Love Drove Mauro Porcini to Turn PepsiCo into a Design Pioneer

“It starts from your heart, it’s intuitive.”

When it comes to love and design, Mauro Porcini literally wrote the book on it. His 2022 tome, ‘The Human Side of Innovation’ was subtitled ‘The Power of People in Love with People’. Spend even the shortest amount of time with Mauro, and the passion that spills forth makes it clear that that love for design and its power to help people lives beyond the pages.

Since 2012, Mauro has been chief design officer at PepsiCo, building up a global network of design hubs and converting everyone from marketers to R&D bods to the power of design. To do so for a business the size of PepsiCo - one that covers over 200 territories, over 500 brands and 315,000 people - is no mean feat. Without that personal well of passion and, yes, love, that design journey would not have been just daunting, but impossible.

“The real innovators in marketing and design, in finance, in journalism, in any field are people in love with people,” he says.

When Mauro talks of love, he considers three specific dimensions. The first is the love for the people he serves, the very real human beings around the world that interact with PepsiCo and its products (he’s not a fan of calling them consumers - and yes, he’s got a whole chapter on that). The second is the love for what he does - the passion that keeps him going when barriers and doubters try to block the path ahead. And the third is the love for the people around him, not just fellow designers, but the many professional communities he collaborates with. It all comes together to form a deep sense of empathy and responsibility.

“If I’m the chief design officer of a multinational corporation, I don’t just have a responsibility towards the company; I have an amazing opportunity and responsibility towards society,” he says. “It’s an amazing platform. I can reach billions of people every day. So what can we do? How do we leverage what we do?”

When Mauro first joined 11 years ago, he had a very clear vision of just how to meet that responsibility and what levers to pull. In his early talks with Indra Nooyi, PepsiCo’s then CEO and chair, the initial idea was to bring Mauro onboard to create a small, central team to influence design across the rest of the world. But Mauro had quite a different vision - a thriving, diverse design culture fed by the love and expertise of specialist hubs around the world.

This vision was inspired by his experience at industrial multinational 3M, where he found that no matter how strong his personal passion and determination to learn and engage was, nothing beat collaborating with people who held strong local insights and empathy. 

At 3M, he was working for a Minnesota-based multinational at a central design hub in Milan. From Italy, he and the team were designing for people all over the world. For about a year, he found himself travelling to Japan every other week, labouring under the illusion that he and his team could simply figure out the culture and bring it back to HQ. Eventually, he persuaded the company to fund a design team in Tokyo and Shanghai, who could bring a deeper ‘love’ for those markets and communities.

“That’s when I realised that it was impossible to be global without having local teams,” he says. “The idea of global teams that work in isolation from the local team is nonsense. That’s when I developed the idea of this ‘glocal’ approach to things. ‘Globally Strategic, Locally Relevant’.”

Upon hearing Mauro’s 3M experience and glocal vision, Indra gave him her support. They decided to start small, with a little team in China. The local business team was reticent at first, so Indra persuaded them to start on the tiniest scale possible - to hire just one person.

“They hired the person and one month later, the marketing team from PepsiCo came back and they told us, ‘Oh my God, now we get it… we want to hire three more people’. What they understood was that this person reporting to the centre was getting access to the global vision and strategy - what we wanted to do with Pepsi, wth Lays. But, this person in the region was giving them the possibility to deeply understand the nuances of the culture. And this is what ‘glocal’ is all about.”

Eleven years later, PepsiCo now has 15 design centres and 300 people around the world, creating work that playfully combines global brands with local cultures. From 7Up’s Fido Dido celebrating Durga Puja in India with specially designed packaging and traditional dhak drums, to a celebration of ‘Everyday Heroes’ with Pepsi and China’s People’s Daily news outlet that plays with the visual potential of Chinese characters and the country’s political poster design heritage in a way that could only have emerged from a local team, the strategy has unlocked a world of nuance and locally relevant aesthetic palettes and design languages.

This may be a story of love… but it’s not necessarily a story of love at first sight. This 11-year journey has not been a linear one - how could it be in an organisation of the scale and complexity of PepsiCo? Nor was it the case that everyone understood Mauro’s mission to spread design thinking immediately. Cupid’s arrow takes a little more persuasion and strategy to take flight.

To get started, Mauro needed to fund his vision. He persuaded Indra to give him 20% of the budget for packaging design in the United States on the promise that she would get what she was already getting and more, without costing her any more.

“Essentially, you have a sponsor at the top. That is super indispensable because any company will reject anything new of any kind,” says Mauro on the importance of having Indra’s backing. “Look what’s going on with AI, with anything new, even in the marketing community. It’s human nature to want to protect the status quo. That is the equivalent to the safety at the base of Maslow’s pyramid.”

Nonetheless, that backing didn’t mean he immediately set out to agitate and get in people’s faces. It goes back to that third pillar of love - love for those around you. Mauro’s perspective is that of one seeking to empathise with those who are reluctant, and to collaborate with those of whom you sense a spark of shared values - something that is more productive in the long run. 

