Refreshing employer branding: webinar insights from PepsiCo and Papirfly

In today’s competitive job market, with global companies trying to maintain a consistent reputation across all markets, a strong employer brand is more crucial than ever. Using brand and content management solutions have become essential when scaling and streamlining branding efforts.

Recently, Papirfly collaborated with PepsiCo to deliver an insightful webinar on the evolution of PepsiCo’s employer brand. Featuring Sally Elbassir from PepsiCo and Espen Getz Harstad, Chief Branding Officer at Papirfly, the session highlighted strategic innovations and practical approaches to maintaining brand consistency and empowering employees – anywhere in the world.

Strategic collaboration and innovative employer branding

The discussion underscored the strategic innovations PepsiCo implemented to transform its employer brand. By establishing clear visual identity guidelines, PepsiCo ensured brand consistency and empowered its teams to create customised, cohesive brand assets.

Having worked historically with each market or region working with their own agencies and partners, creating assets with consistency was difficult. “Maintaining brand consistency was just so challenging,” noted Sally Elbassir from PepsiCo. “All it takes is a little tweak here and a little tweak there, and then suddenly your brand doesn’t look like a brand anymore.”

PepsiCo’s challenges and solutions

One of the key challenges PepsiCo faced was balancing budget constraints while maintaining a cohesive global brand identity. Sally Elbassir explained, “Every market has a different marketing budget that they can allocate. So with Papirfly, we ensured that folks could create assets that are a bit customised but maintain that global brand.”

Empowering employees was another crucial aspect of PepsiCo’s strategy. “With Papirfly, one of the cool things is that it’s a tool everyone feels empowered to use. We made sure that we set it up so folks could take the templates and then create and use them to build assets that are still a bit customised but maintain that global brand,” said Elbassir.

Enhanced asset creation, workflow efficiency and agency collaboration

Papirfly significantly improved on-brand asset creation, transforming how PepsiCo worked with external agencies. Day-to-day assets can now be created in-house without the external back and forth of review and sign-off, releasing agency budget to be used on more specialised creative work. The platform optimised campaign execution and workflow management, ensuring timely and effective communication. 

“Papirfly has transformed the way we work with agencies. We can use budgets to focus on the more complex creatives, and with both parties using Papirfly’s DAM, agencies can understand our brand and access and upload preapproved photography and other assets with ease. It’s been a game-changer,” shared Elbassir.

During the Q&A, Espen highlighted the evolving relationship with agencies. “Instead of eliminating agencies, we are focusing on improving collaboration. Papirfly enables us to work better together, with agencies gaining a deeper understanding of our brand and seamlessly contributing to our campaigns.” Sally confirmed, “This collaborative approach has led to more efficient use of our resources and higher quality outputs.”

Enhancing employer brand engagement and activation

Empowering employees to activate the hard-fought results of the employer brand development process has led to a stronger sense of belonging and loyalty, making them feel valued and more connected to PepsiCo’s global brand. Making every employee excited to be a brand ambassador in this way has been pivotal in maintaining brand consistency and reconfirming the positive values and visual identity in PepsiCo’s employer brand.

PepsiCo’s journey to enhance its employer brand showcases a commitment to maintaining a cohesive brand image while allowing for regional customisation. Creating a centralised brand asset management system has significantly streamlined PepsiCo’s employer branding efforts, ensuring consistent and compelling messaging across all markets.

Revolutionising talent attraction and retention strategies 

By centralising brand assets and empowering local teams to create on-brand materials, PepsiCo has revolutionised its talent attraction and retention strategies. This strategic move has enhanced the global brand presence.

As well as improved brand visibility, using the Papirfly Platform for employer branding efforts has ensured potential candidates receive a coherent and engaging narrative about what it means to work at PepsiCo – more effectively attracting top talent and providing a consistent experience for those employees after they are hired.

Strategic insights for employer branding professionals

Employer branding professionals can draw valuable lessons from PepsiCo’s experience:

• Clear visual identity: Establish tight guidelines to maintain brand consistency across all regions.
• Empowered scalability: Equip global and local teams to create on-brand assets instantly, creating agility and saving time.
• Cost efficiency: Balance regional budget constraints while maintaining a global brand identity.

Papirfly’s role in PepsiCo’s success

All of this was possible with Papirfly. By providing tools for centralised brand management, template customisation, and employee empowerment, Papirfly enabled PepsiCo to maintain brand consistency and streamline asset creation processes. This partnership helped them to set a new standard for employer branding excellence.

• Improved brand consistency: Centralised brand guidelines ensured a cohesive brand image.
• Enhanced employee empowerment: Teams felt empowered to create customised, on-brand assets.
• Optimised budget management: Efficient use of regional marketing budgets while maintaining global brand standards.
• Increased talent attraction: A compelling employer brand attracts top talent more effectively.
• Greater employee retention: Empowering employees to share their experiences fostered a more profound sense of belonging and loyalty.

A blueprint for future success

The collaboration between PepsiCo and Papirfly demonstrates the transformative power of strategic employer branding supported by advanced SaaS technology. For companies looking to attract and retain the best talent, the insights shared in this webinar serve as a blueprint for leveraging employee voices to create a compelling and authentic employer brand.

Watch the webinar in full to discover more about how PepsiCo utilised Papirfly’s brand management platform.