Hall of Fame Profile: Tracey Doucette

It's proving to be a pivotal year for PepsiCo. Its CEO just finished a major business review in early February, and Wall Street is voicing plenty of opinions about PepsiCo's strategic direction. For shopper marketers, however, it's the opinions of retailer customers that matter most. And as evidenced by the most recent Kantar Retail PoweRankings, retail executives hold PepsiCo in very high regard, and on multiple fronts: Shopper Marketing, Insights, Customer Teams and Digital Marketing. In several areas, in fact, Pepsi's scores were double those earned by its archrival, Coca-Cola.The team led by Tracey Doucette, Senior Vice President, Customer Strategy, Field and Shopper Marketing for PepsiCo Beverages N.A., is in no small part responsible for these high marks. Her team develops the "learning agenda" that uncovers key insights in collaboration with customers, determines the success metrics, develops programming that solves shopper problems, and localizes it with the field marketing organization.Doucette, a graduate of the University of Florida, joined Proctor & Gamble's sales team in 1986 as a Memphis-based sales rep for bar soap and household cleaning products. Over the next 10 years, she took on increasing responsibilities, calling on nearly two dozen chains in virtually all channels of retail until being named head of national accounts for the Food/Beverage sector.In 1996, she joined Pepsi-Cola as Senior Manager, Sales Strategy. In the years that followed, she managed initiatives in various areas including promotions and interactive marketing (websites, digital media, database, loyalty/CRM). She also served as Vice President and General Manager for the North American Coffee Partnership from 2004-2007. In 2007, she took over the areas of Customer Strategy, Field and Shopper Marketing.Last month, Tracey was honored at the 19th Annual Hall of Fame induction ceremony, held in conjunction with the Shopper Marketing Effie Celebration and the Shopper Marketing Summit. In early March, Bill Schober sat down with her at PepsiCo's HQ in Purchase, N.Y.I imagine that, in those first jobs out of college, you spent a lot of time in stores and out in the aisles.DOUCETTE: Oh, yes. I remember that at my first high school reunion, people kept coming up to me and saying, "Procter & Gamble is such a cool company… can you get me in?" Well, it is a cool company, and I loved my experience there, but then I'd explain what I actually did: Scrape gum off of grocery-store shelves. Stack boxes of Tide and Downy. It wasn't DSD back then – I built those displays. And at the time, Kroger grocery managers in Memphis often worked at night, so I'd often work through until 4 in the morning.But I have a lot of great memories. My experience in those stores is the foundation of the work that I do today.I understand most of the items on your resume at Pepsi, but what is the "North American Coffee Partnership"?DOUCETTE: That was a fantastic role. It's a joint venture between Starbucks and Pepsi with the purpose of manufacturing, marketing and distributing ready-to-drink coffee beverages. The partnership was formed in 1995, and I was fortunate to act as the Vice President and General Manager of the Partnership from 2004-2007. It was the first time I had 100% P&L accountability. I had supply chain, R&D, sales, operations, marketing and finance all reporting to me. I reported to a management board that was equal parts Pepsi and Starbucks senior executives, so I got to experience Starbucks' culture.I'm proud to have been a part of that brand's history because two months ago, it became one of the billion-dollar brands in our company's stable.How many of Pepsi's 22 billion-dollar brands does your work touch today?DOUCETTE: All of them except for Walkers, Mirinda and 7UP. I have direct responsibility for the beverage brands, and I touch some of the snack brands because of the "Power of One" work. I work very closely with my counterpart at Frito-Lay, Jeff Swearingen, and his team.Could you walk us through Pepsi's evolution from a customer marketing mindset to shopper marketing?DOUCETTE: Historically, you'd find that the metrics for customer marketing were mainly volume and maybe share. Stack 'em high, let it fly, right? It was all predicated on having a brand plan and pushing things out. We didn't necessarily think about whether a program with a certain retailer was the right thing to do for that specific retailer, or whether it felt natural in terms of the consumer and shopper experience.That's evolved into putting the customer and the shopper upfront in our brand planning. What that allows us to do is move to a brand-accretive mindset where we are actually leveraging the insights we get from our customers and their shoppers' motivations, building that information into the process sooner, and making the brands more relevant in that environment. A classic example would be "Target Skinny." That program built brand equity because we thought about what the Diet Pepsi brand stands for as well as what Target stands for. We found a common bond; we found a shopper problem that we were trying to solve; we put that all together and designed the program with all of that in mind instead of just forcing out a Diet Pepsi program that would look the same in every customer.Who are the key members of your team?DOUCETTE: A lot of my field marketing team members are spread out. We have a lot of people in Chicago, for example, so we've learned to operate and communicate in the "virtual" environment through Halo [videoconferencing] and conference calls. The key members