Life of Design: Mauro Porcini

Chief Design Officer at PepsiCo

Colin Campbell

Published in

Life of Thought

11 min readOct 30, 2017

How did you begin working in the wonderful world of design?

When I was a kid I had two passions. The first was the world of literature and philosophy, which was infused by my mother and the second was the world of art, architecture and drawing infused by my father. As I grew up, I had to decide what kind of university to attend. I had these two potential paths and I decided to pursue architecture because I was thinking that it would give me more opportunities for work, for a job but the two passions were on the same level, literature and architecture, and then a month before I applied to architecture school, a friend of mine told me that they just opened the first university on “design” in Italy. Hard to believe because there are so many famous Italian designers, but all those designers are either frustrated architects or engineers so the dedicated university didn’t exist and thats when I decided to try that and I found something that was my dream job and I didn’t even realize they were teaching something like this, so that’s how I started!

Many designers become designers because they love to do things. They’re very manual or they’re good at drawing and there are not many people that combine the passion for human science, (i,e philosophy to literature to psychology, with the ability of doing things as well, with crafting things and drawing and I think it’s a magic combination because at the end of the day, design and literature or philosophy is all about deeply understand human nature. Especially the work of philosophy as you translate an understanding of human nature into theoretical constructs, frameworks, and something that helps you make sense of what you observe. This is what design is about at the end of the day. I’ve been using a lot of it because on top of loving the work of philosophy and literature, I love to write. I write, I read, and we use a lot of this to make sense of what I was reading in design and to articulate the various designs to people, to my companies and to my partners or in conferences or in a variety of different ways.

2. What is the purpose of design?

Obviously this is the first question in my philosophical mind that I’ve been asking myself for many, many years. What is the purpose of design? My answer is from the perspective of a practitioner so it comes from experience, and what I’ve done in the past 20 years, but abstracting into something that is broader. Essentially, if you think about what we do, we solve problems. … We first of all understand a need and want into design, (i.e the needs and wants of people) and then we translate those needs and wants into solutions for them and those solutions become products and brands and services. We create experiences, we add, to the life of people, moments of fun, of happiness, of convenience, of safety, and value depending on what you design.

If you design a luxury fashion item you have a certain kind of value to add. If you design in architecture you have other values. Essentially, you have moments of some form of value as a experience, product or service from fun to safety, from health awareness to convenience, into the lives of people. This is the purpose of design.

Now, all of these moments are fragments of a broader social happiness. The nexus of design is to create positive moments. If we’re able to add positive moments into the lives of people within the constraints and boundaries of what we do, of our jobs, the brands we work on, the products we work on, if we’re all united by this vision, we can really create a better world, a happier world, a world that is more sustainable from an ecological standpoint, from a visual standpoint, and from a social standpoint. This is the purpose of design, starting from needs and wants of people, crafting the solution, and arriving in a collective effort to build a better world.

3. How would you describe the intent (mission) behind PepsiCo’s design?

The first message is it’s a broad, broad portfolio, so if you link it back to the purpose of design, because I really believe that purpose, that’s what I’m trying to do with the platform that PepsiCo gives me.

Now, there are multiple dimensions of this platform, so I can act on the portfolio products that we have and I can act on the brands that we have that often transcend the idea of “food and beverage” to becomes popular culture like Pepsi or Dew or Doritos, or Gatorade in the world of sports.

I’m lucky enough to work with brands that really work at the intersection of product that create culture by activating the platforms of music, sports, fashion, art and design.

One key theme is the world of today and the world of tomorrow. What are the products of the future in food and beverage and with society? What are the brands of the future for our company in that society that is about to come?

One of the most relevant examples is the launch of LifeWater, this brand of water is “premium-mass,” so it’s premium but it’s still for the mass market. Every bottle is a piece of art in collaboration with a different artist. Every three months we change the art so it’s a platform where the product keeps evolving and where we use the resources that we have to support the art community and the design community and the product is all about health and wellness. It’s water.

That is one example.

4. What’s one thing you believe about design that most others don’t?

Well, if we think of design … You have design that is the output of what we do and then you have design thinking, that is the way we think as designers. The combination of the two, design and design thinking, is what I believe that most don’t, I believe that design can actually create a better world.

Now, why don’t other people think this way?

The new designers don’t because they don’t know what designing’s about, so they focus just exclusively on the dimension of styling and aesthetic most of the time, so designing something beautiful and cool.

Even the experienced designers often don’t understand the potential of the discipline because most of the time are focused on one dimension. They design a beautiful chair. They design a beautiful piece of furniture. They design beautiful packaging, but very rarely do they have the possibility, and sometimes the ability to see broader than that and understand what is the social value of that kind of thinking to create a better world?

There are obviously people that think in this way but they are usually more rare to encounter or they are people that are in positions that allow them to think in that way and that have the resources and the access to people in society to try to push the discipline and the community of design in that direction.