He says that often, when one has a mandate to disrupt, the tendency is to “go in like a tank - to disrupt and destroy”. However, Mauro’s approach has been somewhat gentler. 

“You need to be able to disrupt by building bridges,” he says. “Having business teams across the organisation investing, having a stake in this new activity and believing in you is fundamental. So, when I joined the company, I partnered with HR and we started to map the organisation in two ways. On one axis, we put the projects where we could show very quickly what design could do to help in some way. On the other axis, we put what they called the co-conspirators - people that were somehow willing to make a leap of faith and try to change things.” 

The key, says Mauro, has been to identify partners and generate proof points quickly. Even with a couple of small projects in China, he soon found teams in other markets looking on in envy and asking for help with design.

Mauro has identified five phases in what he calls his strategy of design coaching. The first is denial - outright refusal to engage. The second is what he calls ‘hidden rejection’, when he starts to get positive and even enthusiastic responses to his message of design, but no outright commitment. He reflects that in the early days at 3M, he mistook polite enthusiasm for genuine desire to implement. It took a senior executive to point out that these people were lying, and that they had money to spend but had not committed any budget to design for Mauro to realise that the positive response he’d had was likely excitement about the novelty of their interaction, and the fun he’d injected into a boring day.

So, Mauro developed a simple, blunt, but effective technique to combat hidden rejection. “Every time I pitch a new idea, right away I ask people for a commitment. ‘OK, you love it, give me the money, let’s do it’. I became famous for that, all the time asking, ‘give me the money’ - or at least a commitment if it’s not about the money. I needed what I call a sacrifice. Most of the time, people will say ‘no’, and that’s great, as you can quickly identify your co-conspirators,” says Mauro. “Even if only 10% of people say ‘yes’, that converts to a solid base of co-conspirators.

The third phase is all about leaps of faith to generate evidence - to reach a critical mass of proof points so that the wider company can see this isn’t just a phase or fad. That takes us to the fourth phase - the ‘Quest for Confidence’, when design projects move from prototypes and small experiments to scale, and where design requires bigger chunks of investment and more developed processes.

“The risks become higher, so you need different kinds of capabilities,” he says. “It’s a different phase where that is very dangerous, because you need to protect that entrepreneurial approach, but also scale it. That’s where process meets human beings, and culture, and people and you need to be very strategic about culture and people.”

And, finally, you reach ‘Holistic Awareness’, when this new design culture becomes infused across the broader company culture.

Now happily living in phase five, the projects that Mauro and his teams are involved in have become more ambitious and more collaborative with the other functions of the company. Where that gets really exciting for Mauro is that this has taken PepsiCo to a place where it’s starting to design the future.

Sodastream Professional is a relatively new product and service that launched commercially in 2020. It allows people to personalise their beverages, regulating temperature, flavour combination and intensity (level of overall fizz). It even allows you to tweak levels of electrolytes and vitamin B. A QR code linked to a personal account allows the dispenser to recognise you and your preferences. https://www.sodastreamprofessional.com/

For Mauro, Sodastream Professional helps PepsiCo address the biggest ‘megatrends’ facing nearly every industry on the planet: sustainability; health and wellness; tech-enabled personalisation; and platform.

And, in tandem with Sodastream Professional, there’s also the Gatorade GX system. The ‘Gx Sweat Patch’ monitors fluid and sodium lost during workouts, and connects to an app to advise exercisers about the best hydration and nutrition to aid their recovery. A smart Gx bottle also connects to the app.

This may sound a bit ‘Star Trek’, but it’s a first step into the future of beverages and nutrition. “This is just one manifestation of something bigger and broader that we’re thinking about for the future,” says Mauro. He presents a vision that sees us using tech to monitor our sleep and exercise throughout the day, to track our nutritional intake and automatically plan for busy or slow schedules - and then use AI and smart products to fill the nutritional gaps.

“Sodastream Professional and Gatorade GX are two prototypes, two manifestations… I call them prototypes but they are real products in the market that are doing well but they are prototypes for the long term vision,” says Mauro.

For Mauro, design is not a job. It’s life. It’s a mission to ‘create value for people’. And it’s a mission that he’s been able to share across PepsiCo’s brands and markets. It’s a mission that has taken him beyond his comfort zone into new spaces like marketing, science, and engineering. And, those collaborations have given him and his teams around the world the ability to weave technology into their designs - building sophisticated visions of the future that look set to turn sci-fi into reality. 

But in the end, it all boils down to one simple thing. Love. “Love for the world, the planet, and society made me see PepsiCo as an unbelievable opportunity to shape an entire industry. Because, if Pepsico does a certain thing, it has the power to have many other companies follow in the industry. Think about all the challenges of sustainability, health and wellness, the role of new technologies, personalisation… essentially building human-centred solutions and creating value for people. Being here, the opportunity is unbelievable.” 

Finishing, he says, “Pepsi gives me access to billions of people with these systemic opportunities, that could really reshape the way people consume any kind of product, not just in our industry. That’s one form of motivation that’s very powerful.”