PepsiCo may be a massive company with hugely popular products, but the way to their consumers’ hearts is through deep insights around subcultures.
“Understand your audience and deeply prove that you can understand them,” said Matthew Watson, chief creative officer at PepsiCo Europe, during the Brand Innovators Marketing Leadership Summit during SXSW London. “Everyone can do a campaign, an idea that will touch and talk to everyone, but by doing that you’ve got a slight risk of being quite vanilla, generic and not really touching any emotion. If you can really understand your culture or subculture or your niche, you can be deeply relevant and you can have much higher engagement and much higher brand love.”
This philosophy has manifested itself in a number of ways. For instance, the Doritos brand is big with gamers. But if you try to go after gamers generically, they won’t pay attention, said Watson. “If you can dig into their community and understand the subcultures that sit within that culture, you can really understand the types of gamers you want to talk to,” he added.
The team identified an insight among gamers that like to play with their friends in squads. Think Call of Duty and FIFA. Apparently, this niche of gamers loves Doritos, but gets very annoyed when they hear their friends eating the chips, particularly the crunches. “It’s a real problem created by our own brand,” explained Watson. “Gamers were not buying us as much because we kind of got in the way of that f*cking game party…iI you crunch a Doritos down that microphone, the pain you cause for the people you’re playing with is real.”
So they created Doritos Silent, a project that uses AI to remove the sound of Doritos crunches from a user’s audio output while gaming.
When Lay’s was launching their gourmet crisp during Christmas in Spain, they found the wavy chips corresponded to a popular hairstyle. And since the December holidays are a popular time to get your hair done, the brand leaded in.
“[Consumers] love to get the Christmas look, the Christmas hairstyle. Salons were booked up, so much so that people struggled to get spaces in salons,” explained Watson. “When we dug into TikTok and did some kind of social listening, we found a hairstyle that we called Te Andalado, which means ‘The Wavy Cut.’ We had a crisp called ‘The Wavy Cut.’ We were just like, wait a minute. We can do something with hairstyles here.”
They created a trend, a new wavy hairstyle for Christmas and hired about 10 content creators and influencers to wear the style, designed with PepsiCo’s hairstylist, and they infiltrated Spain’s version of the Oscars and the BAFTAs. “We put them on the red carpet. They all wore it. And we had TikTok, we were like, ‘why is everyone wearing this wavy cut? Is it bad? Is it a trend? What are they doing?,’” explained Watson. Two days after the event, all of the content creators were having their hairstyle by BTS eating Lay’s crisps.
Then they blasted the out-of-home everywhere and built a salon where consumers could get their hairstyles and some crips. “It was all to launch this new gourmet crisp in probably the hardest time to launch a luxury food,” Watson said.
Drilling down into consumer-specific insights and finding niche audiences allows the brand to drive these specific experiences.
“To be deeply relevant, you need to be able to prove it and be able to put your money where your mouth is,” Watson said. “We also use insight miners to mine the truth, the tensions and the trends happening within our subculture.”
