In this episode of the Greenbook Podcast, host Karen Lynch interviews Stephan Gans, SVP Chief Insights and Analytics Officer at PepsiCo. They explore Stephan's career path from marketing at Unilever to leading global consumer insights at PepsiCo, emphasizing the integration of analytics, capability building, and the importance of empathy in understanding consumer behavior. Stephan shares insights on the proactive role of insights professionals in commercial decision-making and discusses the impact of generative AI on the industry. The episode concludes with Stephan sharing his excitement about an upcoming book on transforming consumer insights for competitive advantage.

You can reach out to Stephan on LinkedIn.

Many thanks to Stephan for being our guest. Thanks also to our producer, Natalie Pusch; and our editor, Big Bad Audio.

Hello, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Greenbook Podcast. I am Karen Lynch, happy to be hosting this episode. And today we have a guest from PepsiCo joining us. Stephan Gans is the SVP Chief Insights and Analytics Officer. Spoiler alert, he’s also in charge of global marketing excellence at the organization. Stephan, it’s so great to have you on the Greenbook Podcast. Welcome.

Hey, thanks, Karen. Great to be here.

Why don’t we start off at—you know, I know I mentioned your title and a little bit about your role, and we’ll get into all of that, but your background fascinates me because you weren’t always an insights professional. So, why don’t you bring everybody on this little journey with us about where you started off and how you got to the role that you’re in right now?

Okay, happy to. So, I’m now in my current role at PepsiCo for seven years. So, my current role being responsible for consumer insights and analytics, it’s actually the first role that I have in this particular functional space. And I trained as a marketeer, first 15 years of Unilever, then ten years as a consultant, building a consultancy with a couple of business partners. So basically, as an entrepreneur, building a global marketing consultancy. And then got more and more interested because that was our, kind of, inches wide, mile deep specialization into the world of global marketing, and what makes global marketing work, from that period. Yeah, I got in touch with PepsiCo, and they were looking at creating a role, kind of, their first ever global consumer insights lead, somebody who was able to turn all those resources that work in consumer insights all over the world into a global function. And that sounded, like, super interesting to me. And I still find it super interesting today.

So, you know, I love hearing things when somebody says, “I found it super interesting, and it’s still really interesting,” what to you is the most interesting part of that global aspect of your role?

Well in, sort of, random order, the incredible diversity of both the content of the work as well as the people I work with. I’ve always been interested in capability building and really helping teams, or in this case, an entire organization, leverage its scale through capability, building, and establishment. In my consultancy days, I really, let's say, trained myself in delineating between the what and the how, it’s like from a 30,000-foot perspective. So, I always find that that works, no matter how complicated or how big your organization is. But if you find ways to really standardize and digitalize the how the work gets done, then you can leverage your skill for the work that needs to get done in all those different marketplaces—the what—in a very meaningful way. So, I like that challenge of building the global [might 00:03:05] for the local [fight 00:03:06], as I call it, and that is what I find ample opportunity to do in this role.

You know, last week—for our listeners—last week, I happened to be on site up at Yale University for their InsightsOn Conference, and Stephan was speaking there as well. And one of the things I heard you saying is—it was towards the end of the panel discussion that you are on—you had said how love for people is mandatory in this field. And you spoke to empathy, which many, many people speak to empathy, but I’m curious about that, and just how that plays out in the work that you do. Because it’s more than just passion for the processes, and the key performance indicators, or other, you know, data points that you might be adding to your work. It’s bigger than that. It’s about the people. Can you talk more about that?

Yeah. That’s actually—good point because I [laugh] I may have sounded a bit technocratic in my previous [laugh] answer.

[laugh].

