Reimagine: A conversation with Pepsi CMO Todd Kaplan

Todd Kaplan , CMO of Pepsi at PepsiCo and one of marketing’s most influential leaders continues to shape an ever-changing industry with his knowledge and expertise. Over the years, he’s overseen some of the world’s largest campaigns, such as the Super Bowl Halftime Show, and has launched some of PepsiCo’s top brands. It’s safe to say Todd has made a significant impact in the marketing industry and I’m thrilled to share my conversation with him today. 

CHRIS CAPOSSELA: You’ve worked at PepsiCo for over 16 years. Can you walk us through your journey, and what led you to the role you’re in right now?

TODD KAPLAN: It’s a great question and hearing you say out loud, 16 years, that was not by design, just to be clear. But I came to PepsiCo straight out of business school, where much like Microsoft, it has so many opportunities within.

I’ve done everything from creating a branded entertainment group, which was one of my first jobs, to working on our energy business, to Mountain Dew, to sports marketing, to food service, where I led innovation and insights, to water, where I led our water portfolio and created a couple of new water brands: Bubly Sparkling Water and LIFEWTR.

For the last, almost, five years now, I’ve been leading the Pepsi business, our flagship brand, and it’s been a great place. It’s been a fun journey. We have a lot of great brands and a lot of great people.

CHRIS CAPOSSELA: A couple of days ago, you made some pretty big news. You’re essentially doing some rebranding. Can you tell us what led you to do that and the behind-the-scenes of that?

TODD KAPLAN: These are not small decisions, as I’m sure you can appreciate. And I relate it to, Microsoft, or some of the things that you all may look to rebrand. We have a very tactile business, right? We make cans, signs, fountain machines, cups, trucks, there are so many things. You can imagine that the scale and scope of this is massive.

PepsiCo has always been a brand that’s been at the forefront of culture. It’s an iconic brand that’s always trying to evolve and stay one step ahead. It has evolved its logo many times over the years to reflect what’s next for new generations.

As we look at our current brand position, which is around this idea of unapologetic enjoyment, and has a kind of bold challenge or confidence to it, and you look at our current or visual identity, it was a bit more recessive, a bit dated. It was from a different era of minimalism.

We’ve spent 3+ years building out all the elements, validating with consumers, and aligning the 5,000 stakeholders. We were finally able to announce it, which was an exciting moment in PepsiCo’s history. Later this fall, we’ll be starting to roll that out across all our packs and in the marketplace.

CHRIS CAPOSSELA: I’ve heard you’re a big believer in this idea of “intrapreneurship.” For people listening in who might not be familiar with that term, could you define it and share how you’ve used it inside of your teams?

TODD KAPLAN: I love that word. We both work at these big, bureaucratic, publicly traded companies with layers – people, lawyers, and things that we can use to our advantage. If you want to really disrupt the marketplace, or act like a challenger brand, or push the limits creatively on something or try something new, there’s often going to be times where there’s friction.

I try to instill a mindset within my team, this intrapreneurial mindset. It’s like a challenger mindset of saying, if we were like a startup, and we were funded by the VC of PepsiCo, how would we operate? The bigger you get as a company; the stakes get higher and there’s a benefit to that. We can flip a switch tomorrow and we’re in 90% of retail environments, selling our products. The risk is, if you make one misstep, you risk the whole enterprise for something that might be a small campaign risk. You get very risk averse as a company and as a culture.

And I’m not saying to be risky, but to figure out a way to build that mindset within the team. When we’re told “no,” we take that as a request for more information and then work with our legal teams, our R&D teams, our supply chain teams, our finance teams to track that information down. There’s 101 reasons why we shouldn’t do a lot of things, but if we believe in an idea, and there’s a reason we should move forward, how do we wrap our arms around it and start to run around as if we were Shark Tank? How do we really understand the barriers and learn how to work with everybody to find solutions?

It’s a mindset that we’ve really instilled. I’ve got a bit of an entrepreneurial mindset. I started a couple of businesses when I was in college, and I’ve always approached my new teams with this mindset and treated it like a startup, like when we launched our new water brands, Bubly and LIFEWTR.

CHRIS CAPOSSELA: Could you share a little bit about how your own team has adapted to this new world of work, post-COVID, and how you expect your team to be impacted by these changes in the next couple of years?

TODD KAPLAN: We’re in a hybrid phase, like a number of people are, where people are working from home and learning how to work together virtually. The tricky thing is, it’s amazing on one hand, having the flexibility with your kids, with your family, with your commute time, with whatever that barrier was, but it’s also very isolating. Working from home, not having that human connection, and staring at the screen all day is not what we were meant to do.

How and when do you mandate being in the office versus giving employees the flexibility to choose when they will work from the office? When you are in the office, how do you make the most of those moments and schedule the right type of meetings on those in-office days? So, some of the things we do are brainstorms, tastings of new products, and things that are relationship building within different functions and different groups.

It’s a bit of a hybrid mentality we have. I think the one benefit of remote work that came up through COVID and beyond is that it has allowed teams to connect more empathetically with each other. And by that I mean, this is the first time we’ve seen people’s bedrooms, their dogs, their kids – and they’re all beautiful imperfections. It’s one of those things that is very humanizing, and it’s great that we can connect in that way.

We’re trying to create a more fluid environment that supports all of it, but also encourages real human connection as well by being flexible and sensitive to the needs of our associates.

CHRIS CAPOSSELA: I like it. Give me a great show or a great book you’re watching or reading.

TODD KAPLAN: So many great shows right now. I would say I’m a big fan of Ted Lasso. I just got into Shrinking with Jason Segel and Harrison Ford, which I thought, again, was very well written. Love that show. I also watch a lot of sports documentaries with my kids. I’m a big Lakers fan.

CHRIS CAPOSSELA: As Chief Marketing Officer of PepsiCo, an iconic brand in the world, are there any other brands you look at that you think, wow, they’ve done a really fantastic job? Maybe a hidden gem of a brand?

TODD KAPLAN: Well, it depends on when you say great brand, what that means. I’d say, there are iconic brands that everyone would go to quickly, like Nike. I have this theory of the emotional benefits of branding. I use this thing with my team; I call it the tattoo test. Basically, if somebody wants to tattoo your brand on their body, you’ve succeeded in establishing a connection beyond your product and built an emotional connection. I’m not saying we’re trying to get people to make tattoos of all of our products, but you look at some of these brands, like Nike, or brands within our own portfolio like Gatorade. Athletes look at these products and know that that’s the lifestyle they want. Or for example, motorcyclists and Harley Davidson.

It’s just a good thought of saying like, hey, are we a product, or are we a brand? For those brands that really establish a connection, build a community, and have done that over time, I think that’s where you get the most brand strength from.