Insight & strategy Refreshing research Food and beverage giant PepsiCo wants insight to be a source of competitive advantage, and has placed a focus on technology to help it achieve that. By Katie McQuater I magine that you are the chief consumer insights officer for a multinational consumer goods corporation, responsible for a global insight function employing around 850 people and spanning a range of brands. Then Covid-19 hits, and old certainties fly out of the window. For Stephan Gans, senior vicepresident, chief insights and analytics officer at PepsiCo, the pandemic has meant the function needs to become more adept at planning for the future rather than telling us whats happened in the past perhaps the more traditional preserve of market research. Were in a much bigger rush than we would have otherwise been to focus on improving our foresight capabilities, says Gans, of the impact on insight since March 2020. Every business in the world is basically struggling with the same thing that Covid has uprooted a lot of things that we were used to. Planning for the future is arguably more important, but more difficult, now than it has been in many years, because incremental planning doesnt really work consumer behaviour has really shifted. Gans cites the example of the trend towards snacks that come in small packaging, which have been popular for many years, suddenly being disrupted by the changing mobility of consumers. That led to major research on the explosive growth of family packs more suited to in-house sharing. Its a huge deal for the supply chain its an incredibly difficult thing to suddenly rebuild your factories and redeploy capital assets. So, weve got to get better at forecasting where the market is going, not only in terms of consumer trends, emotionally, that help to inform the position of a brand, but also very practically how much are people going to consume this product on the go? How much time are people spending at home? Whats happening with working at the office? If people can get to an office, they may stop on the way and buy a water or a Diet Pepsi. There is huge pressure on insights easing the way in shoring up those capabilities. With PepsiCo products available in more than 200 countries, advertising research was usually carried out at a local level Competitive advantage For PepsiCo, however, the shift towards more predictive insights began before the onset of the pandemic. In the past few years, it has been building an insight function that aims to act as a source of advantage for the organisation, explains Gans. One of the key drivers of the change weve driven in consumer insight over the past few years with the objective of consumer insight really becoming a competitive advantage for PepsiCo, instead of just a support function is the digitisation of a large part of the function, he adds. That doesnt mean simply standardising ways of working or using more tools, but includes changes in skills, capabilities, processes, who does the work and where the work is done. It also means changes to the relationships the company has with suppliers, and what work it 28 Impact ISSUE 36 2022_pp28-31 I&S Pepsi.indd 28 08/12/2021 10:03