful. Look, let's fast forward to 2012. You were then working at three ma company which I credit with the single best design product in history. The post it note uh a brilliant invention. Uh you, you were there, you get a call from the, from a recruiter saying that there's this chief design officer job at Pepsico and in your book which I read, it's wonderful. And I recommend it to everyone here in your book. You, you said that that called to mind a quote in Walter Isaacson's book about Steve Jobs where Steve Jobs is trying to get John Scully who was CEO of Pepsico to come work for apple. And, and he said to him to convince him, he said, John, do you want to spend your life selling sugar water or do you want to come change the world that quote is going through your mind as you're entering this conversation with Pepsico, what convinced you that there was more here than selling sugared water? Well, actually, because of that at the beginning, I turned down the offer II, I was, I was not interested on, on, on, on the company. I was coming from the world of innovation. I'm an industrial designer. I was thinking, well, what do I do in Pepsico packaging for Pepsi? Exciting, but not exactly what I wanted to do. And then the recruiter thanks to the recruiter convinced me to meet the CEO back then in the movie. And when I met Indra, I realized the opportunity that there was in the industry, not just in the company or philosophy of performance with purpose. And now she was trying to reshape an entire industry an entire way of interacting with the world of food and beverage. And so actually, uh in, in the meeting with her, I, I went with the book of Isaacson on, on the jobs and, and I, I ended up telling her, look, let's show the jobs and the world. And actually, we can change the world through a company like Pepsico. And this is not just about selling sugar, water, but it's really about impacting the way people interact with food and beverage with the overall uh industry and especially tackling some structural problems that the industry has sustainability, health awareness, think about personalization of the offerings, a world that is totally changing and evolving. And so this was an amazing opportunity that, that we had and we still have to do something meaningful for the world. It's a fascinating vision that she painted for you, but it was a job that didn't exist. Nobody was doing that at Pepsi then. So you would have to go into this giant established company and make all of that happen. And, and I'd like you to talk a little bit about your first experience because they were redesigning the soda fountain when you stepped into the company and not necessarily in a way you thought was correct. So how did you use that first experience to begin to establish the principles of design in the company? Look, I came in the company very confident about my tools, my approach to design, my approach to innovation but also very humble with a very humble approach, understanding that I didn't know at all the world of food and beverage and they were, I was going to be surrounded by people that were really experts in this. So here I am baptism of fire. There is this super important, high priority urgent project, redesign this sort of f why it was so high priority, urgent because our main competitor that you all know very well, co co co guys from Atlanta, they went to market um few years earlier with a very high tech machine that was using a new technology called micro dosing to customize your drinks. So what Pepsico was doing back then was to try to compete with the product in the market. So what often multinational corporations do a competitor or something you react, trying to beat them at the same game. So again, I didn't know much of the industry. I I went with the flow. I started to work on the brief that they gave me. But in parallel I started to ask questions, I asked the company, well, can you give me data information, insights about what the customers and the and the users want? There were not many data, the most of the data were about what competition was doing. So I started to very informally, I had no official budget for this. I started to informally talk to people, talk to customers, talk to users and they started to realize that actually, maybe there were other opportunities to tackle this, this, this this project. For instance, uh we, we realized very quickly that the customers, first of all were very price sensitive. They didn't want to spend so much money for those kinds of machines. We realized also that those machines, the one of competition were very big, imagine a big refrigerator and many of the customers didn't have the space for those kind of machines they can tops were to put something smaller. We realized also that the assumption that micro dosing was the must, that technology was the must was not that true. Many of these customers already had space behind these machines for the traditional technology of back in the box. They didn't, they didn't need that technology to reduce the space, you know, on the back of the machine. So long story short, without going into too much details, we realized that eventually the there was an opportunity to use a different technology, traditional technologies innovating on that technology reducing cost and using some of that cost saving some of the savings in adding additional features that were really relevant to the customer, the consumer. So we started to prototype al already solutions behind the scenes. But then at the certain point when we started to have something alternative that we felt very strong about, there was a problem I was new to the company. How do you go in front of all these people in R and D in marketing veterans of the company, veterans of the industry? And you propose something radically different. It was very tricky. So what happened is that again, there was a specific meeting that I talked about in the book. We are in front of the IND of hr of R and D, the C OS of the different businesses. We talked for one hour about the specific project, you know, the way we were working on the traditional approach that the team was having. And then at the very end, I take out the printout of these prototypes of these different directions that I uh that we started to work on and we start to share them with the with with the with the rest of the organization. And so the shiny object that prototype excited the room excited in that excited all these people around the table and gave us an opportunity to start investigating this other direction with the cross functional team. And then at the end, we were able to take it to the market. So many great lessons in that uh in that story, you know, don't focus on the technology solely on the technology. Don't focus on the competition, focus on the user, focus on the customer, what the customer needs and then the power of prototyping prototypes, the shiny object to, to begin to change the culture and get, get people excited. Uh uh Thank you for that. Let me, let me, let me now move to the present. You've got a, you've just redesigned, thank you for putting that up. You've just redesigned the Pepsi logo. Here it is, here's the new look. It, it's different, it's blacker. I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing, but maybe you can describe what you're trying to do there. Well, actually, uh this project is very meaningful for us because back to 2012, when I came to the company, the second high priority project was uh essentially the need of unifying all the world around the new logo that was designed in 2008 2009. So back then the company commissioned the project to an external agency. They designed this new identity. We launched it in the United States in few other countries. But the world of Pepsico was divided, many of the bottlers, many of the regions around the world didn't want to take that new design. They didn't think it was the right one. They didn't have the right energy. And so here I am an in me, you need to unify the world around this design. So once again, I go to talk to people, I talk with our own people around the world, with customers, with users. And they realized that actually, that design didn't have