Bringing modernity to iconic legacy brands

In this episode, Laura Halliday and co-host Adam Rowles are joined by Nick Graham, an esteemed leader with senior roles at PepsiCo North America and Mondelēz.

Nick shares his expertise on how iconic brands like Pepsi and Cadbury have adapted their strategies to stay relevant in a fast-changing world. They explore the power of nostalgia, storytelling, and emotional connection in creating meaningful campaigns that resonate with audiences.

Hear how Nick helped Pepsi rediscover its “timeless spirit” tapping into nostalgia that so many people can connect with such as in the 1980s-inspired logo redesign. Then with Cadburys, hear how the ‘Cadbury’s Gorilla’ ad was a “lightning in a bottle” moment that shaped expectations for subsequent campaigns and how they embraced the value of generosity to reshape its marketing.

Nick also reflects on the evolving role of consumer insights in today’s AI-driven landscape and why human connection remains at the heart of great marketing.

Episodes are released bi-weekly. Follow us on LinkedIn for updates.

Want to know more about us? Visit our website here: thisistheforge.com

This is an 18Sixty production for The Forge.

Links:

Paula Hamilton VW ad 1987: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKQIUJOr1GA 

VW ‘Gas station’ ad 1996: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lso-fQIR_M8 

John Lewis, ‘Always a Woman’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYOsWWKHZVw 

The Persuasion Game is available on all your favourite podcast apps: https://link.chtbl.com/PersuasionGame

Transcript

Adam: This is the Persuasion Game, the Forge’s podcast all about the art of persuasion. Each episode we connect with marketers, business leaders and beyond to learn how they use persuasion to influence their customers, convince their stakeholders and drive their businesses forward.

Adam: Hello Laura.

Laura: Hi Adam, how are you?

Adam: I’m really well thank you. Yeah, having a good week. How is life for you today?

Laura: Very excellent. Well, today we are going to be talking about some iconic brands that have really been with us all our lives and are still very relevant today. So I suppose the question is — when I ask you about iconic brands, what’s coming to mind for you?

Laura: So it’s going to make me tear up talking about this one, but I love the John Lewis advert — Always a Woman — where it shows a woman growing up from being a girl into a teenager, a young woman, and then she gets older and her house changes through the years. It’s incredibly moving. And I think it’s one of those ones that often comes up in marketing case studies, and every time it does you find yourself at a slightly different life stage, slightly older when you see it, and a different bit of that advert will connect with you in a slightly different way. Now that I’ve got children of my own I see children running around in the house — it’s really quite moving. How about you? Any iconic advertising from nostalgic brands that you can bring up?

Adam: I seem to remember watching a lot of telly when I was younger, and one of the ads I always remember was the VW advert with Paula Hamilton — which dates me a lot. She’s leaving the house and she’s obviously had a big fight with someone. She takes a ring off, throws it in the gutter, takes her big old 80s earrings off, and then gets in her VW and she’s like “at least I can rely on something.” And I really loved that.

And then years later they did another one which was about VWs not needing to be refilled so much, and it was all about how people had seen a mysterious car travelling through the middle of nowhere that never stopped — so it must be an alien car. And me and my mum and my sister used to walk around saying “like a VW” practising to see if we’d actually got the accent right. Which just goes to show — advertising was a lot more pervasive and people were watching the same channels and the same mediums a lot more. You could really capture a cultural moment with an advert, couldn’t you.

Laura: That’s right. Whereas what we’re seeing today is a lot more multi-channel and a lot more fragmentation. So the interesting thing we’ll talk about with Nick, our guest, is really how do we take those iconic brands and translate them for modern audiences and modern channels.

Adam: And one thing to add – a new thing we’re going to be doing on this podcast is, when we refer to adverts that we think have been great, we’re actually going to start popping the links to those in the show notes so you guys can watch them along too.

Laura: So you can rate my accent.

Adam: You can rate the accent — yes please, write in and rate Laura’s accent.

Laura: Please don’t.

Adam: On this episode we’re thrilled to welcome Nick Graham, an experienced leader who has held senior roles at PepsiCo Beverages North America and more recently as Global Head of Insight and Analytics at Mars. Nick is known for his ability to drive lasting change within global organisations, particularly in the realms of brand strategy and consumer insights.

