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Annual Planning

Set your team and your brand up for success in the coming year with a more efficient and engaging annual planning process. 

Optimize your 2021 annual planning process.

Streamlining PepsiCo's Annual Planning

PepsiCo’s annual planning needed a ground-up reboot that better integrated cultural trends and brand goals and delivered a more efficient and engaging process. The brand teams were tasked with creating soup-to-nuts 2021 marketing plans and big bets for Pepsi, Mountain Dew, LIFEWTR, bubly and Rockstar in the Western United States. By distilling a sea of trends and facilitating a process built for COVID-driven chaos, we helped the teams successfully create flexible brand plans designed to set the business up for success in the coming year.

Trend Development & Research Synthesis

Framing up the landscape for brand teams through cultural trends, brand goals, and consumer research. Each brand team received their own welcome packet tailored to their market and respective brand challenges and global trends needed to understand the landscape moving into 2021. 

“Just wanted to send you a note and thank you for your help with setting up our AOP process this year. We just had our first CMO check in, and I think that the process really helped set up the team for success and to feel prepared.”

- Pepsico  Director of Consumer/Shopper Insights & Innovation

100%
improved

Every post-project survey respondent strongly agreed Current Forward improved their strategic thinking and preparation.

Process Design & Workshop Facilitation

Independent homework was designed to simply and quickly answer the challenges each team faced. This helped streamline subsequent workshops by focusing them on team consensus versus idea generation — a need identified through understanding organizational challenges in an era of COVID-19 uncertainty and chaos.

Planning Output
& Guidance

The output of each team was defined beforehand based on the needs of senior marketing leadership. Guiding teams to a known output from the outset — along with overall process design — dramatically reduced confusion, saved time, and led to a more compelling output.

50%
more efficient

Post-project survey respondents believed this year's AOP process to be 50% more efficient than the previous year's.

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