The useful thing about a bottle of soda is that nobody needs a meeting to understand it. The difficult thing is that everybody already has a feeling about it. Mark Kirkham works inside that contradiction. As Chief Marketing Officer of PepsiCo Beverages U.S., he is responsible for brands that arrive with decades of memory attached: Pepsi at a restaurant table, Gatorade on a sideline, Mountain Dew beside a game controller. His job is to keep those memories recognizable while giving people a fresh reason to reach for the bottle.
Kirkham's route to this seat took 15 years inside PepsiCo and, before that, an apprenticeship in a category with even less room to maneuver. At Gillette and Procter & Gamble, he worked on Duracell. Batteries were a stern marketing teacher. People do not create many new battery occasions because an ad asked nicely. Demand follows the devices already in the house. The marketer has to make familiar assets carry more weight: the copper top, the black body, the little sounds and cues that make the brand identifiable before anyone reads a word.
He has said that battery assignment made him grow exponentially as a marketer. The lesson appears in his beverage work now: recognizable beats busy. A giant campaign still needs a compact center. A celebrity, however famous, should serve the brand and message. A Super Bowl spot, however discussed, should move the business. Kirkham's phrase for the whole discipline is almost suspiciously modest: “make simple special.”
“The simpler your idea, the more special you can make it.”Mark Kirkham
The coffee shop inside the strategy
Simplicity does not arrive through isolation. Kirkham's method depends on getting close to people whose days do not resemble a corporate calendar. While leading international beverages from Dublin, he asked marketers to spend time with consumers at least once a month. A business trip should include a trade visit and some form of immersion: a restaurant, a gym, a sports match, a place where choices happen without a moderator watching through glass.
In Hanoi, he gathered a group of 18-to-22-year-olds in a coffee shop. They talked about what they liked to eat and drink, and what they watched online. Then he spoke with street vendors about which Pepsi products people bought and why. It was small-scale, informal and useful in a way that a tidy presentation often is not. Dashboards reveal motion. A conversation reveals texture: the language people use, the tradeoffs they barely notice, the context surrounding a purchase.
That habit reflects the unusual geography of his career. Kirkham spent nine years leading international markets across the United Kingdom and Ireland. He ran marketing and innovation for Western European beverages, later oversaw global sports, energy and juice work, and became CMO of PepsiCo's international beverage business. The title “global” can invite abstraction. He pushed in the opposite direction, arguing that a global CMO needs to understand what is changing for a brand manager in places as different as Uzbekistan, Tanzania, Cairo and Kyoto.
The solution is neither command from headquarters nor a jumble of unrelated local work. PepsiCo uses what Kirkham calls a lead-market approach. A local team develops an idea that can travel. The United Kingdom, for example, drove a Pepsi football sponsorship campaign when the Champions League final came to Wembley. The same market originated a Rockstar Energy performance with Stormzy that could be adapted with local musicians in Germany, Poland and Saudi Arabia.
Local authorship changes the emotional equation. The market is not handed a kit and asked to translate it. Its people become part of the global team. The center contributes reach, production and shared assets. The market contributes a sense of what will feel natural. Scale becomes a distribution advantage rather than a machine for sanding off context.
One logo, 179 realities
That balance faced a public test in 2023, when Pepsi introduced its first substantial visual refresh in 16 years. The assignment was not merely to design a new mark. The company wanted 179 countries ready to reveal it on the same day, with a consistent idea and room for local expression. It was the kind of project that makes process essential and dangerous at once.
Kirkham likes clear process, but warns that it can become a creative cage. The relevant question is how much structure allows a good idea to travel without dictating every move. Too little and the system fragments. Too much and local teams become fulfillment departments. The Pepsi rollout offers the visible result of that negotiation: one identity, appearing across wildly different streets, languages and media habits.
By 2024, Kirkham had returned to the United States as senior vice president of marketing for sparkling brands. In April 2025 he was promoted to Chief Marketing Officer for PepsiCo Beverages U.S., succeeding Greg Lyons. His remit covered Pepsi, Mountain Dew and Gatorade, along with partnerships including Starbucks and Lipton. It also placed him at the center of a portfolio argument he describes as “core and more.”
The core pays for patience. Established brands carry distribution, memory and commercial weight. The “more” supplies new occasions and new propositions, from PepsiCo's acquisition of Poppi to Pepsi Prebiotic Cola. Kirkham's formulation is a useful warning for incumbents: the core cannot become an excuse to avoid experimentation, while novelty cannot become an excuse to neglect the brands already doing the work.
Protect the asset that already compounds, then make adjacent bets with a clear job. Newness is a portfolio role, not a personality.
The scoreboard behind the spectacle
The Super Bowl compresses all these tensions into half a minute. Airtime costs millions. More than 100 million people watch. The creative industry produces rankings by breakfast. Kirkham refuses to confuse that scoreboard with the business result. Winning, in his account, means growing the brand and the business. A spot can entertain, trend and place high on an ad meter while failing to teach people anything useful or give them a product they can find.
This is why he treats the game as a platform, not an isolated performance. Distribution has to be ready. Retail support has to connect attention to action. Teasers and follow-up work have to build a crescendo around the broadcast moment. The message still has to survive on its own. His advice to a CMO facing that audience is to stop worrying about the stage and focus on what each person should understand.
In 2026, that thinking surfaced in “The Choice,” Pepsi's playful polar-bear taste-test campaign, and in conversations about turning retail media into what Kirkham called a shopper-engagement network. PepsiCo tested its prebiotic cola through a Black Friday launch with Walmart and other partners, using shopper signals to shape creative, price and go-to-market planning. The old boundary between broad brand work and a confirmed sale grows less useful when the same system can carry a person from curiosity to shelf.
“What I worry about is, will it drive sales?”Mark Kirkham
The discipline has not made him allergic to fun. Kirkham has played guitar since he was 13. He skis, follows soccer and describes Pepsi Max as his unquestioned afternoon pick-me-up. His preferred morning drink is green tea. He developed a taste for Barolo while bartending in Italian restaurants. As a child in the early 1980s, he lived in New Bern, North Carolina, the birthplace of Pepsi, and visited the place where the drink began.
Those details fit the working philosophy better than they first appear to. A brand becomes durable through repeated human associations: a taste, a place, the sound of a guitar, the colors on a battery, a bottle beside a meal. Marketing at Kirkham's scale is an exercise in noticing which associations deserve protection and which need a new chapter.
The legacy is a team that can see
Kirkham calls himself a pragmatic optimist. The phrase captures his double vision. He likes creativity but asks for commercial proof. He values global power but gives local teams authorship. He embraces data and artificial intelligence as capabilities the organization should build, not magic delegated to a vendor. He wants brands to participate in culture, then asks whether the product remained visible when they did.
He also talks about legacy in a way that moves attention away from a campaign reel. PepsiCo has long been known as a training ground for marketers. For Kirkham, what a leader leaves behind includes people who can exercise judgment without waiting for headquarters. A team should know how to visit the market, recognize a strong local instinct, simplify an idea and connect creative ambition to a business outcome.
That is the quiet engine beneath the familiar brands. The commercial may last 30 seconds. The logo may appear everywhere on the same day. The real work is slower: thousands of choices about what to preserve, what to change and whose observation matters. Kirkham's answer begins in an ordinary place, with a person holding a drink and a marketer curious enough to ask why.