Laura: Nick is also a thought leader on organisational change and persuasion, guiding teams through challenging transitions with a focus on storytelling and vision-casting. He now works as a freelance consultant helping companies navigate the future of consumer insights, particularly as AI begins to reshape the landscape. Welcome Nick.

Nick: Hi, great to see you both.

Adam: Absolutely, Nick, thrilled to have you with us today. Could you share a little bit about your roles at Mondelēz and Pepsi and sort of topline your involvement there?

Nick: Sure, absolutely. Well, starting at the very beginning is a good place to start in a story. I started my career in advertising, then in brand innovation consulting, and indeed worked with a lot of folks from the Forge in my early career — which is fantastic, paths crossing again. And then I spent the last ten to fifteen years of my career to date in corporate roles. As you said, I led insights and analytics for PepsiCo’s global beverages team, then led the US insights team after that, and then most recently I led the global insights and analytics function for Mondelēz.

When I first got the offer of the job I just told my husband who it was working for and he said “yes, you need to take this job.” I said “you don’t even know what the job is.” He said “I don’t care, if you’re going to be making chocolate and Biscuits, that’s a pretty good job to have.”

And now having made the decision to move back to Europe earlier this year and back into consulting — it’s so timely that we should have this conversation about persuasion, because really what has fascinated me throughout my career, but particularly the last two or three big roles, is really helping organisations like Mondelēz and like Pepsi work out how to drive change — both in the organisation and in the marketplace. We talk a lot about change, we talk a lot about the impact of change, but it’s one of those things everyone talks about but most people don’t spend a lot of time actually thinking about how to achieve it, the complexity of achieving it and what it’s going to take for that to be successful.

Adam: Fantastic, thank you Nick. Could you share a bit more about your role at Pepsi?

Nick: It’s interesting to think about the types of change and persuasion jobs to be done in big organisations. To be honest this is true of any organisation — I’m sure it’s true of an agency, it’s true of a big corporate. Part of my job in both Pepsi and Mars is persuading my own team to do things differently — to embrace change. We’ll talk a little bit about that as we think about things like AI and digitisation, which is obviously transforming the way that insights functions work.

So part of it is about changing your own team and yourself. The second part is about persuading your leadership team, your peers, your senior leaders in the organisation, to act on the insights and the learnings that your team is coming up with — particularly challenging when that challenges their strongly held beliefs. And then fundamentally, all of that is very good, but ultimately you then need to be able to persuade retailers, customers, clients, shoppers, consumers — the end person, whoever that is — to act differently and to buy your brand and your product.

I think a lot of the time in organisations people think about pieces of that, but actually all three need to really work together. Because usually there’s always some end consumer or end client, and those other pieces sometimes get forgotten. And as I thought back about my stories of change — yes, there’s often a change in the end consumer, but often it comes from a change in context, a change in decision-making behaviour, a change in the way that the team operates, which then unlocks the change in the external environment as well.

Laura: I think there was perhaps, if I cast back twenty years when I started, a kind of idea that insights was the voice of the consumer and that marketing was the voice of the brand. And I think what you’re reflecting on is this idea that actually everyone is thinking commercially, everyone should be thinking about the consumer, and how do you use that to create a much more holistic workflow — keeping consumer insights there but also linking it to commercial realities?

Nick: Totally. And I think one of the biggest change factors for insights and analytics as a function is recognising that their role in the organisation is changing. I actually hate when people talk about insights as the voice of the consumer, because it feels like you’re disconnected from the business — like all your job is to do is to bring some really interesting data and some insights about the consumer and then your job stops there.

But in fact, to me when insight is at its most powerful in an organisation, it is actually an insightfully-minded commercial function. What it ultimately cares about is driving the commercial success of the organisation — it’s just doing it from a slightly different lens, from the lens of how to motivate consumers and shoppers in the right way. I think that’s a big mental shift for insight teams, but also for our peer functions as well, because it changes the way that insights and analytics shows up in the organisation and changes the way they behave.

