Overview:
The Platform Lead – Functional Fuel is the prime mover in building the most strategically important incremental growth vector of PepsiCo’s 2030 vision in Europe. This senior leadership role holds end-to-end accountability for shaping, scaling, and delivering the Functional Fuel platform — spanning Energy, Hydration, Enhancers, and Alcohol — and for creating a step-change in the way PepsiCo competes in these categories.
This role is responsible for category creation within existing high-growth spaces, ensuring that PepsiCo carves out a distinctive and differentiated position even though it is not first to market. It carries full accountability for defining the platform strategy, delivering explicit revenue and profit targets, and commanding control of central and market level A&M budgets (c. $100MM) across insights, campaigns, and e-commerce platforms, while influencing market-level investment allocation.
The Platform Lead will also ensure cohesion with the Global IB teams and act as Europe’s representative voice into global SBT (Strategic Brand Team) forums, while chairing the European Strategic Brands Team for Gatorade. With direct influence over pricing, portfolio architecture, and pack strategy, this role is both a creator of above-market platforms and a deployer of executional excellence through clusters and bottlers. Success will directly determine PepsiCo’s ability to future-proof its portfolio, win new generations of consumers, and deliver sustainable, profitable growth.
Responsibilities:
Strategic Leadership & Category Creation
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Serve as the prime mover of Functional Fuel in Europe, building it as an incremental growth vector and a central pillar of the 2030 vision.
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Lead the creation of distinctive, differentiated positions in Energy, Hydration, Enhancers, and Alcohol to drive net new occasions, cohorts, and revenue streams.
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Represent Europe into global IB forums to ensure brand cohesion and global-to-local alignment, while chairing the European Strategic Brands Team for Gatorade.
Revenue, Profitability & Budget Control
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Deliver explicit revenue, profit, and market share growth targets tied directly to incremental platform expansion.
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Command control of c. $100MM in A&M to fund in market media, as well as above-market campaigns, insights, and e-commerce platforms that unlock new growth rather than cannibalisation.
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Influence cluster leads to re-shape investment allocation toward incremental opportunities consistent with platform strategy.
Innovation, Pricing & Portfolio Architecture
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Lead the innovation agenda with a pipeline designed to create incremental demand spaces, ensuring PepsiCo enters and grows categories beyond core.
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Own pricing, portfolio, and pack architecture as tools to capture new consumers, premiumise the category, and expand overall category value.
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Drive adjacency building (powders, supplements, functional formats) to broaden the platform and deliver sustained incremental growth.
E-commerce & DTC Leadership
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Establish e-commerce and direct-to-consumer as core growth engines, unlocking new distribution, recruiting new cohorts, and ensuring PepsiCo captures incremental value from emerging channels.
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Develop digital-first models that deliver scale while expanding the total business.
Cross-Functional Orchestration & Bottler Alignment
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Interface with IB/global teams via SBT framework as a key member
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Act as the unifying senior leader across marketing, commercial, and bottler organisations to execute a single, incremental growth agenda.
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Align with bottlers and partners to expand footprint into new channels and occasions, ensuring execution drives system-wide incremental growth.
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Codify and embed a Europe-wide playbook to replicate success and scale incremental impact.
Talent, Influence & Succession
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Build a team with proven international expertise in energy, sports, and functional beverages, capable of delivering step-change growth.
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Operate as a brand builder with commercial acumen, able to inspire senior stakeholders around the vision for Functional Fuel as an incremental vector.
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Position the role as a clear feeder into CMO/CCO succession pipelines, underlining its strategic and system-critical nature.
Qualifications:
- Minimum 15 years experience in beverages or related categories (Sports drinks or Energy)
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Exceptional analytical and strategic thinking skills
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Strong expertise and skills in Brand Purposeful positioning, Total Connections Planning and 360 Brand communications
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Strong collaboration skills and ability to influence a broad set of senior stakeholders
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Experience in sports drinks subcategories
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Leadership and influencing
Differentiating Competencies Required:
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Global mindset with passion for understanding cultures and varying business dynamics
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Ability to lead in a highly matrixed environment
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Passion for learning and bias for action
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Abillity to multi-task, flex intellectual muscles at the same time
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Strong communicator and open-minded thinker
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Strong collaborator and listener
