How Pepsi’s retail media play was boosted by Uber … and the pandemic
At IAB’s Measure Up conference in Sydney on Wednesday, Pepsi’s national account manager shared how online pandemic-accelerated shopping habits, mixed with the rise of Uber’s food delivery service completely changed how the company now serves impulse customers.
PepsiCo's product range includes Cheetos, Lays, Mountain Dew, and Pepsi.
Alison Silver is the national account manager for PepsiCo. As one of the market leaders in the snacks and beverages sector, Pepsi very much deals in impulse buyers.
The company uses multiple retail media networks, but is ultimately looking for a single ROI figure across all its marketing investments.
Silver was part of a panel at the IAB Measure Up conference in Sydney on Wednesday that got granular about how improving measurement data is helping brands and agencies understand — and prove — effectiveness at every stage of the marketing funnel.
The audience heard how better measurement models are leading towards the holy grail: a single return-on-investment figure across all marketing channels, that can also be broken down to examine every aspect of each individual customer’s purchasing journey. Measurement models that track a customer’s entire purchasing habits, from being served an ad across TV and social media, to typing in a snack-related search query, to swiping their card at a brick-and-mortar store, are becoming better and better.
It’s all leading to a clearer picture of ‘incrementality’ — measuring the actual value of a marketing campaign, beyond organic and existing sales. This term was thrown about quite a bit during Wednesday’s conference, but as Silver explains, it applies in different ways for different categories.
Alison Silver (right) with Harrison Bland from Zenith (left) and Mohammad Heidari from Flywheel (centre) at the IAB Measure Up conference.
“Depending on what category you’re in, incrementality looks very different,” Silver said. “We’re an impulse category and we’re an expandable category. So when you start looking at incrementality, there is a lot of incremental upside in these particular categories.”
She explained that with premium products, like a watch, “the inter-purchase interval or the cycles that you’re going to buy a watch is going to be quite fixed in your life.” Likewise with essentials like toilet paper or toothpaste, “you’re going to have a pretty fixed quota.”
She continued: “There’s a lot of more discussion in those categories around cannibalisation. If they buy it on Uber or Amazon, are they going to stop buying it on Coles and Woolworths? Because they have that fixed quantity that they’re going to need.”
This creates confusion as to where to best spend your advertising dollars. And, which marketing decisions are driving which purchasing decisions.
“That calibration of ‘if you’ve got a dollar to spend, where should you spend it?’ And really having that comparison like-for-like” is crucial, Silver said.
“I think retail media partners are starting to lean in a lot more now, in terms of the metrics that we need to get to have that comparison.”
However, when you’re in an impulse category, like chips and beverages, different purchasing habits don’t necessarily compete with each other.
“Satisfying that impulse craving on Uber Eats is not then going to mean that you’re not going to add a packet of chips and beverages to your habitual weekly shop,” she said.
PepsiCo’s distribution model shifted, like many companies, by both chance and necessity during the pandemic.
“E-commerce grew a lot. And this was very much in groceries — so Woolworths and Coles and traditional supermarkets.”
This shift to delivery and online purchasing led to the rise of so-called “quick commerce”, which Silver calls “the next frontier of growth.” She said that Uber also plays a big role in this.
“What is the different shopper mission on an aggregator platform, versus on a traditional grocery platform?” she said.
For groceries, she said, “you buy it and it’s not impulsive. You know you’re going to consume it later. Whereas when you start looking at the aggregator model [Menulog, Uber Eats, etc] it is very much around that impulse economy: ‘I see it, I want it, and I’m expecting it now.'”
PepsiCo has benefitted enormously from the rise of Uber and similar aggregators in the food delivery space.
“That really unlocked a lot for us. Because, prior to Uber, we didn’t — actually, crazily — we didn’t have a way of delivering impulse to consumers.
“We don’t have a direct-to-consumer model, and we are an impulse category. So it’s not only actually just driving demand-generation, but it is actually then your go-to-market and your total fulfilment model in an impulsive and expandable category.”
This seemed like an enormous oversight for a company that deals in snacks, but the mechanisms weren’t in place. Now they are, Uber Eats has hugely informed PepsiCo’s retail marketing strategy.
“No longer are people shopping from aisles, when they’re on Uber. There are so many different shopper missions on these new and emerging platforms. And that could be anything from ‘I need to satisfy a craving’, to ‘I’m missing an ingredient for dinner tonight’, to ‘I’m actually going to do my whole retail shop now on Uber’, or ‘I’m going to do a top-up shop.'”
She rattled off more purchasing styles: the ‘top-up shop’; ‘gifting’ snacks to others; and the growing “fake-away” trend – where buyers create their own takeaway meals from the frozen or pre-cooked sections of the supermarket to save on costs.
“So for us, it’s really about how do we leverage the strength of our portfolio across snacks and beverages, and speak to that ‘elevated occasion’ strategy, rather than thinking category-first or aisle-first, and then having the right contextual messaging?
“We know that we’re speaking to a person, in real time, when they’re on the Uber Eats platform, with high purchase intent.
“They’re not scrolling on social media, looking at Instagram, and you’re popping up on their feed. They’re actually wanting food in that exact moment. And we know what time of day it is, and we know what day of week it is.
“We can then actually serve the right product, the right proposition, the right contextual messaging, and the right occasion to fit that consumer.”
SUBSCRIBE
Sign up to our free daily update to get the latest in media and marketing.