But it’s, kind of, for me, it’s part of that first point I made around diversity. Look, the reason that I fell in love—let me backtrack. I really started my career, you know, I graduated as a math major and I thought it was a good idea to start in finance. And I really did not like that. So, I started doing finance at Unilever, and then after two-and-a-half years or so, switched to marketing. And what I still remember to this day is that in those—why I knew upfront I would like marketing a lot better than finance, and why that connected with me so well is because I was, as a brand manager, and I started in the haircare business, so as a shampoo brand manager, I really had to get into the actual consumer behavior of men and women washing their hair or not, and why not, and when, and how, [laugh], with whom, without, et cetera, et cetera. And I’m always super energized by that. And I still am. Whether it’s in my own family, if I see my kids do certain things or not, or people around me, or I stand in a queue in a store or waiting at an airport, whatever it is, I’ve always been somebody that is incredibly intrigued by why people do what they do, and especially in the everyday sense of it. So, everyday decisions, the small decisions that make up such big parts of our lives have just always fascinated me, and I have an insatiable appetite for learning more about that, and talking with people about that, right? Why are you spending three hours a day on TikTok? What is [laugh] that doing for you?

Oh [laugh].

Well, just to name it, whatever you, you know? That’s a conversation I can have with one [audio break 00:05:54].

[laugh]. No, I’m like, “All right, guilty.” No I—

[laugh]. So that is always—and that is arguably the first thing I should have said in my previous answer. That is always there, and that’s never going to go away for me.

It’s so interesting because I personally, I start—[laugh] I went away to school thinking I was going to be an engineer. Engineering ran in my family. My father was an engineer, my brother was an engineer, and I literally failed quite miserably as an engineering student. So, then I was like, well, you know what? The school that I was at, I had an Economics in Business major. So, I switched to economics in business. And I was like, I do not like economics, right? So, it was another, like, nope, this isn’t it. And then transferred schools and found marketing. And then within the marketing programming, found marketing research as, sort of, a sub-specialty, and then got my first job out of school insights, right, at a qualitative research firm. So, I understand that process of figuring out what you’re intrigued with, right? And I also understand consumer behavior being extremely fascinating. I mean, yes, your TikTok analogy, you know, example, absolutely. But also, you know, bringing it back to PepsiCo, you know, just the choices that people make with their food and beverages, that fascinates me every day of my life when I watch other people consume. And I, as a qualitative researcher, always want to talk to people about that. So, totally resonates, totally resonates. Here’s a question I have for you. Insights and analytics, this, you know, full disclosure, Stephan and I discussed that this is going to be something I wanted to talk about because when your title is SVP of Chief Insights and Analytics—or akin to that—it brings to mind, there’s the consumer insights part, which many people in our audience are highly familiar with, but then you’ve integrated analytics in. And since we’ve started talking, you know, I’m now aware that even that is still transforming within the organization. So, just talk to me about that role, and how it came to be, and how it is changing.

I think that a job title that includes analytics, to be entirely honest, it’s almost a little—feels outdated in a sense because analytics plays a key role in every job, whether you work in manufacturing, or HR, or finance, or consumer insights, or marketing, right? And I think the job title is a bit outdated in the sense that not that long ago, let’s say ten years ago, the analytics team was something you could, you know, you could say, you know, they sit on, I don’t know, the third floor in that corner, right, [laugh], and that’s a separate team of people doing analytics. I cannot think of any aspect of marketing that does not encompass a heavy dose of analytics these days. And so, I’m certainly responsible for consumer—right, for the function consumer insights. Analytics plays a key role in that. I’m not exclusively responsible for analytics in PepsiCo. Absolutely not, right? Over the last couple of years, we created a very strong horizontal analytics function in the company, horizontal in the sense that they deliver analytic services, and data engineering services, and data science services to all the different functional areas and business units across the PepsiCo world. We’re still in the process of building that out, and so that’s probably never going to be done because it’s such an evolving space. If I give you an example, for example, one of the core capabilities that we’ve standardized and digitalized over the last years in PepsiCo is the capability to test pieces of advertising with an algorithm—with a tool that is built around an algorithm that has a very high predictive value in terms of predicting in-market success for that piece of advertising, whether it’s a banner ad or a TV commercial, whatever. So, what happens if you standardize and digitalize a key tool like that, is that what the tool does, it produces a lot of data about what works and doesn’t work for are all sorts of advertising ideas for Quaker Oats, or Gatorade or [lace 00:10:06] in all these different PepsiCo markets across the globe. And so, one of those analytics teams that supports my function is constantly looking at those data streams and looking for opportunities to extract what we call meta learning, okay? So, we’ve now tested, for argument’s sake, say 56 Gatorade advertising ideas in 13 markets in the first four months of this year. What are we seeing? What works, what doesn’t work, and how can we help the next markets that is developing a new Gatorade campaign with insights that we’ve learned across all these other campaigns? If you’re able to do that, you’re leveraging your scale through analytics for competitive advantage, and that is a key piece of progress that we’ve been driving for the last couple of years.

