Podcast trailer-style conversation about brand strategy, emotional vs functional marketing, and scaling consumer brands. Speakers discuss brand ladders (product features → emotional benefits → self-actualization), competing advertising paradigms (e.g., Dove vs. Axe), and a PepsiCo Canada acquisition and scaling claim (purchase for $3.2 billion; business later tripled).
My guest today is a general manager of the Quaker and saba brands for PepsiCo Canada.
Who is your audience? What are the pain points in their life? What are the things that they're looking for? And it can be super emotional, right? There's a brand ladder that can start. Usually starts with like basic product benefits, goes up to feature features, and goes up to emotional benefits. You can go all the way up into like self actualization.
The advertisements, I saw them when I was a teenager. Like, oh, put this. And like, women will jump on it.
Just jump.
Is that stuff like actualization or more functional?
That's totally the emotional side.
How did that go by the competing attacks?
Very hard because they just broke the paradigm. And Dove is all about, like, wonderful values of, like, women treating, you know, their bodies themselves with respect and seeing themselves as more than just an object. It's the same company. It completely objectifies the women that are jumping all over the guy with axe.
That actually makes me really happy because that's like such beautiful capitalism. It like brings such warmth to my heart. You're selling that to one group and that to the other group. Completely in contradiction with one another. But they're making money and that's the most important thing, right?
PepsiCo came and they bought us for $3.2 billion.
And you did incredible. You tripled that business. Walk us through that story. Like, how did you scale this business in Canada?
Very simple. Thes. I'm going to oversimplify.
