"The name of the game is expansion"

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: She’s extremely cagey about numbers. But on everything else, Punita Lal, executive director, marketing, PepsiCo India, comes across as a reporter’s delight. That’s not entirely surprising considering that prior to joining Pepsi, she happened to cut her teeth with two major advertising agencies, Lintas (now Lowe) and HTA (now JWT), where she handled a slew of difficult-to-please blue-chip clients and devised communication strategies for many an iconic brand, moving on for a short stint with Coca-Cola before switching jobs—and loyalties—to rival coal major, Pepsi in 2005. In a candid interview to FE’s Radhika Sachdev, she shares her plans for PepsiCo at a time when cola’s share in the overall beverages market is shrinking the world over, although not in India.

It’s difficult to miss a very tight fit between Aamir Khan and Coca-Cola, a fit that was missing when Aamir endorsed Pepsi, a long time ago. Please comment.

As a matter of principle, I don’t like to comment on rival brands. But if you are posing it to me as a general question on star endorsers and their fit with a particular brand, I must confess that as a marketer, I don’t, as a rule, look for salience from an endorser. I don’t want a celebrity to be so overwhelming that it completely overshadows my brand. You would have experienced people saying, “I remember that ad... but I can’t remember the product!” Well, we won’t let that happen to Pepsi. It’s a brand so firmly entrenched in the consumer’s mind that it would only look for a close fit—not salience—which incidentally, we do have with Shah Rukh Khan and others Pepsi endorsers.

But hasn’t this whole positioning—Pepsi as a bratty, irreverent brand—become a little outdated when our youth is becoming more team-oriented, structured and sure of their place in the world?

You’ve said it. You are talking Pepsi’s language now. That’s indeed the credo of “Pepsi youngistaan” our new campaign with Ranbir Kapoor and Deepika Padukone (it also has SRK) where the youth is shown as feisty, self-confident and where “sab kuch hai asaan” (everything is easy). As for structuring, it’s not the youth that is getting more structured, but we as marketers who have to be more structured in understanding their psyche. Look at the way they laugh at themselves. Honestly, how many of us have the courage to do that? Pepsi as a brand tries to emulate that attribute of the youth.