on my team are:Scott Finlow, who heads up the shopper insights team. His job is to "look around the corner" and see what's coming next. He digs through consumer and shopper trends to determine where the shopper is going next, and then helps us commercialize those insights so we can start creating programs and shopper solutions around them.Mike Gervasio is the head of category management. His job is to make those insights actionable at the local level. His team takes those insights and makes them real in-store: What's on shelf, what's in the feature, what's on display, how things are positioned.Bryan Welsh is the head of shopper marketing. His job is to create the shopper programs and solutions that we deliver to our retailers and our brand partners.One of the newer members of our team is Linda Bethea. She heads up our national consumer promotion merchants group and portfolio-marketing group. She works very closely with Jeff Swearingen's team at Frito-Lay to deliver all of our "Power of One" solutions.Gregg Sterling is responsible for field and franchise marketing. He takes our marketing programs and moves them down into the local markets, and adjusts them appropriately for regional differences.And then of course, there's Leslie Nagy, another Hall of Famer [2006] who runs our marketing services team. She actually makes it all happen.Are there any special agency/client relationships?DOUCETTE: Maria Zanghetti is another key member of the team. She represents TracyLocke for us and actually participates in all of my staff meetings. We have a very long-standing relationship – 30 years – with TL, our core agency. They've been a great partner on our brand business, shopper business, national consumer promotions and field marketing as well.I've seen PepsiCo seminars on shopper marketing that are almost like grad school. What, for example, do you mean by the term "learning agenda"?DOUCETTE: Scott Finlow and his team own the learning agenda, which is a series of questions that we need answers to. The learning agenda outlines how and when we're going to get those questions answered, and then how we're going to embed them into the work that we do going forward. Basically, it's our insights agenda.You folks also use the term "shoppertunity" a lot.DOUCETTE: Oh, I stole that from somewhere. The shoppertunity is the sweet spot between our customer's problem to solve or opportunity, our shoppers' problem to solve or opportunity, and our brand's problem to solve or opportunity. When we can bring those three objectives together and find the intersection, our work really comes to life in a meaningful way.I've heard the Gatorade G Series Fit launch at Walgreens referenced as an example of this – "almost a perfect DNA fit."DOUCETTE: When you do the real disciplined work of finding the sweet spot, you get programs like the Target "Skinny Can," or the G Series Fit, or the "Dew General Store" program for Dollar General. We don't think we could have placed these programs anywhere else because they were designed from the DNA of those specific retailers and the specific shopper problems they solved. We're really, really proud of these programs. They all started from the right place and ended up delivering against the metrics that we established for them.How do you get to the "DNA" of retailers?DOUCETTE: Most of our retailer partners – once they understand what we are trying to solve together – do give us some access to their data and strategy. We have great partnerships with Kroger and dunnhumby as well as other retailers that have their own data.We also do a lot of primary research on behalf of retailers. We'll go out and talk to their shoppers, based on a mutual learning agenda that we've established, where we try to uncover what's really going on with that chain's specific shoppers.I was also impressed by your group's "shopper creative" principles: Engage me, don't interrupt me; I'll give you 4 seconds; less is more; that's my brand; and consider where I am when you talk to me. How were they developed?DOUCETTE: We developed them, in part, by working with our Frito-Lay partners at our Smart Learning Center in Dallas. We watched how our consumers and shoppers navigate stores and how much time they spend on shelf and on display.But they also came out of quarterly meetings that Bryan Welsh and his shopper marketing team have. At each meeting, they review all of the creative that's out there. They are each given a sheet and first review the creative as if they are the consumer; then they review it as the shopper; then they look at it as if they were the customer; and finally, they review it through the eyes of the brand. So the five shopper-creative principles really evolved out of this review process. And if you go up to our floor, there's a big poster on the wall and those principles are hanging, I believe, on everybody's doors.I saw on your Hall of Fame questionnaire that you believe that part of your job is to offer team members a rewarding career experience "in a fun environment." You don't hear that in a lot of places.DOUCETTE: Think of the brands that we get to work with: Pepsi, Mountain Dew, Gatorade. Those products are all about fun. Yes, we operate in a very competitive environment. But all of our customers – Evan Anthony at Kroger; the folks at Target; the folks at Safeway – are unique, fun people. If you can't have fun with all of that, well...The other thing that's unique about our team is that we sit right between brand marketing and sales. We have people on our team who come from pure functional marketing backgrounds; we have people who come from sales