And I think particularly at Mondelēz, one of my biggest jobs to be done was to help inspire and empower the team to feel like — don’t just wait for the famous seat at the table to be delivered to you. Grab hold of that seat. We used to talk about this in team meetings: don’t wait for it to be given — take a seat to the meeting, and there is your seat at the table. Own the seat at the table. The world has changed dramatically for insights and marketing and will continue to do so for the next generation as well. I think that recalibration of what insights needs to do in an organisation that’s one of the big effectors of change you need to think about.

Laura: I guess it’s a mirror of how people are relating to brands as well.

Nick: Yeah

Laura: When we grew up, advertising was very top-down — “I’m going to dictate the conversation,” single channels dominating the conversation. And that’s how things stuck in your mind. And now it’s very much consumer-led, whether that’s them creating content, hyper-targeting, or just the abundance of information you can get about consumers.

Nick: It’s much more fluid. And the sheer proliferation of content and ways of connecting — the way brands connect with consumers — means that the power dynamic, as you’re implying, has shifted. Because fundamentally those are the end people that we need to influence in order to drive change for the organisation. At the same time, marketers are being given more and more on their plates — there’s much more of a DIY approach, much more accountability across a huge range of functions.

Adam: So how did you go about getting people close to consumers? How did you actually get that cut-through with the audiences you needed to?

Nick: When I worked on Pepsi, when I first moved to the US beverages team to lead the insights function — it was literally just after the Kendall Jenner ad dropped. So as you can imagine, the team was reeling from the after-effects of that advert. And I think one of the things that strikes me as I think back about moments of change in my career — there is usually some catalysing change of context that happens. Sometimes it’s a crisis like that, sometimes it’s a positive change, but sometimes it is that crisis moment that galvanises people and makes them open to change in the first place.

So yeah, when I joined the Pepsi team, there was generally a feeling that the brand had lost its way. It was struggling from a sales perspective. The team had really focused for a long time on building cultural capital, building that cool factor, partnering with a lot of the latest artists and musicians — but it wasn’t really working from a business perspective. And I think the insights team felt that the brand had lost its way too. It had become so focused on the timely — being cool, being the latest, having the latest cultural connectivity — they really lost sight of why it existed. That sort of timeless “why did it exist in the first place?”

And even then, I think for a long time we’d been trying to push this message through data. Showing that advertising wasn’t performing as effectively as it had, showing the data — which actually, you know, the marketing team originally felt was our problem to solve with younger generations. There’s this obsession that we have to be able to recruit the next generation. But the data alone, and this is a lesson for all of us, the data alone wasn’t enough to convince people to change track.

So two things happened. One is the change of context — the Kendall Jenner ad had created this window, this moment, when people were suddenly like “I think something is wrong, I think something needs to change.” There was an open-mindedness to change. And what we did very quickly was say — let’s use this moment to go and talk to the people who buy the brand. Just go and talk to our core consumers. Let’s hear from them. Let’s hear the stories people have to say. Let’s not worry about the data — we have the data — let’s go and have consumers tell their story.

And what became quickly obvious was our core consumers — Middle America, middle-aged, grown up with the brand for 30 or 40 years — they had a very emotional reaction to the brand. When you talked about the brand, their faces lit up. There were lots of positive emotions deep there, which is very difficult to express in a data set — you have to be there and experience it. So we took our senior leadership team out to the Midwest, to our heartland, to meet with our core consumers, to do one-on-ones. Just being able to see that reaction.

But what became very quickly obvious was that they felt disconnected from the brand over the last 30 or 40 years. When you asked them for examples — their stories of when they enjoyed drinking the brand, what they remembered from advertising — they were all from the 80s and the 90s. Which in some respects is great, because that’s a formative period for many of them. They remembered Michael Jackson, they remembered Britney. A lot of people remembered advertising that was actually before they were born — there was this cultural memory. But they really didn’t remember a lot in the last 20 years.

And when you talked to them and showed them stuff, you could see it just didn’t feel like it was talking to them anymore. No amount of data could replace those one-on-one immersions with consumers — if only to better understand the people we were really trying to connect to, but to hear it from them and see their reactions — just realising there was this cultural disconnect that we had unintentionally created with our core consumer.

