Everyone Hates Marketers | No-BS Marketing & Brand Strategy Podcast · Louis Grenier | Marketing & Branding

How to Make Products That Stick (With PepsiCo's Chief Design Officer)

·52 min·5 clips

Mauro's boss told him everyone was lying about loving his design—discover the simple technique that changed his career.

Mauro Porcini joined PepsiCo in 2012 as Chief Design Officer and has since overseen a design function that has received over 1,700 awards. In this conversation with Louis Grenier of Everyone Hates Marketers, he walks through his framework for meaningful innovation centered on three vectors: empathy (understanding the mind and spirit of the person), strategy (ensuring business viability), and prototyping (which he frames not as testing but as a catalyst for thinking). He distinguishes human-centricity from consumer-centricity, arguing that the starting point must be creating genuine value for people, with commercial considerations as a secondary layer. Using the Pepsi brand redesign as a case study, he describes how he joined to find an already-launched redesign that many global markets had rejected. Rather than forcing compliance, he asked a simple question: why are people not embracing this? The answer pointed to an energy deficit in the visual identity. From 2013 onward, his team did iterative refinements and experimented with visual elements — the blue-black color blending, the bold globe — through limited editions, Super Bowl activations, and halftime show visuals, effectively prototyping the future brand in public without anyone realizing it. The new Pepsi identity launched recently was the culmination of a decade of organic prototyping. He describes how the focus on zero sugar shaped the entire visual language: the dominance of black across the range allows the company to communicate zero sugar consistently even in portfolio-level advertising. Porcini argues that the most successful brand redesigns are not discrete projects but living processes that grow from inside the organization's culture. He is working from a framework he published as a book, which Grenier found unexpectedly actionable and concrete despite expecting another inspiration-heavy design narrative. The conversation also touches on what refreshment, fun, and escapism mean as distinct consumer values at PepsiCo.

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