‘Stop glorifying busy’: PepsiCo’s Susan Press on human centricity, culture and the corporate athlete

PepsiCo’s Susan Press has seen fads come and go in one of the world’s most competitive categories. Ahead of her ADMA Global Forum appearance on September 9, she shares why resilience, creativity and human insight will outlast any hype cycle.

Working in soft drinks - one of the most commoditised categories on the planet - has taught Susan Press a simple truth: the brands that win are the ones that remember humans first, technology second.

It’s an industry where margins are tight, competition is fierce and consumer loyalty is fragile. In that kind of environment, Press argues it’s easy to get distracted by tools and shortcuts, but dangerous to rely on them.

As she puts it: “There’s so many ways that tech can help us shortcut to solutions, but if we’re constantly using shortcuts, we’re going to stop using our true, traditional marketing muscle.”

Press is Marketing Director Beverages ANZ at PepsiCo, overseeing household names including Gatorade and Pepsi. Having spent most of her career in the cutthroat beverages and snacks space, Press is well aware that while technology has its place, the future will be shaped by a very old idea: staying human.

She says: “Human-centricity is incredibly important and it's not something that tech can do for us.”

That doesn’t just mean talking to consumers or measuring them in spreadsheets - it means starting with real human needs and desires, and building everything from there. 

This philosophy matters even more in FMCG, where brands live or die on their ability to stand out. Press has seen enough product launches to know the difference between a fad and a brand with staying power.

She points to the hype around YouTube stars Logan Paul and KSI’s PRIME Energy drinks as a cautionary tale - a case study in what happens when momentum is not anchored in consumer truth. PRIME, which rocketed out of the gate and reached over US$1bn in sales in its second year, was deserted by customers based on the product taste and quality. 

Press says it lacked the two essentials: a consumer need and product quality.

Press explains: “It wasn’t grounded in a consumer insight and it didn’t taste great. That’s why, in my opinion, it didn’t last the distance. You could do anything in the world, but if it’s not grounded in a need and desire from a consumer, it’s never going to make you stand out.”

So if the first foundation of marketing should be human-centricity, the second is capability - but not just the kind that gets measured in dashboards and data sets.

In fact, Press believes marketers have conflated capability training with new tech and data. She points out that capability should also be about the softer skills, which she believes are still incredibly valuable to actively learn, rather than assuming marketers will pick it up along the way.

Press says: “The human side of capability is important to discuss because capability is not just something you sit in a room and learn. It’s the softer skills as well: empathy, creativity, resilience. 

“Think about it - if you’re not feeling supported, happy and understood as an individual in your organisation, it’s not going to be a long-term viable proposition for you.”

Her own philosophy of continual learning reflects that. At senior levels, she says, capability isn’t necessarily about ticking off new skills for yourself but about creating opportunities for your team. 

She reveals that working at a global organisation like PepsiCo helps significantly in this, with the business offering employees easy access to training and exposing them to new ideas. But Press insists the best education often comes outside the boardroom.

Instead of leaning only on formal programs, she finds herself learning from the most immediate focus group available - her own daughters. Watching how they navigate algorithms and communicate gives her fresh insights into consumer behaviour and a typically hard-to-reach demographic.

Press expands: “It’s kind of like on-the-job training - sitting in my house in the evening, watching them go between different platforms and the multiple screens they’ve got going at one time.”

For all the talk about data, insights and capabilities, Press argues that culture is another ingredient that quietly determines whether any of it sticks - but not in the way you might think. 

Press points out that internal corporate culture is often overlooked when it comes to judging the success of marketing activities. Australia, she argues, has developed a perfectionist streak that sometimes veers into toxic. 

“There’s something about our culture in Australia where we have a ‘win-at-all-costs’ mentality,” she says. “We are one of the most competitive sporting nations in the world and we have this culture where we always have to show up, be perfect and win.”

That mindset, Press believes, is unsustainable.

Instead, she wants marketing leaders to normalist failure - not as weakness, but as a necessary step in their own personal growth: “Creating working environments where failing fast, sharing learnings and reiterating is going to be really important. We have to create internal cultures where people feel psychologically safe and comfortable to be able to share both the wins and losses.”

At PepsiCo, that mindset has been formalised in a concept the company calls the “corporate athlete” - a framework Press has leaned into as an antidote to the perfectionism so often demanded by Australian business culture. 

Press believes that training as a corporate athlete will leave modern-day professionals better equipped to deal with the pressures of the corporate world.

Press continues: “When you work in a global organisation, pressure is constant. So by creating corporate athletes, we want to help our employees understand pressure and respond to it on a personal, team and cultural level.”

That means rethinking how marketers pace themselves. Press warns: “Stop glorifying busy and start evaluating your energy. A corporate athlete has approximately a 45-year age span, but an elite athlete has 10 to 15 years. Yet we spend as much time as an elite athlete in performance mode, which is not sustainable.”

For Press, all of this ladders back to the fundamentals - human-centricity, creativity, resilience - and why they matter even more in a world obsessed with AI.

As she puts it: “The best marketers will be those who have traditional capability as well as the growth mindset for what’s changing in the landscape.”

Susan Press is a speaker at the ADMA Global Forum on September 9. She will be joined by other industry leaders including business expert Todd Sampson, futurist Tom Goodwin, MECCA’s Kate Blythe and more. The last tickets are availablehere.