This is David Meltzer with Entrepreneurs the Playbook and I have a special treat for you on this episode of the Playbook. I'm joined with Mark Kirkham, SVP and Chief Marketing Officer of Pepsi Co International Beverages.

Welcome to the Playbook Mark.

Hey, thanks so much. Appreciate it, Dave. Nice to meet you and great to be on the show.

Well, it's great to have you because I want to talk about the old traditional parts of marketing of how to build a brand, how to build an iconic brand that awareness ranges around the world when people see the name in the logo.

They know exactly what they're going to get, who they're going to get and how they're going to get it, which is, you know, sometimes lost today in this virtual amplified perpetual content type of world.

I want to take us back to some basics in iconic brand building. What things apply today, Mark, with all the amplification in individual silos, unlike the traditional three media silos that existed when you probably started your career.

What are some of the basics that still hold true today to build an iconic brand like Pepsi?

Look, I think the two basics that have to hold through our authenticity and relevance.

And I say those generic terms in many ways, but actually they're probably more important today than they ever have been.

And the reason is because the media landscape is so fragmented because how you build brands is in many ways so different from where it was 15, 20 years ago.

You know, if you think about the definition of the word iconic, it's all about imagery, you know, it goes back to Latin roots and statues and what made something an icon.

And in the history of marketing, it was that visual representation of a brand.

And many of us got away from doing very simple things to represent that visually on pack on TV and store what have you for a long long time and it worked just great, you know, to identify with and deliver on what people would say is make something iconic.

But in today's world, it's it can't just be those things.

And I think it's creates great opportunity and also some challenges. So for me, if you are building brands in authentic ways that are relevant to a new generation of consumers, then you can be iconic.

But if all you do is do the old stuff the same way and expect, you know, the same results, I think that's the paradigm shift is what makes something iconic is fundamentally the same, but how it becomes iconic is actually very different.

So how you engage consumers, how you tell stories, how you relate to people, how you drive relevance, it's just different. And I think as marketers, we have to evolve and adapt to be iconic and help establish or in some cases reestablish the iconicity of our brands.

Yeah, and using that term iconic and a fairly liberal way, I've been blessed to build some iconic sports brands, like the breakman Steve Young and more moons, the Linux Lewis of Andrew Holyfields of the world.

And I have found by studying physics, believe it or not, that I have learned the energy of this idea of building a community.

When we look at iconic brands, there's a certain community that Pepsi is the lead of and that is in a frequency or vibration of that neighborhood or community and frequencies and vibration when you talk about and your branding is about staying in tune with the next generation.

And to aggregate our community, we want exponentiality of outcomes and growth of that community and we want that to accelerate and we have to stay on top of the neighborhood that we're attracting in this brand building and this iconic community as well as an iconic brand.

It seems to me and I've studied Pepsi and I've studied what you do that you have a keen sense of the energy behind the brand, not just the clever communication of the brand or the coloring and the iconic people that you associate, but it seems as if you really understand a frequency of your community and you stay on top of that in ahead of what's going on today to resonate.

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