Christie is a Senior Brand Manager with PepsiCo, one of the largest and most well-known food and beverage companies in the world. She runs us through the lifecycle of a product as well as dishes out advice for students interested in a career in brand management!
Transcript
>> My name is Christie Shaun and I'm a senior brand manager at Popsicle in New York and I work on a lot of different brands including Mountain Dew, Lipton Ice Tea and I guess it's a rotational program, so I could work on more. So they kind of vary from, I'll say that there's three kind of big buckets of work within our marketing department. There's communications, so that's heavy focusing on advertising, whether it's through TV, digital print, all kind of like digital media. And then the second bucket is around innovation. So it's coming up with new product ideas. And then the third bucket is commercialization. So it's taking something that's been concepted and then selling it in the market place. So for me one really exciting product that I just finished is Lipton's Sparkling Ice Tea. And what's exciting about this innovation is that it's actually taking something that is kind of a growth trend, which is sparkling, bubbles, and finding an intersection of that with tea, which carries a healthy halo. And you see that actually with sparkling it's driving most of the growth in the beverage category. Tea is growing as well but we haven't seen sparkling enter that category. So this actually is poised to deliver growth for the tea portfolio, as well as the category. Over the, so in the innovation role so it's very role specific. Within this role I'd say it depends on what phase of the project we're at but that lifecycle of a project, innovation project, is concepting the idea first and then going through rounds of testing, both qualitative and quantitative, to see if the concept resonates with consumers. And then it evolves once you've locked in the concept, it evolves into developing the product, so working with R&D to formulate whatever that product is, as well as working with packaging agencies to develop the graphics. And then so once you are able to finalize both, you combine it, you test the concept in its holistic form, and then if all you know, signals are go, then you launch the product. And so I'd say at this phase we have gotten the trade sample ready to go, so everything's been finalized and so it's just at that phase of selling into the Walmarts, kind of like the good customers, so Walmarts, Targets, grocery stores, all of that.
Download transcript
