At Web Summit in Lisbon last month I had the pleasure of meeting PepsiCo’s chief strategy and transformation officer, Athina Kanioura. We chatted about mobile, customer data platforms, and PepsiCo’s plan to build a 1:1 relationship with billions of customers and fans.
From my story at Forbes:
How does a $230 billion dollar corporation with thousands of products bundled under dozens of brands connect to billions of customers on a personal basis? Currently, with hundreds of mobile apps. But Athina Kanioura, chief strategy and transformation officer at PepsiCo, has a digital transformation plan to build a customized version of direct to consumer that works for PepsiCo, and reduce that number to just one.
Direct to consumer is a product sales channel that could be worth $213 billion by next year, according to eMarketer, and is growing at almost 17% per year. Nike alone took in almost $19 billion in 2022 through Nike Direct, and other big brands want a piece of this growing and highly lucrative pie. That includes PepsiCo, currently sitting at #46 on the Fortune 500 list.
“We’re talking about billions of consumers that engage with us,” Kanioura told me at Web Summit in Lisbon recently. “So what we are trying to do and we have been trying to do especially in the past two years is: can we bring all of those together to one consumer data platform?”