In the Spotlight: Mauro Porcini, chief design officer at PepsiCo

In 2012, Purchase-headquartered PepsiCo Inc. hired Mauro Porcini as its first chief design officer. While the company had a long history of iconic brand designs for its diverse product line, the recruitment of Porcini – who was previously 3M’s first chief design officer – signaled the company’s goal to take the design element of its operations to a higher level.

Porcini recalls his work at PepsiCo in the new book “Good Design is for Everyone,” published by Rizzoli New York. In creating this book, Porcini details how PepsiCo views design as the platform to “to tell a compelling and holistic story” for what he described as a “brand in perpetual motion.”

“Pepsi is always on the world stage,” Porcini wrote in his book. “That means the brand needs to resonate both globally and locally. One week, we might design a Pepsi activation that invites cola fans to an immersive experience. That following week, we’ll art–direct a music video and collaborate on a licensing project with a major fashion house.”

The Business Journal spoke with Porcini regarding “Good Design is for Everyone” and his role in shaping the PepsiCo image.

Congratulations on your new book. What inspired you to write this new book?

I joined the company in July 2012 and we started to hire the design team a few months after. The first project started in 2013. So, 10 years later we looked back and the company is a very different company.

From a portfolio standpoint, design is totally integrated inside the culture of the organization – you can see it in the products, in the experience we build into the brands. We have 17 design centers around the world and we have more than 300 people spread in every region of the world.

We thought we were at a very important moment with the redesign of very iconic brands to pause, look back, celebrate these achievements, and tell the story of this journey that many people are not aware of.

One of the most entertaining anecdotes in the book was when you recalled how a recruiter contacted you in 2011 and you turned them down. Why did you turn down Pepsi, and how did you get to change your mind?

I am an industrial designer and all my life has been in tech. I did my thesis on wearable technologies with Philips, then I had my own company, and then for 10 years I’d been with the tech company 3M in Minnesota. And so, when a company coming from this industry – food and beverage, where I never worked – came to me and told me there is an opportunity as chief design offer in PepsiCo. On one side I was very humbled and honored by them thinking of me. But on the other side, I was thinking, “Well, but that’s not what I do. I mean, I’m an industrial designer, I do innovation is technology.”

When you accepted the job, was there a culture shock?

When you think of a startup, you see these pictures of Bezos and Amazon in a room and Steve Jobs in his garage. We had the same kind of vibe, the same kind of feeling in the space that we had close to Bryant Park in New York City. My office was a tiny, tiny room that they used to put brooms and things to clean the floor. It was without windows and tiny, tiny, tiny – it was not even a room, it was a closet. And that was where I had my desk.

This space was so embarrassing that we had to have all the interviews in hotels and restaurants nearby, telling people about what we’re doing. But we didn’t want people to have their very first impression to enter in this space. And that culture of the start-up, that culture of rolling up our sleeves, is still there today.

When you put forth a new design, how do you test it to ensure the public likes it? Do you work with focus groups, or is the design released in a limited edition in a certain geography?

We use multiple methodologies depending on the kind of project, but essentially we divide testing in two dimensions. One is the more formal testing process – we have qualitative research, and then at a certain point we do quantitative research. There are different kinds of formal ways to test ideas.

The problem, though, that if you just rely on this, often the most outstanding ideas, the strongest ones, are also the more polarizing ones. Obviously, it depends on the questions you ask or how you interpret the data.

But formal testing is just one dimension – it cannot be enough, so then there is a second one, essentially informal conversations going on all the time between the team members and a series of people out there who could be influencers that we need. At any event, it could be a customer that you meet for another reason, it could be business leaders in an organization with a lot of experience that you’re meeting. You’re collecting insights and information in a very organic way, getting feedback, tweaking ideas. And this is design thinking in action.

But you need to understand what makes sense for your business, what we call viability and what makes sense from our processes, our manufacturing capabilities, and so on. You try to understand what the world wants, but you start to wonder what makes sense for your company from a business and processes standpoint. Once you have an idea of this, you need to be inside the company to understand the business model of the company that processes the culture. Once you have an intuition of what will work, you prototype right away to make things.

That’s why having an internal team is so important, because it’s very different than go to an agency and tell them on Feb. 1 you need this by June 1. We work with tons of agencies out there, but we are inside building the right culture, working cross functionally with all the other functions, and understanding the company, the business model, the culture, the processes, inside out.

The readers of the book might be surprised to find the great quantity of clothing design related to the PepsiCo brands. Do you find it more difficult or easier to design clothing versus designing cans and bottles?

Personally, I have a big passion for the fashion industry – I have many personal connections with that industry. Fashion is a specific kind of skill that is unique – if you are a graphic designer, it’s not easy to do industrial design. And if you’re in industrial design, it is not easy to do digital design. These are all different kinds of skills you have in an organization.

As a leader, together with other design leaders in the company, what is important for us is to understand we cannot be expert in every single field. We need to understand those fields, call in the experts that are really the best in those specific fields. But as leaders, we need to have a very clear idea what is the strategy, what we’re trying to do.

The design strategy for Pepsi manifests itself in a packaging in a piece of clothing, in an event with architecture and interior design in the digital world. And this is interesting, because you need a skill in the design world that doesn’t really exist. When you study design, you study one of these fields – I studied industrial design, but graphic design is a different school, fashion design is a different school. It is like in science: you study biology, chemistry or mechanical engineering, and they are very different from one another, even though eventually they fall under the same kind of bucket.

For the design leaders of PepsiCo, we look at people that have an understanding of all these different dimensions, and there is no school that prepares you for that. There is the school of life. There are career paths that prepare you for something. That happened to me. Within PepsiCo, we are trying to recreate the kind of career path to grow those kinds of designers to have this 360-degree experience in the world of design from within.

What are you focused on for 2024?

There are four big trends that are impacting our industry and the planet: sustainability, health and wellness, personalization of products experiences – and the fourth one is overarching the other three, the role of technology.

From the existing brands and the new ones we could create, we’re looking at opportunities to make those products and brands more sustainable, healthier, and more personalized in the way they manifest themselves in the product. Technology plays a very important role – the digitization of the world and what technology gives you in the opportunity to customize offerings to people.

But technology is a tool. The role of the human being in all of this is even more important – you will need to have critical thinking to interpret and understand the power of technology in your industry, for your profession, in your company. And this implies that we need to keep focusing on the people we serve and the people inside the organization that drive that innovation, that drive design and drive branding.