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Poppi wants to be “culture’s favorite soda.” To do that, the 7-year-old prebiotic soda brand has pushed itself hard on college campuses and social media, further aided by hefty DTC partnerships with platforms like Amazon, and of course, Super Bowl commercials. And while it may take some time to accomplish, PepsiCo clearly also sees its potential.
In March, the OG soda brand for the new generation just bought Poppi for an eye-popping $1.95 billion off the backs of the gut-healthy drink’s marketing-led sales strategy, as outlined by its chief growth and marketing officers, Jeff Rubenstein and Andy Judd, who have identified and executed on these opportunities. Quickly.
“The ability to have a sales and marketing team that can move with that speed has opened up so many opportunities at every customer,” Judd said when explaining how the company can work with large companies like Walmart, while still breaking through with new customers.
With annual sales north of $500 million, up 38x from 2020, Poppi’s 34% market share in the booming functional sodas category is a sign its tactics are working.
Two departments, one brain
Rubenstein and Judd have worked together for over five years. They both said that with time comes trust, familiarity, and the latitude to experiment with the department structure. Rubenstein said that while the revenue and marketing teams at the company are technically separate, they are often in lockstep with one another.
Rubenstein’s 130-person growth department focuses on striking B2B deals with companies like Amazon and Fortnite, while also finding ways to optimize growth from geographic or product-specific trend data.
Judd’s department of 30 marketers focuses on conducting market research, aligning new products and sales strategies with the brand’s identity, and assigning the potential brand value to sales initiatives.
The executives expressed that these teams often work together to unlock opportunity insights, build on brand, and capitalize on online trends.
“I would say that [communication] is hourly, not daily or weekly. Conversations are starting at 7 a.m.or even earlier, 6 a.m., and they continue all day until midnight,” Rubenstein said.
Frequent communication between those two departments has been essential to the brand’s success, so versatility remains top of mind during the hiring process.
“You’ve got to recruit the right kind of folks that have a sales mindset if they’re in marketing, or have a marketing mindset if they’re in sales,” Rubenstein said.
With executive experience in both sales and marketing, Rubenstein believes that he is able to lead the growth team with a better understanding of marketing strategy, which allows everyone to work cohesively.
In practice, that marketing-led sales strategy is exemplified by the company’s “college program.” The program identifies ambassadors on college campuses to help market Poppi and was started in response to marketing data that suggested potential for expansion among Gen Z audiences in particular.
Campus ambassador programs are nothing new, but because Poppi’s growth and marketing teams are so aligned they were able to see outsized results that benefitted both departments. According to Poppi data, after a campus event at the University of Alabama in 2021, there was a 28% increase in units sold to young adult audiences in the area.
The results suggest that for all the buzzy success Poppi has achieved as an online brand, it can still strategically use data to run a classic on-the-ground guerilla marketing playbook to boost sales.
Need for speed
Much like Tom Cruise’s Top Gun character Maverick, Poppi likes to move fast. For example, the sales and marketing teams developed and executed a campaign with influencer Alix Earle in just 16 weeks last spring.
Just before Coachella, Poppi planned to release a new lemon-lime soda. Looking at the influencer landscape, they identified Earle, who now boasts 7.5 million TikTok followers, as aligned perfectly with the brand.
The brand orchestrated an atypical approach and spent its entire Coachella budget on just one influencer. Earle and her friends were given a luxury experience in a heavily Poppi-branded paradise—something Rubenstein said was only possible because of the alignment between growth and marketing teams.
“We like to say that we operate at the intersection of culture and at the speed of culture. And so when things are changing organizationally or culturally or with a consumer cohort, we evolve with it in real time,” Rubenstein said.
Earle’s festival content, over 20 Poppi-sponsored videos, drove over 50 million impressions in three days and a 200% sales spike.
Culture over data
Judd said when marketing is given some agency within sales decisions, protecting Poppi’s core value propositions, like healthiness and the ability to stay up-to-date with trends, becomes easier.
Take for example, Gen Z’s desire for new products in the beverage and food space. While Judd said this demand opens the opportunity to quickly increase sales by introducing new products, overdoing it could damage marketing efforts.
“All of a sudden your catalog’s like 200 products deep. It’s wildly complex; supply chain is your worst enemy,” Judd said.
Instead the departments have agreed to prioritize “purity” over performance, an internal value metric that helps Poppi prioritize its brand value against overselling in a way that can alter the appeal of the drink.
“That’s the balance of this purity versus performance dynamic, where it’s Jeff and I are able, in that deep trust, to keep each other in check to things like, ‘I’m not giving you cranberry fizz all year round,’ because that is such a powerful brand moment that if we do that, we will undermine and erode that demand signal.”
Now, the question becomes: Can Poppi’s revenue team and strategy fit within Pepsi’ structure?