as well as finance and category management. We can navigate through any one of those functions because they all sit on our team. Our team is actually a big career opportunity because it offers marketers an opportunity to get very close to the customers and to the field, and it offers salespeople a glimpse inside the minds of marketers.There's been a lot of media speculation and Wall Street pressure about Pepsi spending an extra $600 million in marketing this year and refocusing on the base brands. Will this impact shopper marketing and what you do?DOUCETTE: We have, year over year, consistently increased the dollars that we allocate as a percent of our marketing mix to shopper marketing when it's the right thing to do. You'll see that we will actually do more programming with great brands like Pepsi, Mountain Dew, Gatorade and Lipton, and shopper marketing will be a key ingredient of those programs going forward.Bloomberg Businessweek recently quoted a Wall Street analyst who thinks that maybe Pepsi and Frito-Lay should be split. What doesn't he understand about the "Power of One"?DOUCETTE: We're doing more with our retailers in the area of "Power of One" than ever before. In the past year we've been doing a lot of work on what the shopper sees when, for example, Pepsi and Lay's or Dew and Doritos come together along the path to purchase and in-store. When she sees a look from us, we want her to know she's getting a solution from trusted partners and that there's always going to be additional value for her. A good illustration of this was how we had a common look and message everywhere we touched during Super Bowl.Another way you'll see that reflected is through our "Moments to Save" insert. We did two "Moments to Save" inserts last year, and we'll be doing even more this year. We've evolved the look of "Moments to Save" to carry more of the core equity that happens when both Frito-Lay and Pepsi-Cola products come together.How has the "Great Recession" affected things?DOUCETTE: Shoppers, as everybody knows, are much more conscious of value. They're shopping circulars more than ever before, and using online planning to build shopping lists, and basically asking, 'Do I really need this?' We see shoppers visiting five-plus channels where they used to primarily stay close to home and visit three. All of that changes the way we think about designing our programs.But in the face of all that, they're still asking for solutions. As shopper marketers, we need to understand what value means to them and provide solutions that deliver against that value. Often times, these solutions extend beyond just the simple price plan by, for example, making their shopping trip easier, putting everything they need in one place, or fulfilling their occasion needs better than anyone else.You spent a lot of time in interactive marketing. Are there any limits to how effectively a brand can reach people digitally along the path to purchase?DOUCETTE: Did you say the word "limits"?Yeah… I used that word.DOUCETTE: Not a good word. Impossible is not a good word here. We have a great digital team. They support us in understanding how our shoppers, by cohort, are engaging in different digital and mobile technologies to make the decision to convert in-store. And we don't think there's a limit.But we also don't do technology just for technology's sake. You'll see us using photo recognition, or QR codes, e-coupons, location-based services, Foursquare – all of those things – when they're right. Our strategy is to provide solutions to the shopper, and any one of those technologies can play if it's the right thing at the right point along the path to purchase.What metrics do you rely on or value the most?DOUCETTE: They can vary by campaign or program but there are ones that we've come to rely on over and over again: brand share and growth; brand health and KPI metrics; equity; and shopper share of wallet, an area that we've spent a lot of time on in the past year. Customers really want to know if they are growing their share of wallet with their customers. We're able, with our insights and information, to provide a look at what their shoppers do when they are outside of their stores. I've got to applaud Mike Gervasio and his team for their work in providing value to our retail partners in understanding share of wallet across the key cohorts.How do you measure brand equity in a shopper marketing context?DOUCETTE: For "Target Skinny" we actually had to beef up the sample size of our equity tracking with Target shoppers to determine whether or not the awareness and the brand KPIs lifted with our Target shoppers during the program. It was a substantial undertaking, but it gave us reason to believe that we could do more programs, with more customers, that build the equity for our brands and build share of wallet in the right way.Pepsi seems to have a solid hold on the third, fourth or fifth spots in the Kantar Retail PoweRankings. Is that a big deal?DOUCETTE: What really matters is that our customers actually recognize the work that we are trying to do with them. The other thing that's cool is that we did focus on our customers and on our Kantar scores this past year. It was seen as a way to bring a new team together. We created a new vision, a new mission, and it became kind of the lightning rod for making that mission and vision to come to life.You were too polite to say anything, but I noticed that you almost laughed when I mentioned how PepsiCo had doubled Coca-Cola's scores.DOUCETTE: I'm not that polite. But I'll let you say it.

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