Insight from the Insight250: Connecting Brands and Consumers Through Insights

The Insight250 spotlights and celebrates 250 of the world’s premier leaders and innovators in market research, consumer insights, and data-driven marketing. The awards have created renewed excitement across the industry whilst strengthening the connectivity of the market research community.

Winners of the 2024 Insight250 were announced this past September - you can see the full list of Winners at Insight250.com. 

With so many exceptional professionals named to the Insight250, it seems fitting to tap into their expertise and unique perspectives across various topics. This regular series does just that: inquiring about the expert perspectives of many of these individuals in a series of short topical features. 

This edition features Stephan Gans, Senior Vice President and Chief Consumer Insights & Analytics Officer for PepsiCo. Stephan directs insight capabilities and innovations for PepsiCo’s portfolio of brands. Previously he held strategy and marketing positions for Interbrand and Unilever and he served as CEO for global marketing consultancy EffectiveBrands. He’s been featured in publications like Brandingmag, Research World and AdWeek. He’s also presented at the Yale Customer Insights Conference.

I sat down with Stephan to discuss the growing importance of insights to a leading business like PepsiCo and how this consumer understanding of attitudes and preferences is helping to drive dimensions like product development, marketing strategy and advertising campaigns.

Crispin: Stephan, you are an Insight250 Legend and PepsiCo has consistently won a significant number of Insight250 Awards annually. Overseeing the Insights and Analytics functions across

PepsiCo, how do you ensure that you and your team keep “leading and innovating?”

SG: “I think a lot of the credit for that should go as much to our internal business partners from Marketing, Innovation, and others, as well as our Chief Marketing Officer – Jane Wakely – as my own team of functional insight leaders. We have a strong corporate culture here rooted in keeping each other on our toes, by challenging assumptions and understanding, which is, in my view, required for any company that wants to continue to grow in the hypercompetitive markets that we operate in.”

Crispin: What are the key objectives of your teams and how critical is customer insight for global brands like PepsiCo in today’s market?

SG: “That’s a good question. There are a few dimensions we focus on here at PepsiCo related to this. First, we are focused largely on driving human-centric commercial decision-making that grows our businesses. By ‘growth’ I mean balanced growth. This is not just in terms of revenue and price related to products, but in at least equal measures of volume and household penetration to understand our strategic strengths and weaknesses..

Beyond this, driving competitive advantage is essential. We do this by enabling our businesses with industry-leading tools that help drive human centricity. To achieve this, we focus on attracting and retaining the best talent in the industry, and forge the most effective partnerships with Industry innovators (like Zappi, Woxi, BlackSwanData and others).

Crispin: Does increased competition and a changing customer base influence how brands gather insights?

SG: “Absolutely. Our team needs to be more agile and faster in delivering insights to keep up with market complexities and consumer savviness. We also need to increasingly leverage end-to-end insights to ensure we don’t ‘silo-up’ our consumer understanding. Given the data complexities we continually face in the market, this is a dangerous threat to businesses.”

Crispin: Has the profile of PepsiCo’s customers evolved over the last decade, and what factors do you believe are driving these changes. 

SG: “This type of question is difficult to answer for our business since our marquee brands often have upwards of 90+ percent household penetration in many markets. The composition of our customer base continues to shift to different degrees as we see changes in demography, cultures and societies.”

Crispin: What role do insights play in attracting new customers and moving them from occasional customers to regular users and even brand advocates? 

SG: “Here at PepsiCo we live by the ‘laws of growth.’ This means we don’t sit back and rely on brand loyalty for our success. Rather, we continually push to grow our categories as well as our market share through strategic moves and future-focused decisions. With this, insights play a key role in every aspect of understanding our customers to effectively grow our household penetration base.

Crispin: Can you provide an example of a key insight that fundamentally changed a product decision or marketing strategy at PepsiCo? How do you ensure such insights are effectively communicated and implemented across various departments?

SG: “Sure, a lot of these types of success points are often brand-driven. For example, understanding the customer base of Gatorade led to the “Is it in you?” campaign. This was focused on prompting consumers to question if they have what it takes to become a legend in their sport or whatever they choose to pursue..”

HOT TOPIC: Market evolution - how do you see the insights space evolving?

A few key drivers of change: more personalized marketing requires more personalized data and insights / behavioral data will become the norm as source for insights / real-time, agile development & deployment of insights will become tablestakes

TOP TIP - What’s your top tip to be a leader & innovator in our profession?

Always be curious. 

Crispin: Stephan, thank you for providing a view into the critical role insights play in driving and elevation a leading brand like PepsiCo’s portfolio. It’s fascinating to see how data-drive insights are playing a centralized role in the product, marketing, advertising and brand decisions in order to develop products that create close connections with consumers.