Culture Starts at Home: A Brand’s story
This month’s column comes from Matt Watson, ECD at PepsiCo’s in-house creative agency Sips & Bites Europe.
Culture starts at home
It might seem obvious, but it’s still worth repeating: in today’s media landscape it’s more important than ever for brands to connect in deeper, more meaningful ways with audiences, and culture sits right at the heart of that. Just knowing your consumer and their passions isn’t enough anymore. We need to be fuelling culture, we need to behave and act like we’re sitting around the table with them, having a pint or sharing a bag of crisps (or Doritos). We need to be entertaining, not preaching, empowering, not celebrating. It’s not enough to simply whack your logo in a world or buy influence with celebrities anymore.
One of the things that I’ve learned over the years is the impact an agency’s culture can have on its output. Our internal agency culture is the single most important thing to us at S&B. We know the best way to be able to move at the speed of culture is to leverage our incredible PepsiCo culture. This starts by looking in the mirror and asking questions that appear quite simple but sometimes have complex answers: Who are we? Why do people work here? What do we want people to feel when working at S&B? We ask these questions to ourselves constantly. We focus on our people first as the input, and the work is simply the output, which thankfully tends to be filled with entertaining ideas, fun executions and a more enjoyable process along the way.
When you’re working with concepts like ‘fun’ and ‘curiosity’, it requires bravery at a senior level to see it through, but that doesn’t hold us back. We do everything here together, we hold hands, jump and make that a leap together. We learn together and we celebrate together. It’s what enables a one direction mindset from the outset. To paraphrase the other One Direction, it’s what makes us beautiful.
Our recent work with Doritos is a great example. Gaming and snacking go hand-in-hand, and where there’s snacking, there’s Doritos. Now one of the great things about Doritos is the “crunch”, but crunches don’t sound great on headphones when you’re playing games with other gamers. This led us to the creation of the Silent Dorito, which worked because we solved a consumer (gamer) problem first. We identified we were causing the problem to some degree, so our response focused on providing solutions to a consumer problem with a creative idea. And then in the execution, we silenced our biggest product attribute, the “crunch”, which caused uproar and buzz, and made our “crunch” even louder.
Gamers are the smartest audience out there, so you have to focus on providing entertainment or solving a genuine problem of theirs–like with the Silent Dorito. Brands need to enrich the customer experience and not get in the way.
Nobody had ever tried anything like this before, but once we came up with the idea it wasn’t a difficult campaign to develop. The business backed it from the outset, so navigating it through the global stakeholder group was fairly easy. I guess that’s a hallmark of a brilliant, simple idea.
You can hear more from Matt in person at Brands & Culture in October.
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