I think that created this catalyst for us to go back and say — yes, the brand wants to be cool and timely and up-to-date — but how do we do it in a way that actually speaks to the core values of the brand and actually celebrates the heritage of the brand? But it was the combination of the storytelling and that catalyst of context change that was the big opportunity. So then we could talk about the data, then we could show some of the ideas the team had been coming up with, some examples of how brands were doing that. But you needed — it goes back to the simplicity of the behaviour change wheel — you need to have the right context for that to be heard and understood in the first place.

So we were lucky in one respect. There’s always an element of luck — or bad luck in this case — and then there’s an element of jumping into that and using human storytelling and empathy as the vehicle to actually communicate that message and connect with the team.

Laura: I think that’s fascinating. And I suppose the challenge I could see with making people understand that tension — that maybe we’re leveraging the wrong values — is what I always associated Pepsi with was “the voice of a new generation.” And I suppose what you could argue is there was a perception of “well, that’s what we’re leaning into.” Whereas actually what you were saying was the context has changed. There are still values we can tap into, but they’re not the strapline, they’re not the most obvious thing — it needs to be something a bit more subtle than that. Let’s uncover what’s actually meaningful to consumers.

Nick: Exactly right. And so the challenge the brand had is that through the 80s and 90s it had sort of used that comparison with Coke — so the strapline became the brand for a lot of people. And there is something very true about it — it is a brand that’s always been disruptive and challenged the status quo a little bit. However, I think the brand had lost sight of the core purpose and was just very much focusing on being associated with the latest cool things, because that would be the vehicle to being culturally relevant. As opposed to saying — this is a brand that is about youthful disruption, youthful exuberance, a little bit of challenge. But how do you maintain that to make it relevant for someone who’s now 40, 50, 60 — who actually really remembers, very positively, that feeling from the 80s or the 90s — but also linking it back to a more intrinsic feeling that anybody at any age could connect to?

And I think then where we pivoted to in 2018 — it was the 120th or 125th anniversary of the brand. For the Super Bowl ad that year we intentionally used a lot of our nostalgic references from the past, but each expression we also used a modern expression as well. So we had a NASCAR driver and we had the bit from Back to the Future where he’s got his Pepsi Perfect. So we used a combination of historical references from the 80s and 90s that everybody would get, and then modern expressions too. But through it all we tried to show that there was a fun, disruptive, challenging heart at the heart of Pepsi that you could engage with at any age range, at any stage and any generation.

Laura: A timeless spirit

Nick: Yeah! So trying to find a way to communicate that timeless spirit through a combination of nostalgic references and more modern references. But where the brand had been before was that it had lost sight of what that timeless spirit was, and it just thought it was about the timely expression of cool things. And if you lose that connection — that to me was where we lost a lot of our core consumers.

Adam: That’s a really revealing and insightful take on a lot of what we saw happen with Pepsi post that advert. Are you able to share some of the other changes — the logo and the packaging — and what that created in terms of the strategy of Pepsi that we see today?

Nick: Yes. So I think another thing we had sort of run away from was just celebrating the flavour. I think we were embarrassed by the fact that it was a soda, embarrassed by the nostalgia that we had. And I think in 2017 and 2018 we just leaned back into that and said — you should never be embarrassed about those things, those are some of the things that make the brand good. It’s polarising, some people love it and some people don’t, but you’ve got to lean into the heart of what the brand is all about.
So we fundamentally went back to celebrating that timeless spirit of the brand and the product itself. You really then saw that first in above-the-line communication, but then even in things like our restaurant and food service ads — we sort of just leaned back into the fact that fundamentally this is a really great-tasting, slightly sweeter product than Coke, and unashamedly did that.

And the logo to me was a great example. It launched after I left but we worked on it extensively while I was still on the team. And it really came from this recognition that the logo — which I think was from the early 2000s or the late 90s — had almost become a bit apologetic. It had lost some of this connectivity. So we had consumers just draw the Pepsi logo — it’s the classic thing, you’ve seen Heinz do it, lots of people do it. But what was powerful is they all drew the sort of 1970s and 1980s logo. Almost nobody drew the current logo — which was about 20 years old at that point — whether they were people who’d been with the brand 40, 50, 60 years, or Gen Z who’d probably never seen the old version in store.
There was a recognition that we needed to go back to the heart of that. And I remember sitting in a focus group with one of our senior leaders, watching some of our core consumers. We were just testing out some different directions for packaging, and we had this logo design that was very similar to, certainly reminiscent of, the old logo. And you just saw people go “oh my God, this is like the old logo.” You could feel — when you’re in a piece of qualitative research, you can feel the energy go up.

