Profile: PepsiCo's Salman Amin on Refresh project in Asia

Salman Amin plays an instrumental role in PepsiCo’s global strategy. In the past year, he’s supported product innovations and initiatives to develop the company as a leader in healthy snacks, sustainability and corporate sponsored environmental movements. Now, the executive vice-president sales and marketing wants to bring an ambitious campaign named the Pepsi Refresh Project to Asia. The campaign - an extension of a programme that ran in the US last year - is aimed at doing well by doing good, and will see PepsiCo dedicate millions of dollars of donations to local organisations and causes in the areas of health, the environment and education in India, China and key markets in Southeast Asia.

At the company’s global headquarters in Purchase New York, Amin takes care to present PepsiCo as a leading player in the global fight for wellness and not, as many would suppose, as one of the chief causes of health issues, with its sugary, fried and fatty foods, consumption of which contributes to rising rates of obesity and diabetes. He explains that the company was an early adopter in removing trans-fats from all of its snacks, and is boosting its line-up of products that fit the health and wellness trend. It’s reducing its carbon footprint and prefers to think about sustainability not as means to cut costs but as the means to innovation.  

Born in Pakistan, Amin has close ties to the UK although he studied in the US and worked at Procter & Gamble for a decade before being poached by PepsiCo in the mid-90s.

Atifa Silk What are the key growth areas for PepsiCo in Asia? Are there any new ideas or developments in the region that are being exported to other markets?

Salman Amin The region is our highest growth area globally. In China and India, we’re investing and building our infrastructure, as well as focusing on our brands. These two markets have been two of our growth engines over the last decade. We’ve built up powerful share positions in these countries in the arena of snacks, where we went in with brands like Lay’s and Cheerios. More recently, on the food side we launched Quaker. This allowed us to enter a new part of the day - breakfast - that we weren’t historically big in. On the beverage side, our portfolio was initially about soft drinks and carbonates. But that has expanded quite dramatically into juices, teas, and value added products in areas such as traditional Chinese medicine. 

But there’s also strong work being developed outside of China and India, particularly in Southeast Asia. There’s innovation coming out of countries like Vietnam and Thailand, where our teams are giving us a number of ideas in both beverages and snacks that we’re starting to roll-out across the region. We are looking to export some of these ideas to other parts of the world. One example is the brand Sting, which was originally developed in Vietnam. The brand is now rolling out across a number of other markets in Asia. In India, we recently launched a brand called Nimbooz, an analogue for the classic nimbu pani that people drink in the hot months. That brand is now moving into other parts of Asia, albeit in different forms. What’s important is that we’re encouraging this regional innovation and investing in it by putting in a big R&D centre in Shanghai to complement those we already have in New Delhi and Bangkok. We want innovation that’s locally originated and locally driven.

Atifa Silk What’s the key challenge to driving future growth at PepsiCo?

Salman Amin I am confident that we will continue to build preference for our brands in the key markets in Asia. We will continue to drive growth. But I don’t want us to stop there. I want us to drive growth the right way. What does that mean? There are two components to it. First, we have to do it in a way that enables us to resonate with consumers. We have to build sustainable plans, and bring consumers in to help us design what the next generation of innovation might be.

Secondly, we have to do it in a way that’s responsible. PepsiCo talks about responsible performance with purpose, and it’s the purpose part of it that we have to be very conscious of. I want us to be seen as good brand stewards, who are building the purpose component into our brands as much as we are building the performance component. That could be measured by water usage, reduction of solid waste, or reduction in our carbon footprint. These are things we must achieve as we continue to evolve
our brands.

Fragmentation will continue in the categories we operate in, and innovation will continue to be at a premium in this space. We will see more functional innovation coming through and I believe that companies like ours will need to more actively produce solutions for obesity and health and wellness issues. Certainly, we are committed to finding ways to lessen the trade-off that consumers may be making in their minds. And I expect the move towards natural products and the move towards fewer artificial ingredients will continue in this space.

Atifa Silk What is PepsiCo doing to demonstrate commitment to sustainability?

Salman Amin We have done a huge amount of work around reducing our dependence on water - particularly in Asia. We are now moving towards something we call ‘net zero’, where we are lessening our dependence on water resources. The work that’s been done in China with ‘Mother water cellars’ has been a big part of it. The work that we are doing in India on ground water conservation has been state-of-the-art.

But it’s not just about water. We’ve also done a huge amount of work to reduce our carbon footprint. We were the first company to partner with an organisation in the UK called the Carbon Trust. We invited them to audit our snacks plant - something that no other company asked them to do. We asked them to audit the carbon emissions that are created from the point that a farmer grows potatoes up to the time that the potato shows up on a shelf in the form of a chip. This is true life-cycle carbon analysis. Our brand in the UK - Walkers - was the first brand to do this and share the results publicly. They figured out exactly throughout that entire supply chain where the greatest amount of carbon was being emitted.

But they didn’t stop there. They partnered with the Carbon Trust to figure out how to reduce those emissions year-on-year. For example, about half of the carbon footprint associated with that was actually created before we received the potatoes. It was in the farming practice that was being employed. And only half of it was with us producing the potato chip and transporting it. We partnered with the Carbon Trust to go a step further and we committed to them that we would lower our carbon emissions three per cent every year. With this, they awarded us their seal, which now goes on every bag of Walkers potato chips in the UK. Now the only way that we can renew the seal is if we demonstrate we’ve lowered our carbon footprint versus the previous year. So, a huge amount of work has taken place in this space for us and it is pioneering work, which I am very proud of.

Atifa Silk Refresh is a campaign that awards grants for civic and social programmes in the US. Has it been as successful as you’d hoped it would be? Is it sustainable?