You know, when it comes to that meta learning, I’m curious how you’re sharing that or communicating that across such a global organization. You know, is it simply a function of, you know, a knowledge hub that people can tap into? Are you disseminating it with different communication methods internally? Like, is that [mental 00:11:15] learning going elsewhere outside of your team? I’m just a little curious about the sharing of that learning?

Well, it’s kind of the all of the above, kind of answer, Karen, I guess. So, every key global brand in our portfolio has a global brand team, right? And so, that is a destination for this type of learning that they can work with, and they will disseminate to a lot of different teams. That is, kind of, if you want the route of dissemination of this type of learning through marketing. But then there’s the consumer insights [function the whole world 00:11:48]. Consumer insights is run by what we call the Global Insights Council, so basically the top 15 insights people from the company get together every other week, and we regularly share these types of really bespoke pieces of meta-learning in that group because we can all learn from it, if not for that particular brand, then for the particular methodology that is used. And then thirdly, there is, Ask Ada, which is our knowledge management platform, where anybody can go on and, for example, search for—learn [it from 00:12:25] Gatorade advertising. If you type that in, you will get the latest pieces of content instantly. So, those are the three key levers for disseminating that kind of insights. And it’s because we have a bespoke team that runs this kind of meta-learning. One of the really big advantages of that is that you have a group of some, I think, 14 people that do—no more, actually now—anyway, doesn’t matter how many, but it is significant that—

[laugh].

—[crosstalk 00:12:57] the team that does nothing but these kinds of studies. So, they know a lot about what works and doesn’t work in different parts of the world for [badging 00:13:07] in our categories, right? So, you really built a very strong advantage there that you would never build if you would outsource this kind of work to agencies or consultancies.

Yeah, they have that internal expertise. And I know some of the conversation that was happening last week at this event that we were both that was, the concept of becoming really a strategic adviser, somebody who is—I think you might have been the one to say it, also—like, you know, that they are business partners within an organization and helping driving strategy; they’re not just reporting on research, right? They’re more than CI specialists. Is that accurate? Did I recall that properly [laugh]?

Yeah, yeah, you did. And—or you do, I should say. I think one of the things that I learned from a colleague of ours, Tim Warner, who’s now leads insights for our beverages business in Europe, he said, if you look at a piece of work, there’s always three phases. You’ve got the work before the work, the work, and the work after the work. And typically, in organizations, I see—and this was definitely also the case in PepsiCo years ago—people spent the majority of their time on the work. Meaning—if you want to, for example, build consumer insights around innovation ideas, people will be designing a specific type of test, or they outsource it to, like, some testing company, or some forecasting comp—[unintelligible 00:14:33] forecasting company, and they will spend all their time, or the vast majority of their time, preparing for the test, getting the test run, and getting the results, and interpreting your results, right? But the thing is, the people you do it with and for, say the marketeers or the innovators into companies, they need a lot more, ultimately, right, to really be successful in the marketplace. They need a partner who can work with them to do to work before to work. In other words, to really understand the opportunity and the challenge, and to really make sure that we’re asking the right questions in whatever kind of test or forecasting methodology we’re deploying, and that we’re really partnering around what we believe are the success criteria for this particular innovation, right? That’s the work before the work. And at least as importantly, if not more important, is the work after the work, like, hey, we’ve done the forecast, we’ve done the test. Now, let’s talk about what we’re learning from it, and how it’s impacting our plans, or our strategy, or our project, and let’s talk about how we can really learn from this, right? And way too often, I see insights people—or entire insights functions and teams—there are these project managers, basically, that are forced into this reactive mode of just getting stuff done and doing the work. And the added value is in the work before and the work after the work. And so, getting to that phase is a prerequisite to enable people and empower people to become those strategic business partners instead of just order takers that get a ton of work done, right? So anyway, a bit of a long answer to your question, I guess, but the topics I talked about earlier around leveraging global [might 00:16:18] for local fights, standardization, digitalization of processes and tools are crucial enablers for this, to enable this to happen.

