How PepsiCo built a faster innovation insights system

Today’s world moves fast, and businesses need to innovate quickly to keep up. But there’s an inherent tension between speed and the significant investment innovation typically requires.

Historically, this has left insights teams to strike a tough balance: move fast with little consumer input, or move slow and dig into consumer insights.

DESIGNING & DEVELOPING

To successfully deliver on PepsiCo’s requirements, Zappi took a Design Thinking approach.

To fully embrace design thinking principles and properly empathize with customer pain points and needs, Zappi & PepsiCo also turned to the Zappi Insights Alliance (IA) program. The IA is a group of partners from progressive businesses and brands who helped to:

1. Map out a broader view of different innovation processes across leading organizations

2. Help ideate, prototype and test solutions that would ultimately be relevant across a wide range of businesses

3. Optimize the analytical map based on real world examples. Ultimately this helped show how the data could (and could not) be used to answer PepsiCo’s business questions

Prioritize it is an existing solution that was previously co-designed and developed with PepsiCo. It helps assess, prioritize and fast-track concepts with the strongest commercial potential.

An early-stage screening solution, it uses a robust databasing approach to size up each opportunity — so the right decisions can be made and the pipeline prioritized.

Key benefits include:

1. A powerful and actionable concept recommendation framework based on 5 go-to-market classifications defined by a Trial vs. Breakthrough assessment.

2. A human-centered design that uses category consumption context to evoke a real-world consumer response. It also uses bite-sized stimuli exposure design to provide an improved experience for mobile survey users.

3. Smart sample and profiling to identify a concept’s opportunity and targeted consumer segments, not just the general population.

Together these two solutions integrate into the overall PepsiCo innovation insights ecosystem, helping address the core challenges identified:

• Speed & cost-efficiency: Zappi’s hard-won experience and expertise in delivering rapid data and insight is at the core of the Prioritize it and Activate it solutions. They land data and insight back in less than 24 hours.

• Scalability: Deploying consumer insights for prioritization and activation guidance across a high volume of ideas, brands and countries is now much more achievable due to the highly efficient design and cost profile.

• Actionability: Both solutions deliver insight for fast action. For example:

  • Rich diagnostics for optimizing concepts to their full potential

  • Metrics that also integrate key metrics in forecasting for easy actionability