2 Legacy Brands Adapted During the Pandemic to Grow Their Revenue. Here's How

Here’s a showcase of two brands from starkly different industries that leveraged strategic digital tactics to stay agile in difficult times—but ultimately stuck to the basics by listening to and knowing their audience.

How CMOs Can Use Customer Voice to Build Their Brands

PepsiCo’s data journey

The pandemic caused steep and rapid behavior shifts in consumers, especially in the food and beverage industry. But the successful brands are the ones that embrace change, knowing it’s the only constant.

PepsiCo CCO Mike Del Pozzo navigated the pandemic’s foggy terrain in search of growth, using the golden currency of the digital age—data. But he wanted no middleman. He wanted the brand to be self-reliant.

So PepsiCo created pepviz, a proprietary data practice, to analyze the behaviors of their shopper on a hyperlocal scale and take a deeper dive into what consumers are buying at the store.

Here are some staggering behavioral shifts PepsiCo discovered:

1. 70% of shoppers will continue online grocery shopping.
2. Covid-19 caused travel behaviors to shift in favor of road trips.
3. People turned to snacks and beverages as a form of comfort, with late-night and after-dinner snacking accounting for 25% of all snacking.
4. Virtual working environments reduced coffee and breakfast trips on the way to work, which caused a 12% spike in demand for caffeinated and energy drinks.
5. Most consumers will only shop at smaller convenience stores to avoid crowds at larger grocery stores, ultimately leading those smaller stores to be seen as frequent grocery-focused shops.

Now, when they aim to launch new products or reach new demographics, the brand starts small with an in-market test, using A/B testing via store sampling and cross-referencing the results against a control group.

PepsiCo took advantage of this period and the data it yielded. The brand created new products to satiate consumers’ desires all while targeting hyperlocal mini-tests to avoid supply chain bottlenecks, resulting in sales and shares numbers soaring.

Chanel’s exclusive digital tactics

Chanel, owned by the elusive Wertheimer family, generates more than $10 billion in annual revenue. But how can a fashion brand skip selling online during a pandemic and still grow?

Bruno Pavlovsky, the luxury brand’s president of Fashion, was able to pull it off with the help of Chanel’s current creative director Virginie Viard, appointed in 2020.

Pavlovsky believes that physical boutiques and live fashion shows are still the way of connecting with customers. He insists that regardless of any crisis, Chanel’s way of doing things and communicating their story starts with their fashion shows, adamant about the fact that customers are intrigued by it and very engaged with it.

He claims that in-person sales work for them because it’s how the brand works—consumers touching fabrics with their own hands—but more importantly, because they discovered that when a client books a meeting desiring a specific item, they often leave with another.

Even though other luxury fashion brands leveraging ecommerce saw sales soar during the pandemic, Chanel refrains from selling ready-to-wear clothing and handbags online.

But where Chanel did decide to focus and innovate was their live fashion shows. The shows, once reserved for industry insiders, are now increasingly designed to engage consumers watching online.

While the in-person experience remains pre-pandemic—or, some would say, prehistoric—the brand’s story is still amplified by leveraging digital tactics. As for missing online clients, Pavlovsky insists that, while they might indeed lose out on them, the brand’s true fan base are those who enjoy the in-person experience—and this consumer base is growing, with 2020 growth in the double digits.

Chanel’s base tactic, storytelling—a key factor in any marketing or brand’s arsenal—was not changed. It’s still their fashion shows. They just pivoted to accommodate the brand’s loyalists via digital media.

Consumers over everything

PepsiCo studies audience behavioral shifts and adapts at their whim. Chanel—knowing its audience through and through—still leveraged online tactics to spread its story and gain new fans. It’s what worked for them for decades and now enabled them to increase sales despite insisting on store-only shopping.

In 2022, consumers are driving decision-making, even for legacy brands, regardless of the sector. Digital marketing is the Swiss Army knife to help you achieve it.

But ultimately, these two approaches remind us of some repeating marketing motifs: To stay in our area of competence, understand our industry and, most importantly, our customers.

Getting Closer to Consumers Through In-House Data With Pepsi’s CMO