Introducing my new hire, Ada

Say hello to Ada, my ferociously intelligent new PepsiCo colleague.

(Don’t be put off by her Victorian-era “retro” style; I’ll explain in a moment how Ada is exceptionally modern.)

Ada is about to revolutionize how we generate and action against consumer insights at PepsiCo. Once Ada is fully on-boarded, the 400-plus members of the Insights team I lead will be connected with consumers—and Marketing, R&D and other functions across PepsiCo—in ways previously unimaginable.

Ada’s arrival at PepsiCo coincides with significant leaps in technology and data science. Leaps that will increase the speed, depth and breadth of the insights-gathering process. Leaps that are evolving market research from a discipline that previously enabled marketers to target dozens of segments of millions of people to one that will now target millions of segments of dozens of people.  

We’re thrilled to welcome Ada to the PepsiCo team!

But before we talk about how market super-researcher Ada will help shape our future, I want to talk, briefly, about market research’s past—and why Ada ’s arrival on the scene is long overdue.

For millennia, sellers of goods and services have been trying to get into the heads of consumers. In the bazaars of the ancient world, where merchants hawked pots, pans, spices, furs, and so on, you can bet that sellers then—just like sellers now—were keen to figure out what their customers really wanted or needed. You can likewise bet that sellers then had to figure out how to price their products, manage inventories, and respond to shifting consumer preferences. Just as they must today.

That said, “market research,” such as it existed, was a mostly qualitative pursuit.

It wasn’t until the 1930s that the discipline became more formalized and scientific. In the U.S., during the Golden Age of Radio, advertisers discovered the reach and scalability of radio, which enabled them to put the right message in front of the right buyer. Thus an industry was born. One that became a mix of the qualitative and quantitative.

To be sure, over subsequent decades and into the 21st Century, the market research function made—and saved—its share of iconic brands.

But, in all honesty, for much of the last 20 years market research has been a bit of a laggard when it came to its own innovation. Notwithstanding incremental advances, the market research formula was tried and true: A corporate R&D or marketing team conceived a product, built it, and packaged it. Then, in most cases, just before launching it, market research teams tested the idea with prospective consumers, who were surveyed in store aisles, contacted by telephone, or assembled in focus groups, their reactions dutifully recorded by observers installed on the opposite side of one-way glass panels. For decades, marketers and consumers alike both seemed to believe they were “collaborating.” They weren’t. Asking a consumer if she prefers Product A over Product B, months or even years after it was first developed, isn’t “collaborating.”

Further, legacy research approaches were designed in a time when companies sold their products monochannel--before today’s omnichannel media and retail channels existed. And, they were selling to a homogeneous customer base—in an era that predates the fragmentation of consumer demand that is the reality today.  

Accordingly, legacy research methodologies became less impactful and predictive, particularly inside global-reach companies where market research was typically ad hoc, locally driven and housed within discrete business functions or geographies. Whether a company’s market researchers were down the hall from each other at headquarters, or separated by an ocean, insights captured in one part of the business were not easily shared and leveraged organization wide. PepsiCo was no exception; our insights teams have historically been as siloed as our business teams. Teams working on US beverages, for example, could not easily leverage relevant insights generated by US snacks teams, let alone the insights generated by teams from different regions and markets. And insights were often used only once, with no ability to recycle and generate meta learning to build institutional knowledge that would allow us to better understand and serve a global consumer base. 

Until now.

Because, with the arrival of Ada, PepsiCo is about to exponentially increase collaboration and knowledge-sharing with both consumers and colleagues.   

Ada —named after Ada Lovelace, a 19th century English mathematician credited with writing the world’s first computer program—is a centralized digital platform we’re building inside PepsiCo. Ada will be listening intently to what’s being said in public forums, to spot trends sooner and help innovators inside PepsiCo respond in real time throughout the product-development, packaging and advertising stages. Ada will harvest insights from social media, online forums, blogs, product reviews, nutrition and medical journals, and dozens of other channels to identify and record emerging food and beverage trends—new flavors, new ingredients, new functional benefits, new packaging—before consumers themselves even realize that they are nudging them forward.

Designed with the help of several pioneering technology companies we work with, Ada will source, sort, connect and, most importantly, leverage literally millions of consumer insights generated from the farthest corners of the world.

Ada will apply big data, predictive analytics and other digital tools to bring consumers into every stage of the innovation, brand building and advertising development cycle—not just at the back end. And what’s more, every time we conduct a concept or advertising test or identify a new insight, Ada will generate meta learning which we can deploy at scale and use multiple times, across the globe—in a machine-driven digitized way as opposed to relying on individuals. This will help our brands and business become more consumer centric and in turn help PepsiCo grow faster, stronger and better.

Though, technically, Ada reports to me, something tells me I’m about to become massively over-shadowed by my new hire.

I can’t wait!