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PepsiCo reveals a bifurcated brand strategy in Q3, Revlon launches 'Be Unforgettable' with Teyana Taylor, and AI cuts a Goodwipes campaign from six weeks to four days.
PepsiCo is treating snacks and drinks as two completely different problems. Revlon is betting heritage beats reinvention. And one AI experiment just rewrote the production rulebook — at a cost.
In this episode:
The FMCG Marketing Daily is a concise briefing for FMCG and CPG marketers, brand managers and CMOs, hosted by Marco & Klara. New episode every day.
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Also from Marco & Klara: The Digital Commerce Daily · The Health Marketing Daily
The essential morning briefing for brand leaders in fast-moving consumer goods. Hosted by Marco and Klara — two senior strategists with decades of experience inside global CPG companies and consultancies. Every episode covers retail media and distribution shifts, brand and competitor moves from Unilever, Coke, Nestlé, and challenger brands, and the macro and regulatory forces reshaping the category. Authoritative. Analytical. No noise. Built for brand managers, trade marketers, CMOs, and agency directors who need to stay ahead.
Marco: Morning — we've got a proper mix for you today.
Klara: PepsiCo's Q3 results are in, and the numbers tell two very different stories depending on which aisle you're standing in.
Marco: Then we're looking at Revlon's bet that heritage — not reinvention — is the smarter comeback strategy.
Klara: And we'll unpack what happened when an AI experiment cut a six-week campaign down to four days.
Marco: Let's go.
Marco: PepsiCo has just reported its Q3 results — and what's interesting isn't just the numbers, it's what the company is doing differently with each half of its business.
Klara: So let's set the scene. For the past couple of years, big food and drinks companies have been leaning on price increases to protect their profits. Raise the price, keep the margin, hope the consumer follows. Some did. Some didn't.
Marco: PepsiCo is now living with the consequences of that — at least on the drinks side. CEO Ramon Laguarta used the word "aggressively" when talking about cutting costs in North America beverages. That's not normal language for a quarterly earnings call. That's a signal that something is genuinely broken.
Klara: And they've also lowered their full-year 2026 earnings outlook, which has triggered a broader cost-cutting programme across the whole business. So this isn't a small adjustment — it's a structural reset.
Marco: What I find really telling is that snacks and drinks are being treated as two completely separate problems. Snacks — think Lay's, Doritos — they're holding firm on pricing. Drinks — they're in what I'd call a burning platform situation. Fix it fast or lose the category.
Klara: But I'd push slightly on that framing. Isn't this partly self-inflicted? Drinks brands that raised prices aggressively during inflation without maintaining enough product quality perception — they didn't just lose volume. They lost trust. And you can't cut your way back to trust.
Marco: Completely agree. And that's the bigger lesson for any brand manager listening. When consumers stop believing your product is worth the price, that's not a cost problem. That's a positioning problem. Cutting costs buys you time — it doesn't fix the relationship.
Klara: Pricing strategy and brand perception have to move together. PepsiCo is learning that the hard way.
Marco: Our second story is up next.
Marco: Revlon has just launched a new campaign — and the interesting part is what it's deliberately not doing.
Klara: So some context. Revlon is one of those brands that's been around for over ninety years. It went through bankruptcy in 2022 and has been trying to rebuild since. The instinct for a brand in that position is usually to reinvent — change the logo, chase trends, signal that you're new and different.
Marco: Revlon has done the opposite. The campaign is called 'Be Unforgettable', and the faces of it are Teyana Taylor — musician, actress, known for a kind of timeless cool — and Megan Moroney, a country star with a huge following among younger women. Neither of them is there to make Revlon feel trendy. They're there to make it feel credible.
Klara: And the brand's own marketing leadership is explicitly saying heritage is a strength, not a problem to fix. That's a brave thing to say out loud when every boardroom conversation is about staying relevant.
Marco: What I think is smart here is the talent choice. Taylor pulls Gen Z. Moroney pulls millennials and younger country audiences. You're bridging two groups without pretending to be something you're not. The brand history gives both of them something real to stand behind.
Klara: I'd add a small note of caution though. Leaning into heritage only works if the product underneath has actually kept pace. A great campaign built on nostalgia buys you attention — but if the formulas or the experience haven't moved forward, that attention doesn't convert to loyalty.
Marco: Agreed. The heritage framing gives you permission to be noticed. It doesn't automatically earn a repurchase.
Klara: So the real lesson isn't "heritage good, modern bad." It's that your brand history is an asset — if the product can actually back it up.
Marco: Our third story is next.
Marco: A small hygiene brand just compressed a six-week ad campaign into four days — using AI — and what happened next is worth understanding.
Klara: For context, most challenger brands — smaller companies without the big budgets of a Unilever or a Nestlé — have always been squeezed on production. Making a proper campaign takes weeks of agency time, shoot days, editing, approvals. That process costs serious money. Bigger companies absorb it. Smaller ones struggle.
Marco: Agency OK Future ran an experiment with a brand called Goodwipes — a personal care challenger brand. They used what they're calling AI-native workflows — meaning AI wasn't just a tool helping humans work, it was doing the heavy lifting at every stage of production. The result: a spoof campaign that would normally take six weeks was delivered in four days. The cost savings were significant.
Klara: And this is one of the first documented cases of a challenger FMCG brand using AI as the primary creative engine — not just a supporting tool. That's a real shift. The production budget has always been the moat — the advantage bigger companies had over smaller ones. If that moat is draining away, that changes the competitive landscape considerably.
Marco: It does. But I want to stay on the finding that's being underreported here. The team burned out. Hard. Four days of that intensity is not a repeatable process. And if you're a brand manager excited about speed, that's the number that should worry you most.
Klara: I'd actually frame it slightly differently. The problem isn't the speed — it's that the process wasn't designed for humans. Velocity is genuinely useful. But if your team is destroyed after every campaign, you haven't built a workflow, you've built a sprint that can't be run twice.
Marco: And that's the real lesson from Goodwipes. The economics of AI production are compelling — but sustainable output requires designing around people, not just around what the technology can technically achieve.
Marco: Today's thread — knowing who you are is a competitive advantage, whether that's a snack brand holding its price, a heritage brand owning its history, or a team that knows when to slow the machine down.
Klara: So pick the one thing your brand keeps apologising for — and ask whether it's actually a strength.