the right energy that everybody was looking for. What you know, that bold and apologetic look and feel of Pepsi. But, but we just launched the new logo. We just launched the new visual identities. I couldn't change it right away. So what we did back then in 2012, 2013, we refreshed it a little bit. We changed the blue. We made it more saturated, more brilliant and we made the logo bigger. We made the font of Pepsi a little bit more fat, more bold. Uh So we did few tweaks to give it more energy and we those tweaks, we call that visual identity. Big Ball blue. We were able in 2013 to unify the world, but we knew that it was not enough. Over the years, we have been working on limited edition packaging on different kinds of experiences on a variety of different activations to give as much energy as possible to the brand. While we were doing that, we were testing ideas for the future. And so organically, we started to prototype different potential directions, hid them behind limited edition packaging, hidden behind different kinds of activations we could do for Super Bowl or for the we fa Champions League for music concerts and so on and so forth. We were testing prototyping and at a certain point, we realized a few things, for instance, uh people were when we were asking consumers, people out there to design the logo, many of them and you see the logos right now on the screen, many of them were designing the globe with the Pepsi warmer inside the globe. As you can see the logo, the logo that we had for these years at the Walmart outside of the globe, consumers were designing the globe with a Walmart inside like the the the logos that we had in the seventies in the eighties. And so at a certain point, instead of rejecting the insides, we decided to embrace it and we started to prototype different ideas with that kind of approach. And then the right time to redesign the logo, the visual I arrived, there are two reasons that push us to to do this change. One is this new focus on zero sugar. You know, the company is really committed to double down in communication in everything we do on zero sugar is the future of of the brand in our company. And then the second is the importance of the digital world. We needed to have a visual identity that is digital forward. And so here we are we designed this new logo, new brand and again, same lesson that I shared earlier power of prototype. But that yeah that that that first point you made is really important here, right? This is black because black has been used as the color of zero sugar, Pepsi. So this is a nudge, you're pushing consumers to the zero sugar project. It's black in many ways is black in the war mark is black in this outer line of the globe, but mostly is black in what we call the poles, the radiate from the globe. And so there is this blend of black and blue. So you know, in the past, it was Pepsi was blue. Now Pepsi is this blend of black and blue. They give us also the possibility of even master brand approach through all the different formulation. And it's all about pushing this idea of zero sugar is is all about that. Uh Mara you make the uh there it is on a there it is on a truck. I like that truck too. Uh You, you make the argument in the book that design in the modern world has become the only true moat. The only true competitive advantage. It's no longer about having the scale. It's no longer about having the capital or the uh uh the, the sunk cost plant and equipment. It's about having great design. Why are you so sure. That's correct. Well, look, we need to explain what design is. And you know, if you study the design at school, they teach you something very simple. They teach you to observe people and understand what they need, what they want, what they dream, what they desire. So designers are obsessed with creating something meaningful for people. Something that creates some form of value into their life, then they teach you by the way, you also need to make money with it. You know, you need also to understand how to create these solutions. So they teach you the three lances of design thinking. The first one once again is people its desirability. But then they teach you all the world of physic and viability, the business world and the technology world. But the starting point and the end point is creating value for people. If you study business, they teach you something different, they teach you to grow a business, grow, grow a business from A to B and then they tell you, well, you have different levers to grow. This business. One is called product, one is called communication, but you have also pricing, you have distribution, you have so many levers. So if you are a business leader that could, that goes to a company and you're stuck with a mediocre product, you don't touch your mediocre mediocre product, but you are, you are able to lever to use other levers to grow the business, no matter the mediocre product. You're a business star, you are, you know, an amazing professional in the business world. Designers that are obsessed with creating value, meaningful value for people who now why this is important because in this world we live in, in this global world, in this world that is digital and this ich in this world where all of this is essential, making the traditional barriers to entry of businesses, like the one of p barriers made of scale of production, communication and distribution crumbling down. And once again, the winds of globalization and new technologies in this kind of world, either you create something extraordinary for people or somebody else will do it on your behalf. Those barriers to entry we used to have are not as high as they used to be, as solid as they used to be. So while in the past, you could le you could use other levers to protect eventually the mediocrity of your offering today, your best competitive advantage is human Centricity. It's creating value for people and design is all about this. We are ambassadors of the human beings inside this corporation. It's beautifully put. It's a rallying cry for everybody in this room. And at this conference today, one last question before II, I let you go. You write in the book about the importance of mentorship. You've had great mentors throughout your career. What's the single best piece of advice that you ever got from one of your mentors that you can pass on to everyone here? Well, is the ability to protect your dreams, to protect uh to always think, big, always think. How can I do something that nobody ever did before me? No matter the uh the project you have in front of you, it could be, you know, a project is about disrupting the world, but it could be just a sim simple project, something very basic all the time thinking, how can I do something body ever did before? So this is the innovation mindset. Then you can use tools and processes and everything you want. But it all starts with that idea of creating something that is new, unique and different. This is for me so important. And then there is uh the importance of all the different traits and skills of these innovators, curiosity, optimism, uh kindness, ability to work with others and excitement, diversity of thinking. So there are many, many different traits that make the difference. You know, our processes are very important. But at the end of the day is all about the people behind those tools and those processes, what they call the unicorns, what they call the people in love with people, the people, 33 shapes of love, three forms of love. The love for the people. We serve this obsession to create something extraordinary for the people in front of us. The love for what we do. That passion that give the ability to go through uh and, and beat every kind of roadblock and barrier. We, we, we, we see in front of us and then finally, the love for the people surrounding us because innovation design is not a one woman or one man show but is a cross functional effort. And we need to take all orders with us. Mara, thank you for that inspiring message uh to this group, really appreciate you being with us. Let's please give Mara Pin a round of applause. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Allen. Thanks everybody.