Overview
The Platform Lead – Core Cola is a pivotal senior leadership role, responsible for safeguarding and accelerating the foundation of PepsiCo’s beverages business in Europe. This role carries end-to-end accountability for driving the growth and category leadership of our cola business, which represents the single most important growth vector in the region.
This role focuses on three strategic imperatives:
Zero Sugar Leadership – establishing PepsiCo as the undisputed leader in zero‑sugar cola through clear strategy, superior execution, and consumer‑first brand building.
Reinvented Indulgence – creating incremental recruitment opportunities through the Pepsi Treats platform, ensuring indulgence is codified, positioned, and scaled as a consumer recruitment driver.
Added Good – shaping the future of healthier indulgence beverages through innovation in probiotics, fibre, natural flavours, and protein, expanding cola into spaces that match evolving consumer needs.
Responsibilities
Core Category Leadership
Serve as the senior architect of Europe’s cola strategy, ensuring Pepsi remains the core foundation and growth anchor of the beverages business.
Drive Europe‑wide category leadership in zero‑sugar cola, securing consumer preference and share gains across markets.
Codify and lead the strategic roadmap for new user recruitment, with a sharp focus on Gen Z.
This role leads the group that translates strategic platforms (Global) into workable market‑level propositions, activation models and repeatable execution frameworks.
Zero Sugar Leadership: Defines the roadmap for No Sugar, strengthens consumer preference, aligns communications, improves passion point integration and drives recruitment among younger consumers. This resource will also lead standardization of ‘blue can’ approach across the region, and will be the driver of ‘Extra Fizz’ in Europe.
Indulgence: In partnership with SBT, scales the ‘Treats’ platform, strengthens cultural and sensorial positioning and turns Treats into a recruitment engine.
Added Good: Act as lead market to pilot the roles of poppi and Pepsi prebiotic, builds innovation pathways in permissible indulgence, integrates Added Good into the cola roadmap and codifies execution and scaling models.
Cross‑Functional Leadership & Bottler Alignment
Interface with IB/global teams via SBT framework as a key member.
Unify commercial, marketing, and bottler agendas around a single cola growth plan.
Drive execution excellence in partnership with cluster leads, ensuring local plans ladder up to the Europe‑wide strategy.
Govern budgets and resources to ensure maximum impact from central and local A&M.
Performance Delivery
Deliver measurable step‑changes in revenue, market share, and penetration through the acceleration of zero sugar and recruitment platforms.
Codify best practices in zero‑sugar execution, indulgence recruitment, and added‑good development to scale consistently across Europe.
Succession & Talent
Build a team capable of owning Pepsi’s next era of growth.
Position the role as a senior feeder into CMO succession, reflecting its pivotal strategic importance.
Qualifications
Minimum 15 years experience in beverages or related categories (Sports drinks or Energy).
Exceptional analytical and strategic thinking skills.
Strong expertise and skills in Brand Purposeful positioning, Total Connections Planning and 360 Brand communications.
Strong collaboration skills and ability to influence a broad set of senior stakeholders.
Experience in CSD categories.
Leadership and influencing.
Visionary brand builder with the ability to codify strategy and inspire execution.
Strong influencer in a matrixed system; credibility with bottlers and global counterparts.
Global mindset with consumer obsession, especially for Gen Z and younger cohorts.
Resilient leader, capable of balancing core execution with platform creation.
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