Yeah, Stephan, in your opinion, what else do you think is crucial, kind of, with the current business environment? With the influx of generative AI, and the technology that’s out there, and changing consumer behaviors, what other things do you think are crucial for professionals that want to work their way up in an organization of the likes of PepsiCo, or you know, there’s, you know, a dozen behemoth organizations like that, but what else do people need to kind of be thinking about the mindset they need to adapt or even skills they need to develop? What would your advice be to people who are, you know, climbing a ladder, perhaps?

One of the key things that comes to mind for me is that you take a very proactive, you might even say, brave approach to your work and to the role that you play in commercial decision-making processes. I hear too many insights people complain about the fact that they are not invited at a certain meeting, or that their part of the story is put in the appendix, or that things get decided without them feeling that they are properly heard. And I think, the best insights people are able—willing and able—to also do the, if you want, dirty work of inserting themselves into commercial decision-making processes where they are indeed not invaded, where they are maybe overlooked, or other voices are louder. I mean, the two of us can come up with so many different examples in the world of business, or in the world of not just consumer products, but also services, where a ton of talent combined with a ton of money, produced spectacular failures because at the end of the day, all that talent and all that money combined wasn’t producing something that people truly wanted, that people really had a need for, right? And I think that happens in big scales and at small-scale all the time in the economy. And I think consumer insights people really need to feel very emboldened and very good about the role that they have to play, right? The ‘it’s not us, then who?’ Attitude to, you know, ensuring that what the company is doing is meaningful to people. And that doesn’t mean, by the way, that people will always feed back instantly that, you know, your idea is the best thing since sliced bread. Because very often, consumers don’t know what they want, which is what makes this work so interesting, right? The art is in making sure that you don’t take consumer feedback literally, but that you understand what’s behind what people do and say, and that you feel incredibly good about the super important role that you have to play in an organization to make sure it stays on track to deliver value for consumers.

It’s interesting, in my head, I’m thinking the word that used to come to mind was empowerment. People have to feel empowered, which puts the responsibility almost on somebody else to empower them. But when you’re talking about somebody being kind of bold and brazen, it [laugh] it puts the accountability back on them, which I find a very interesting, sort of, just paradigm shift in my head. That’s very interesting. You have to—don’t wait for somebody to empower you; you need to actually be more proactive on your end, which I think is actually stellar advice.

Yeah, I think that’s actually advice—I like what you just said, Karen. I think for those people who know me, I think they would describe me as somebody who’s not waiting for others to empower him [laugh], right? And I mean, that that is in any aspect of my [laugh] my life, actually. So, it’s a good observation. I think, in the world of consumer insights, there’s a ton of potential for self-empowerment, and for people to recognize that they have phenomenal value to add, and not to wait for getting invitations, right, but just to invite yourself. And if, you know, some cases, in some organizations, that may not work out as well, then, you know, then I think that that’s time to move to another organization. Because I think your time is too valuable and too short to waste it on organizations that don’t have the wherewithal to realize that, you know, everything starts and ends with relevance for consumers.

I love that. You have a leadership example ahead of your team, right, about if [laugh] if you’re not waiting around for that, you know, you’re being far more proactive, it will likely inspire them, too, as well. What other advice would you have, if you think about your team, then other things that you think your team learns from, either from you about how to go about their work, or from one another in that kind of collaborative efforts that I’m sure they have with people in different roles underneath you within the organization?

Yeah, I think this is something that I need to pay a lot of attention to, for myself because I tend to get quite nerdy about things about, for example, new tools, or capabilities, or phenomenal talents that has done something really remarkable. And that’s great, [laugh] and can be interesting for others, but my boss keeps pointing me to the, you know—and by the way, she’s not the first boss to do that—to say, “Okay, that’s great, Stephan, but okay, so what was the business impact, exactly?” You know, I don’t get excited about stuff that has no business impact, I know that. But I need to make it more explicit. You know, this is also a development area for myself. And it’s basically something I’m never going to learn. I’m in my mid-50s, right, so I’m never [laugh] going to change anymore. But in terms of advising people, it’s really, specifically in a function like consumer insights, you need to be constantly making the point of, okay, so this is an actual impact on the business. And then after you feel you’ve made it, then you have to make the point again [laugh], just make sure that people hear.