Adam: I felt the same when I saw the rebrand. I felt exactly the same — I was like “oh wow, the old one’s back.”

Nick: What I thought was nice about the way they did it is they borrowed very heavily on those old design cues — very consciously trying to reconnect with the core consumer. But they decided to do the wordmark in a much more bold way. They even made it much bigger on pack — it sort of expands over the edge of the can or the bottle. So what I think they did really nicely — again — is that they went back with the attitude of “let’s not be ashamed of the timeless spirit of this brand and the nostalgia of this brand, but how do we carefully reinvent that and use it to express the bold spirit of the brand in a way that also feels more contemporary?”

For most big brands — Pepsi being a prime example — finding that right balance between leveraging nostalgia but not being old-fashioned, between being timeless and timely — that’s always the balancing act they need to manage.

Laura: I wanted to move on to more about Cadbury. We’ve talked about some advertising which felt like bad luck, but there was obviously a lot of Cadbury advertising that was very celebrated, won a lot of awards, from an outsider’s point of view was ticking all the boxes. I want to hear a bit more about how that was on the inside.

Nick: As we know there was the famous gorilla advert that sort of reset expectations of all advertising forever — unfortunately. And I think at the time it was almost a problem of good luck — it was an incredible piece of advertising, but it almost trapped the team into a formula view of how advertising needed to work.

And it came at that point in time — the late 2000s into the 2010s — when the search for breakthrough, for cut-through, for how to grab consumers’ attention and create likes and shares, was really starting to come to the fore. So in its moment it wasn’t the wrong piece of advertising — it was an incredibly powerful piece. But when I joined, one of the things we talked about a lot was the problem it created. It was almost a victim of its own success — it created this paradigm that we had to follow. And every piece of advertising we did after that, nothing quite delivered on that same level of surprise. It was just a pure case of diminishing returns. The team was incredibly brave, but also just very lucky that that first advert was so powerful.

Laura: Lightning in a bottle.

Nick: Exactly. And the challenge was it didn’t really have any essence of Cadbury in it. The idea of joyfulness — sure. But there was nowhere to go, nowhere to expand that theme and continue it over time. That was by far the biggest problem.

And then the team quickly realised that while the idea of the joyful feeling you get from chocolate wasn’t wrong per se, it was lacking something. It felt a bit one-dimensional. And clearly was one-dimensional in terms of how it was being executed — the team were really struggling, not just through advertising but below the line as well, to work out how to communicate this. What’s my brief? Because it’s so wide ranging.

But I think most importantly, the biggest issue was that it wasn’t really unique to Cadbury. It was very generic to the category. There was nothing particularly unique and it wasn’t really linked into the purpose of the brand at all.

So I think in 2017 and 2018 the team just took a real step back and said — something wasn’t really working from a marketing communications standpoint. And from a brand and business standpoint the business was suffering as well. So again, I think the change-context moment was the business struggling, and the team were just almost running out of steam on the advertising side.

So the team took a step back — and again, reminiscent of the Pepsi example — they went back and said “what is it that’s at the heart of this brand, of Cadbury Dairy Milk?” You’ll know the glass and a half of milk — that’s the heart of the Cadbury brand. And they said let’s go back to the history of this brand. And fundamentally this is a brand that’s actually about generosity. It’s about giving a little extra. And they were like — oh, there’s something really powerful in that. It feels true to the category, it links into the idea of the pleasure of the category, but it’s also unique — or it speaks to the product truth of Cadbury Dairy Milk — and it’s something the brand can really stand behind. Because there’s a legacy within Cadbury itself, this rich seam of generosity that you can actually really get behind and focus on.
And I think a big part of that was then finding a way to communicate it. Because you could think — well that sounds really boring, that sounds really dull, how are we going to communicate that in a way that’s going to cut through? And I think when they came back with this idea of generosity, what the team realised is that actually the power of understated human storytelling can break through just as well as shouting loud and having an 800-pound gorilla in the room.

