Data and flexibility are the new ingredients in modern marketing that even CPG conglomerate PepsiCo is following.
Chief Marketing Officer Mark Kirkham discussed abandoning the old mentality of “spray and pray” for launching the brand’s Prebiotic Cola at the POSSIBLE 2026 conference in Miami in April.
“It used to be easy to just run a big TV ad and people came buying it,” Kirkham said. “Now when you think of omnichannel environments, you think about unique product benefits. You have to have different messaging.”
Pepsi Launches Prebiotic Cola Online
Instead, PepsiCo launched its new product exclusively online, including on Walmart’s retail media network Walmart Connect on Black Friday 2025. The product sold out within 24 hours and had 80% positive sentiment, Kirkham said. The goal was to create the initial demand and gather data on the new product before the official retail launch in February. PepsiCo got both.
“The learning we got in just that one weekend fundamentally allowed us to shift messaging, shift targeting, shift price pack architecture thinking, allowing us to sell it in back to [Walmart] and to other retailers on the learnings that we took from that,” Kirkham said. “And that is modern day marketing. The idea of spray and pray doesn’t work anymore.”
PepsiCo received household data back to understand who purchased the product, such as latent Pepsi customers or consumers who typically purchase from a competitor. That data allows the brand to be much more dynamic, Kirkham said.
“If I can actually take the data from what you share and actually on the fly, immediately change messaging and then measure that, that’s real success,” he said.
Pepsi found that both of its flavors performed well, but cherry vanilla out performed in sales, he said. The data also uncovered the right message for each target persona. For example, some groups prefer the main message about the benefits of a prebiotic, while previous Pepsi customers prefer a message that leads with the product still tasting like Pepsi. The brand then used the data from Walmart Connect to target those shoppers.
Pepsi Takes Walmart Connect Marketing Learnings National
The information it learned from the online launch allowed Pepsi’s marketing team to change its communication, its header cards and pricing strategies, when it launched at retail stores a few months later, Kirkham said. Pepsi made all of the creative in house, which helps to quickly change tactics.
“We took the learning from Walmart Connect and the Walmart shopper and applied that to our national programs across all retailers, and we’re still learning,” Kirkham said.
This is the opposite strategy of how brands launched products just a few years ago, when they would launch in retail first and then take those learnings online, Kirkham said.
“Getting your mindset differently: thinking omni from the start, thinking multi-channel, and then thinking dynamic messaging, I think is the biggest learning we took,” he said.
This all boils down to flexibility and being able to change quickly because of what the data is saying.
“The only way you’re going to be successful is to be flexible,” Kirkham said. “Flexible on how your media plan, flexible in terms of your launch strategy, flexible in terms of your messaging strategy. And by the way, we used to not be that way — we were highly linear.”
Since Pepsi launched Prebiotic Cola on Black Friday, it debuted two other products first online. They weren’t on a huge scale but they were successful because they did a great job of telling a story, Kirkham said.