You know, I have my former supplier hat on when I was, you know, again, you know, providing research services, and I’m thinking, how many times did we look at, all right, what were the, you know, the research questions to answer? And it’s like, oh, no, go higher up to the business questions to answer. And now this other layer that you’re introducing is, even more than the business questions to answer, it’s, “What will be impactful on the business”—

Oh absolutely.

—and taking it even a step further than that. And I think that’s another thing that every everybody who’s listening who is in the partner space, that they must understand that what’s going on in an organization at that, you know—

Super valid point, Karen. And also from that perspective, I’m in the—I’m probably—no, I know, I’m not exaggerating if I say that I get 50 emails a day on average from all sorts of vendors trying to sell me their widget or tool or their whatever, you know? And I am—there is not only, you know… very often just spam—but not always, right? Sometimes it’s from existing partners that have a new idea. But it’s hard to respond to that for me because I’m like, “Okay so… whatever, but what is it going to do,” right? What am I… talk to me about the impact it could help me have on the business, and how we could leverage this to make our function even stronger business partners, instead of just telling me that you have, like, I don’t know what, a new feature or something, you know? A tool that is just, you know—so you’re leveraging generational—GenAI. Okay, well, great, but [laugh] but then what, right? I mean, what is that doing for me? You know, in and of itself, the fact that you’re using a technology is not that relevant for me?

Yeah. No, excellent advice for everybody, so thank you for sharing that. So, you know, I’m watching the clock, and I know that, you know, I said it’d be about a half an hour; here we are at about a half an hour. But I do want to ask you to just—real quick—the global marketing excellence part of it, I just found that fascinating that not only are you doing what you do, but also you have this responsibility for what sounds huge for an organization like yours. Talk to me a little bit about that new nuance over your role, and how all this fits together.

Yeah, I find that when you talk about global marketing capabilities, so whether it is raising the floor and/or the ceiling in the effectiveness of our brand creative, or our innovation, for example—just to name two topics—I find that when you think about how to [release 00:25:39] build capabilities, so that goes well beyond training people, training marketeers or others in really building capability, then, you know, we all know that capabilities, they get built by doing, right, more than by sitting in a classroom or in front of a screen, watching videos or training material. And in that, the insights team—the consumer insights team—always plays a crucial role: crucial in terms of content that they bring and experience, but also crucial in terms of the fact that they are a key stakeholder in making sure that marketing also works along the set of tools, and processes, and capabilities that are… let’s say that make sense, that are hopefully somewhat standardized between markets, and that enable a function like consumer insights to really deliver very valuable content to that [project 00:26:38]. And so, the short answer is, I think it’s a very logical combination with the functional leadership of consumer insights because consumer insights people are so incredibly involved with deploying capability-building activities. And that doesn’t mean that marketeers themselves are not involved because they are, and it’s ultimately the CMOs of all our businesses around the world that are responsible for the actual impact on the brands and the business. But consumer insights always plays a key role, and a very logical one, so for me, the combination is super logical.

It’s very cool. And you’re not the only organization that is doing this. I think we learned—again, another thing I learned last week was some of your colleagues on the stage, it’s very similar. They also have this layered in. So, that is a trend that is not unique to PepsiCo, it’s happening in other organizations. Last question, before we wrap. Is there any other kind of high level organizational trend that people should be tapped into? Like that one. Anything else about what is important to business leaders for a large firm like PepsiCo?

Well, that’s a big question.

[laugh].

[laugh]. There are multiple things. I think, let me stick with one thing that comes to mind is very close to my day-to-day work these days—and for the foreseeable future, by the way—and that is, the larger an organization gets the quote-unquote, “Better” it gets at slicing up functional areas like consumer insights into all these sub-areas that’s hitting different parts of the organization, right? So, for example, shopper insights in PepsiCo reports into sales, right? E-commerce insights reports into our business units all over the world. Consumer insights reports into marketing. Revenue management insights reports into. I believe, sales again [laugh]. In fact, I don’t even know a hundred percent right now. So, that is as non-human-centric way of working as one possibly imagine, right? It basically means that the moment you sit in front of your laptop, you’re a consumer, and the moment you step into a store, you’re a shopper, and you know, it’s as if those are two different [counts 00:29:03], right? And they’re not [laugh]. They’re obviously—

No. No, no.

