Nostalgia's Lasting Impact

Joining Trend Hunter's Innovators Series of forward-thinking business leader interviews, Tammy Butterworth, Front End Innovation Lead at PepsiCo shares the most prevalent Megatrends she and her team have been seeing following the pandemic.

The Most Prevalent Post-Pandemic Megatrends::

Multisensation and Nostalgia:

People have been locked in their homes for up to 18 months. They haven't been able to travel and they haven't been able to go out and discover those things around the world. Nostalgia is important and they want to have this sense of discovery, so we're gonna see all of those things collide. How do we make something feel trusted, homely and nostalgic, while inspiring a sense of discovery? People may not be traveling as far as they have in the past but they can still have those experiences. We're going to see all of that convergence come together in the products that we have to make in the future and that's quite exciting.

For us in the near term, the Nostalgia Megatrend has been trending for the past few years, but with COVID, it really hit home. Consumers are going back to these traditional breakfasts, and are sitting down and spending time with family -- the things that you see in sitcoms and movies but that none of us were actually doing. Those are the things that we're seeing coming through and people going back to those things because they've got more time at home. And equally in times of uncertainty like COVID, people want to feel rooted and want to feel familiarity. They want to feel safety, so they're going back to some of the products they used to use in the past things that brought them happiness in childhood. So we're seeing a revival of some of those flavors and those old snacks and drinks that they maybe haven't had for a little while because they just haven't needed them. They've gone back to those and they've realized that actually this is this is still a product for me. So nostalgia is really coming to it.

Hybridization:

We've got hybrid categories and hybrid industries and this has delivered on a new set of needs. I see that hybridization space continuing to accelerate, and you can see that with some of our more recent launches. People want convenience, they want health and wellness, they want clean label, and so we have products like Bubbly coming out. When you overlay that with people wanting energy, we then have products like Bubbly Bounce, which is the same drink with caffeine. And so you're seeing that kind of hybridization -- just bringing things that you wouldn't normally expect to see together.

Anytime someone is going to look at a space and explore the reinvention of it, many times what they're doing is applying a logic of another space to that core space. And so by definition, they're taking a spin at it and they're creating a hybrid nature. A few years ago, if a colleague said we're gonna have caffeine water, nobody would have believed it, but people want to have one product that does lots of things for them, so we're definitely seeing that hybridization come through.

Today, it's amplified more than ever before and It's not just taking any two things and putting them together, right? It's also understanding what the right things are, and you also have to start with some core innovation and trend frameworks. In particular, you have to ask who the customer and the consumer are. You have to look at what the value is going to be long term or in some cases short term and ask if these two or three things that might come together are actually going to be serving something -- even if it's small today, does it have potential to become something bigger, or is already pretty large, and it's just been untapped? And then looking ahead, you might put the most random two things together, but that doesn't mean that it's going to work also, if it's still not grounded in who the customer the consumer are at their core.