A PepsiCo marketer describes designing a periwinkle basketball court for Speed Stick, only to have his boss reject it as wrong for teenage boys. He explains how understanding your actual consumer, through focus groups and immersion in their lives, matters more than any single design choice.
Speed Stick. You know, a lot of the consumer there was like teenage guys, like it's young guys.
The worst, the absolute worst.
Well, I'll tell you, they need their Speed Stick. Speed Stick does a favor for the world. So we had NBA, NHL sponsorships. And so we did a whole basketball clinic, a traveling— it was a really cool program. I remember designing the court and I chose like periwinkle for the court and I showed it to my boss and I said, it's such a pretty color. He's like, no.
What's periwinkle?
It's like a light purpley bluish.
It's for a brand director.
Exactly. And he's like, no, not your consumer. We're not doing pretty. This is tough. And so I learned a lot. Also competitively, it was fascinating because Axe had entered the market when I was on Speed Stick, and Axe has turned the market upside down.
That's interesting. I actually want to go into this thing about colors because you get into such a level of detail to understand what would make, like, move, like, a percentage of market share. Like, could you walk us through that? What color do you use instead of periwinkle to convince the market that this is the right brand for them? Like, how does that conversation even go? I can't even wrap my head around it.
So, I mean, I'm a consumer-based marketer, right? You should really start with who are you talking to and what do you want them to do? And you should be doing some work on the insights of like speaking to them, focus groups. You wouldn't do focus groups on the color of the basketball court, but you should understand, try to live a day in their shoes, right? And there's really fun things that we actually do at PepsiCo to try to get deeper into understanding the consumer. It is about empathy. It is about really trying to understand what they care about.
