Learn From Them

From Adi Ignatius’s interview with Nooyi on design thinking, Harvard Business Review, September 2015 (pp. 80-85). Nooyi was then CEO of PepsiCo. Ignatius asked how much she listens to consumers and whether they even know what they want; these two sentences open her answer.

She reaches for SunChips. The original chip was one inch by one inch, the size dictated by Pepsi’s cutting mold. In focus groups, consumers told Pepsi they had moved to a competing product because it was bite-size. That was the answer: make ours bite-size. The signal was clean.

Acting on the signal meant abandoning the manufacturing assumption that had given the chip its shape, replacing the mold, changing the line. “I don’t care if our mold can only cut one inch by one inch,” Nooyi tells Ignatius, and the rule that follows: “We don’t sell products based on the manufacturing we have, but on how our target consumers can fall in love with them.” Consumers had been telling Pepsi this for a while. The mold had been telling Pepsi back. Nooyi was the operator who broke the tie.