In fact there was one I saw a couple of months ago just before I left — the team, I think it was in Malaysia or Indonesia, looking at dementia. Thinking about how do we tell a story that will also speak to the many many people in the world going through this with an older parent? And they created just an incredible piece of communication which made me cry as well — it’s about a mum and her daughter reminiscing about the past, with Cadbury Dairy Milk being the trigger that sparks the mum’s memories. Just what an incredible way to talk about a very difficult topic, but actually in a very authentic way, through a simple piece of chocolate that can trigger these memories.

Adam: The other one that gets me is the Quaker Oats advert — I think it might be Quaker Canada. It’s basically this child growing up and he always has a bowl of Quaker with his dad. It shows the two of them getting older, and obviously at some point the dad’s not there anymore. You’re absolutely right. Sometimes you can just find that human truth linked to a product and it can just bring up a lot of memories and nostalgia for that brand in that moment.

Nick: Right, and I think because you’d gone from putting gorillas on screen and having crazy kids to this very dramatically different looking feel — obviously it was a journey, it wasn’t just from A to B — but I think showing some of that content and seeing the emotional reaction of the internal team to that cntnet, then they could say “yes, It goes back to what you said Laura, this feels like Cadbury, this feels like Pepsi, this just feels right to me as a brand owner as well as to a consumer.”

And I think it just goes back to that power of very emotional storytelling done in the right way. Because every brand, every team and every organisation is different, and yet many of us sit through presentations every day — internal, external — and there’s not an ounce of storytelling in them. And yet it is the most human thing in the world to persuade and inspire. We’ve been doing it for millennia — tens of millennia — we’ve been telling stories to tell the next generation what to do, to stay away from the tigers, to eat this thing and not eat that thing. Our entire cultural history, wherever we come from in the world, is made up of stories and parables and tales and poems, and they’re all about stories. And I think it’s sad that corporate life forgets that that’s actually the way to drive persuasion and communication in many cases.

Laura: I couldn’t agree more

Adam: Nick, It’s been so good to have you on the podcast, thank you so much for coming on. Best of luck with all the changes coming and with your new venture.

Nick: Thanks, and good to see you all again — it’s been a lot of fun.

Laura: Real pleasure to see you Nick, thanks.

Laura: Wow. Well what I loved about that was Nick’s ability to really set out the stall and champion the power of qual — not only talking about what is unsaid in conversations, reading the mood and dynamics, but also lots of inspiration about how to navigate that in the business. How to storytell in the business, evoking a feeling that gives meaning to data and makes people energised and pulling in the same direction.

Adam: Absolutely. And the fact that it became 50% of his role — I mean, that just shows you something. And in the case of Cadbury with the 800-pound gorilla — that’s a really exciting advert and it won lots of awards, but ultimately you do need to come back to what is the reason people are going to buy chocolate. Yes, it’s great to capture attention, but how are we going to sell more chocolate bars? And something like generosity can provide lots of different layers for a long-standing advertising campaign to come off the back of that.

Laura: Yeah. To me it’s about precision of terms. Because yes, chocolate absolutely brings joy and that is very true and very exciting, but if you gave that as a brief to a category manager or someone trying to bring it to life in a retail environment, it can take you in all sorts of places that are very far from the brand. When you link to generosity, you’re not only linking to very specific occasions and a very specific mood — you link back to the product, you link back to that heart of “they’ve always given a little bit more.” And I think that’s really interesting from an emotional perspective, but frankly also from a functional perspective. When you’re going up against private label you need those rational RTBs to give meaning to the more emotional levers. So yeah, really fascinating example of how precision of terms and really understanding what your drivers are is so effective.

Adam: 100%. And it was great to hear him talk about how well that translated across the world in different markets as well.

Laura: Yes. Yeah, well great stuff — see you next week.

Laura: See you next week.

Adam: Thanks for listening. If you’d love to hear more from marketers, entrepreneurs and business leaders about how to use the art of persuasion to drive your business forward, then make sure you’re following the podcast in your favourite podcast app. And just one last ask from us — this is a new podcast and we’d love it if you could be persuaded to help us spread the word by telling somebody else about it, leaving us a review, or even better sharing an episode on social media. Search The Forge on LinkedIn.