Salman Amin What Refresh has done is exactly what it was designed to do. The question was: can we renew the cola conversation in North America? Can we find ways to re-engage our target with our brands - in this case Pepsi - and can we create a very powerful conversation platform? When we measure the equity scores for the brand and measure the amount of engagement with the brand, we are incredibly encouraged by what it has achieved and its ability. Of course, Refresh is just one part of our activation platform. It’s not necessarily all of it. But we’re pleased with the results we’ve had for what it was designed to do and how it has been activated so far.

You’re going to see aspects of Refresh come to life in markets outside of North America, including Asia. We are already starting work on this in China and India, and there will be other Southeast Asia markets, including Thailand and Vietnam, taking it live in the second half of this year. We will activate Refresh in ways that are actually meaningful to consumers in different parts of Asia.
We know we can’t just take the programme from the US and export it as it is. We have to recast it in terms that are far more local, and give consumers in local countries a sense of purpose and a sense that they are engaged in the development of this platform. Our plan is to begin rolling out Refresh in China this year.

Atifa Silk Health and wellness are areas of focus for consumers globally. How is nutrition defining the future of the company and the PepsiCo brands?

Salman Amin There have been two parts to our focus on nutrition. The first part has been how we reformulate our portfolios. How do we take saturated fat out? How do we reduce sodium? This has been a big part of our focus for the last four to five years. There have been potentially exciting launches on the back of this, such as Quaker and its variants, and Tropicana juices, which has allowed us to get into the 100 per cent juice business.

In India, our entire launch campaign for Quaker was centred on the idea ‘Make India heart healthy’. We partnered with people in the health field to get out that message and launched a campaign to tie Quaker in as part of a positive diet in India.

That’s on a local level. But when you link that with the launch of the Global Nutrition Group for PepsiCo, it’s clear that we have a major commitment to expanding our nutrition or ‘good for you’-based portfolio. What’s exciting is that this new business unit is looking horizontally across the entire PepsiCo system and underlines our focus to accelerate our growth in this arena.

Atifa Silk How do changes in consumer behaviour impact your marketing strategy?

Salman Amin I think consumers are becoming much more picky. The choices they have are expanding. Frankly, for companies like us who deal mostly in discretionary categories, the bar has been raised in terms of what we (as branded suppliers) need to do to enter consumers’ lives. Certainly, there is some pressure on brands.

In the age that we are living in consumers expect brands to do more than just sell to them. They expect a brand to be more than the sum of its parts. To that extent if we can come in and demonstrate to them that we understand the broader community in which consumers operate, that we understand what consumers care about — whether it is taking care of the environment in the broader sense, or carbon emissions or the role of water — and show that we are sensitive to these challenges, then our brands will be in a much better place.

Atifa Silk How is your communications strategy evolving given these changes in consumer behaviour?

Salman Amin Consumers have so much choice and information on our brands. Unless we find ways to get consumers to invite us into their lives, we will struggle to influence their purchases. Whether they invite us into their lives is entirely dependent upon how strongly they feel that we are relevant to them. They have to feel good about us. But it’s incumbent upon us to build relevance. We have to be able to say to consumers that we understand what dilemma they may be facing, or what trade-offs they may need to make. And, we have to offer a way for them to resolve that dilemma. They need to understand that this brand is speaking to them in a way that resonates with them. We have to get through that gatekeeper before they will go and spend money on our brands. One has to lead to the other. This is an eternal conversation that we are having with consumers online. We think of social media as a bilateral conversation with our consumers. The single biggest thing we can do is to continue to be authentic and real and deliver on our promises to consumers. If we do that, the odds are that we will continue to succeed even within the social media space with our consumers, and make sure that the facts that relate to our brands are always fairly represented.

Atifa Silk How big is the shift from traditional to social media at PepsiCo?

Salman Amin I think for us it’s really a question of balance. Have we added more tools to how we market and has some of our spending moved away from more traditional media into social media? Yes. But in each country we require a different balance of traditional and non-traditional media depending on the level of engagement we can get through a combination of traditional and social channels. I am very focused on getting that balance right on a country-by-country basis. Our principles are to go where consumers are and to engage with them in ways that they will invite us into their lives so we are very focused on finding the right mix from country to country as we go forward. Historically, our focus on social media or digital media would have been in the low single digits, and that’s increased appreciatively over the last two years.
But a big issue for us is measurement. Some of the classic measures of eyeballs, for example, are not as strong as they need to be.

That’s one of the areas we are partnering very closely with our agencies. We are working together to find new ways to measure effectiveness. That may include trying to find better links between what we  are doing and what happens to sales volume and share. Or it may be looking at our various brand equity measures as well as at the things that drive those equity measures.
We’re also working very hard on some new proprietary ways of understanding which of the various sources of advertising, or awareness and trial are driving our business.

Atifa Silk Six out of the seven PepsiCo ads at this year’s Super Bowl were produced by consumers. How is this strategy impacting your relationships with agencies?

Salman Amin I’m a huge believer in the partnership of agencies. But do I think consumers can be and have been a source of some fertile creative ideas? Absolutely. We started this strategy four years ago, and this year we received more than 1,000 ads from consumers in the months leading up to the Super Bowl. We got close to a billion impressions. The winning Dorrito ad cost the guy who created it just US$500 to make it. You couldn’t get that from an agency. But the reality is you can’t count on that to be your primary means to creative content and I don’t see that - I won’t say ever - but certainly I don’t see high odds of that becoming our primary means of it. Our agency relationships are incredibly valuable and I think without those relationships and the trust that we build with our agencies, it would be really hard for us to get the sort of consumer engagement that we’ve been looking to get.

This article was originally published in the March 2011 issue of Campaign Asia-Pacific.