So, creating ways of working, processes, scorecards that provides the business leaders with what we call end-to-end way of understanding consumers is essential. And the more our markets enable us to do one-to-one marketing, right, the more granular we can be in our marketing—or have to be in our marketing—the more inevitable it is, as far as I’m concerned, that we have to build ways of working that look at the consumer in an end-to-end way and service him or her, you know, no matter where he or she shops, whether it’s online, or in the store, or in a combination of online and a physical store, whatever, right? Doesn’t matter. It’s one and the same person. That is a daily part of my challenges is to work through how to best organize for that because it has implications for, yeah, the way we organize, but even more importantly, for the way we work, and for the type of talent that we put in key roles, and for the kinds of processes that we have. So, that’s the first thing that comes to mind when you asked me that.

Cool. Thank you very much for that. I know, I love the big questions because I never know where they’re going to go [laugh]. So, for me, it’s, again, fascinating because this all is when you really love the topic you’re talking about. So Stephan, like I said, I want to be mindful of your time, and I’m so grateful that you joined us. So, let’s wrap by talking about two things. One, I want to know, kind of, what’s on the horizon for you. And also, I’d love to know your take on what you think is on the horizon for the industry. Is there something that you think is coming down the pike for others that you would consider colleagues outside of your organization? And then is there something coming down the pike for you personally. So, let’s take one first, and then we’ll wrap with what’s coming down the pike for you.

I mean, organiza—I mean, there’s—everybody seems to be quite obsessed, or is quite obsessed, and understandably so, with what AI and GenAI is going to do for our functional space, and for businesses around the world. I’m super excited by it. I see a ton of opportunities to get smarter. I don’t see that many threats, to be honest, to the type of work that we’re doing or to the field itself. There’s always a lot of people, and new technology like this comes up that say like [laugh], you know, “Who needs”—whatever—“A creative anymore?” Or, “Who needs an insights person anymore if we can ask an app to create an answer or come up with insights?” I think the future is for—you know, the future is there for people who can leverage these tools to their best effect, and certainly not just for efficiency, also for effectiveness. So, [unintelligible 00:32:10] for content. But I’m really excited about that. And I experimented with it myself and see a lot of opportunities. So, that’s on the professional front. On the personal front. Yeah, together with the two leaders, [Stephen 00:32:26] and Ryan from Zappy, and my colleague, Kate and I, we’re publishing a book about, you know, how to transform a consumer insights function for competitive advantage. And that’s coming out in the third quarter of this year. I’m excited about that. That is a first for me [laugh]. Quite frequently, I do like this a podcast or contribute to an article or whatever, and it’s the first time that’s I’ve really put pen to paper, and planning to share some of the key drivers of the work that we’ve been doing over the last years. So, I’m excited about that. Looking forward to sharing that story with a wider audience.

Yeah, I’m excited about that, too, and I think many people know—we talk frequently about how Zappy was one of our first insight innovation competition winners, and of course, they’re a valued partner of ours. They, you know, sponsor many of our events and are frequently contributing to what Greenbook tries to do which is, help inform people within the greater industry and keep them up to speed. So, we’re excited for both you and your colleague at PepsiCo, and then also that team as well. So, I’m so glad, and we’ll look forward to that later this year.

Yeah. Well, great, Karen. Thanks for the time. [unintelligible 00:33:41]—

Thank you. I’m so glad to have had you on the show. And yeah, I look forward to our paths crossing once again, Stephan. Thank you.

I have no doubt they will. Hey, cheers, Karen.

Cheers to you, too. Friends, that’s our show for today. I just want to thank our producer, Natalie Pusch, for setting this up and to our editor, Big Bad Audio. Thank you for helping us sound better than we probably sound live, so [laugh] I appreciate you. And of course our listeners. Thank you for tuning in. We are just so grateful for your listenership, and all of the downloads, and all of the episodes that you tune into. Know that we are grateful here at Greenbook. Thank you so much.