5. What key problems are often overlooked by design?

We don’t look holistically at a business. Imagine you are a company. You go to a design firm and they’re going to give you the best solution, the best product that you can imagine for specific need of people in the society. But what we often miss as “designers” is all the other dimensions of what makes sense for the company, for the business model of the company, for the processes of the company, for the culture of the company, manufacturability combined with profitability.

A series of all the variables, that allows the product to be launched in the market. How many times have you heard designers say things like, “Gosh, we designed the best possible product for people and this company doesn’t get it. They’re not launching it. They’re stupid. They don’t get it.”

But the reality is that the ideal product has to be an innovation that gets to market and is successful in the market.

So you need to see those things that happen between the idea and the launch and then post-launch that often designers overlook. Sometimes that means that these certain kinds of companies, especially the big, data-driven companies like PepsiCo, have ideas die in the process and they haven’t reached the market.

Other times, most of the time, smaller companies they reach the market because there is less of a scientific approach that killed them before, but it played into the market. Sometimes the failure is there but it’s not obvious.

There are multiple products in the luxury world that sell almost nothing but they are where they are because anyway they build a kind of activational image for the brand and it’s fine like this.

Then actually there is a value for them, but once again, why is it so important for the product to be successful? Not just because you want the company to make money. Obviously all these companies, from small to big, they are all profit organizations. They need to make money, but it’s not that. There is an ethical message that is even more important than that.

If our mission as designers is to build a better world, a happier world, a more sustainable world, then we need these products to be as successful as possible in the market because that means they’re going to reach as many people as possible and they’re going to impact as many lives as possible, and they’re going to make the world as happy as possible.

If you reach very few people, we won’t make the world happy.

We need these products to be successful and this is the strong message I often deliver also and people of these multinational corporations.

They often are seen by, especially by the younger designers like these “bad, evil corporations” and the reality is that first of all these corporations are made by people.

They, very often, want to do the right thing but they also need to create something that makes sense, that is profitable, blah, blah, blah.

Because all designers, they want to work within this corporation to push the corporation to do the right thing and the value of working at a corporation is that you can reach so many people. Millions and millions and millions of people, and so if your mission is the one of creating a better world, what a better platform than the one the giant corporations can give you to change the world?

6. What is the most difficult thing about design?

I think it’s to balance everything I said before, so to balance the solution that is available to people with a solution that is available to a company. That means that to balance something that is right for people with manufacturability, innovation, and all the different variables to take it through the market, but then on top of this there is another dimension that is to take more risks.

That’s one of the biggest problems for big corporations. What kind of risk you are willing to take? The more you change, the more you disrupt, and the more the risk, and especially in big companies where the scale is big, to change, an existing product, or an existing brand, may be a huge, huge risk of hundreds of millions of dollars or billions of dollars.

What is the risk that you are willing to take? That’s the most difficult thing when you design. If you really want to disrupt, you need to take risks, and that’s not easy.

7. When is design “done”?

Never. Meaning that … I mean if you think about [Buda 00:25:25] 3M, my previous company now in PepsiCo, we have this new product introduction system, MPI, or MPV, depending on the company, but essentially the different gates the new product test through. It essentially goes from idea to prototype to visibility, scale up the development, scale up launch and post-launch. Post-launch is the magic word.

Essentially post-launch means that you develop this idea, you launch it and post-launch is the space in which you monitor the idea. You monitor the product, how it’s performing in the market, what it’s doing, what is working, what is not, and you’re ready to tweak it. Essentially you’re ready, eventually, or you take insights to start the process again from idea all the way to post-launch. So you could design this idea to post-launch in a linear way or you could design it actually in a simple way and after post-launch you take the insights to start again with a new idea.

That’s why I say design is never done because even when you are finished with your product and you launch it, a good designer is there monitoring what’s going on, what is working, what is not working both to tweak their idea eventually but also to generate new insights for new ideas. It’s never done.

8. What does the future of design look like to you?

I think it’s going to be a good future. There is, today, more and more awareness about the potential of design brought into the design community itself, because I think we are underestimating the power of these tools and mindset, and then obviously in the business community. The only thing that is still unclear of what is going to happen in the future is if we as design community will own innovation and brand experience building or if we will be beholden to the business people who continue to own that and we will be more of a super function, but even in that case we’ll be more powerful.

They will give us more opportunities to really express ourselves and leverage our culture and our tools and our mindsets in the best possible way to impact society in a positive way.

It’s a positive future, and why is all of this happening? Why is it so much awareness? Well, because we live in a world that is radically changing because of the role of the internet, of the global market, social media, low cost manufacturing, new technologies, all of this is creating a situation where essentially the big challenges are how to understand how to actually create a better world. How to do it very, very fast and how to create new solutions for people at the speed of light and how to do it in an authentic and consistent way across every research point and across every market and geography.

Design plays a key role in all of this, and that’s why the business community cannot do brand building and brand innovation without design anymore. Some companies get it and for instance, in the case of PepsiCo that’s why we’re here. Some others don’t get it yet, but they will need to get it because the market, customers, consumers, society, will just ask for it and they will need to adapt.