In 2019, eCommerce growth accounted for $1 billion in revenue for PepsiCo. The team knows that consumers want even more choices and digital channels to order their favorite snacks and beverages online. Lauren Fleischer, eCommerce marketing lead, explains how her team solves new and ever-changing challenges and shares the excitement of bringing traditional brands into the digital age.
Lauren Fleischer (eCommerce marketing lead): When I think of creativity, the concept of building something from scratch really resonates with me. How do you take just an idea that’s never existed before and mold it or craft it into something very real, measurable, tangible, visible? And that’s what we’re doing at PepsiCo. We are taking these brands and we are taking this new way of consuming digital media and bringing them together. We’re taking a lot of inspiration from other industries, but we’re really tackling a problem that’s never been tackled within traditional brands or consumer packaged goods before. I started my career in brand management, working on snack food brands during a really exciting time when digital marketing was just coming up. I then sort of went the startup route where I got to work at a direct-to-consumer retailer and sort of lived and breathed that daily data. But I did miss some of the excitement of big national brands that everyone knows and loves.
And for me, PepsiCo provided that perfect combination of the speed of a startup with the scale of brands that America knows and loves. I work with our retail partners to grow our eCommerce sales. So every day, I’m working on different advertising tactics and working with a set of partners to grow our business in a measurable way. Historically, when a shopper buys their groceries, there has been a way in which they’ve done that. There are so many mechanisms that we don’t even think about that are challenges that we now have to figure out in an online landscape. Think about when you’re in a store and you see a display of Pepsi bottles or of Lay’s chips. That doesn’t necessarily translate online.
So our team works cross-functionally to figure out these challenges. We’ve pulled the various experiences from everyone in the different industries that they’ve come from and we try to craft a new experience that offers shoppers the best path to purchase and the best experience with PepsiCo brands. The reason I love my job is because we’re solving problems that haven’t been solved before. As a result, we are learning every single day, we’re getting better and no two days are the same. And that pace of learning is really exciting just in terms of personal employee development. And the second part is that the work we’re doing is critically important to the company. Bringing traditional brands into the digital age is really tough but exciting. And as a result, it’s so strategically important to the company that we have the energy and the resources to make it happen.
