Today's episode features Gina Judge, Vice President of Communications at PepsiCo. We hear her insights on a people-forward approach to leveraging employees as ambassadors and reputation builders, why empathy and understanding your audience are crucial across key touchpoints, and how to approach communications with a data-driven strategy. Signal in the Noise is hosted by Daniel Gaynor, Head of Strategic Solutions at Signal AI.
Below is just a snippet of the conversation. For more episodes, check out the Spotify channel to listen or the YouTube channel. This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
"There's a lot of data that shows your employees can be your most credible reputation builders." - Gina Judge
Dan Gaynor: You've been at PepsiCo for a long time, 15 years as I understand it. Walk me through the career arc. Tell us a little bit about how you got here, what were some of the forks in the road? What is all part of a master plan?
Gina Judge: Oh my gosh, I wish I could say it was part of a master plan, but I think we all know that it doesn't always work out that way. I like to think of my career arc in four different chapters. Childhood is one of them. My parents owned a French cafe and bakery when I was growing up, and my sister and I always used to joke that it was forced labor.
But I think it was really there that I learned a lot of really important values —things like having a good work ethic, teamwork, customer service, and being part of a community. So it was a very small restaurant. And we did everything there, from mopping floors to bussing tables to washing dishes to showing up at 6 a.m. to make the muffins. As a young person, while we kind of thought it was a pain at the time and looking back, I really appreciate how that got me thinking about the world.
I went to journalism school at the University of Wisconsin, and I was naive enough to think that the Chicago Tribune was going to hire me right out of college. They told me to go work in Peoria, and I really couldn't afford to do that at the time, as I was on my own. So I thought the next best thing was to go into public relations. It was sort of by default that I ended up in the industry, but I'm so grateful that I did.
I think the second chapter was really agency life, which you mentioned, we have that common background. I was really fortunate to work at a number of agencies, Weber Shandwick, Fleishman Hillard, Leo Burnett. Agencies are an amazing training ground. Not only do you get exposed to incredible mentors, but you learn a breadth of skills on a variety of different businesses. So to me, that was just learning on steroids… To me, that was really about spreading your wings, getting a breadth of experience, and learning all the ins and outs of communications.
I verged a little bit out of traditional communications into the restaurant world. Harkening back to my childhood, I had an opportunity to lead the full marketing responsibilities for a restaurant company in Chicago. That was just another great way, again, to broaden my skill set, add more tools to the tool belt, and work in a business that I could really relate to and love. It was an interesting restaurant company with multiple concepts... We had everything from a neighborhood tap to a four-star Italian restaurant. And that was where I really got to think about how you create brand experiences and every touch point in the communications ecosystem.
Obviously, in the restaurant world, there's that physical touch point, right? Marketing extends to how they were greeted by the hostess, how the chef might come out and say hello, and how we tried to get them into a loyalty program before they left. So, it's really interesting work.
Dan Gaynor: That’s such a fascinating allegory for the world of big corporate enterprise communications because what you're talking about are all these different touch points that, in many companies, actually represent totally siloed functions, right? There are operations, supply chain, and sourcing - AKA the food that actually gets on the plate. There's the experience. They could have a booth that isn't clean, or a waiter that's having a bad day, or their favorite meal is out, or the kid's birthday gets screwed up. And then you think about the digital side of the equation, like getting them into a loyalty program. How do we create some sort of recurring experience?
Gina Judge: Yeah, I love what you're saying. I think it's absolutely right. And we say this to ourselves all the time inside PepsiCo, right? The consumer doesn't care what department or function you're in. They see one brand, one company, and we have to work really hard to make things fit together and, ultimately, to create a better consumer experience.
“The consumer doesn't care what department or function you're in. They see one brand, one company, and we have to work really hard to make things fit together to create a better consumer experience.” - Gina Judge
DG: Brand value [for PepsiCo] is gigantic because it spans all these different divisions, right? Frito Lay, Quaker foods, beverages and global, right? That includes brands like Cheetos, Gatorade, Mountain Dew, Doritos and even SodaStream, employing over 300,000 people. I know that you're now doing the employee orbit of communications, but let's go back in time a little bit. How did you get into the company and then walk us through a couple of the roles, ranging from your digital and innovation roles to something now more around talent and culture?
GJ: It's been an incredible ride at PepsiCo. As you mentioned, I think the scale has made it a place where you can have multiple careers In one place, right? As you mentioned, we have a range of global, regional, and local brands. So I really started on our Tropicana business, and I thought I was going to continue to be a brand communicator. That was part of the role, but it also really helped me broaden into reputation management, issues management, employee engagement, and a whole host of other areas that I really didn't think I was interested in at the time. I'm really glad that I stayed open-minded and got experience in them. I also touched on different parts of the function back then.
Consumer experience was part of the communications function. Today it sits in our insights function. But that was really looking at how consumers interact with our brands directly, right? So way back when it was back when they would call an 800 number, visit a website, or send an email. But at that time, we were going through a major transformation of really trying to understand how, you know, social and digital were really breaking down geographic boundaries and how consumers were becoming influencers in their own right and how we really needed to build better capabilities to protect our reputation.
So issues in India, for example, wouldn't make their way to the U. S. unnecessarily because consumers were expecting a faster, higher level of service in their local area. So that was really interesting because it kind of diverged from the traditional comms world of focusing on media and really got us much closer to the consumer and really thinking about all these new social and digital channels and how we need to build relationships with our consumers in those channels in different ways.
“At that time, we were going through a major transformation of trying to understand how social and digital were breaking down geographic boundaries, how consumers were becoming influencers in their own right, and how we really needed to build better capabilities to protect our reputation.” - Gina Judge
DG: Every company is fighting to recruit, train, and retain top talent right now. This is critical not only to the company's culture but also to its success, as institutional knowledge can't be replicated. How are you pulling it off?
GJ: We are trying to be much more intentional in thinking about our employees as we think about our consumers. We need to really understand how they are consuming information, not just within our walls. As you all probably know, associates are getting just as much information externally as they are internally. So, we need to really understand our associates on a deeper level and make sure they're getting digestible, engaging content as well.
Just like the rest of the world wants TikTok and X, we really need to be concise and to the point to break through and grab their attention, just like we would with our consumers.
Data is a big piece of your world. We're definitely trying to bring that more into the fold in terms of the work that we do. How do we start with insights? It's the same way we would with our consumers, right? If we took one of the transformations that I mentioned, digital evolution, for example, we have org health surveys and other things like that, but how do we really get a pulse on where our employees are today?
So, how do we really understand the problem to solve, and where do we need to move them? For the future of the business, we should also think of applying some of the same practices we would apply with consumers, like message testing. We can tap into our employee resource groups or other smaller groups of employees to really understand what resonates with them.
What doesn't or what resonates more with certain cohorts versus others? The channel piece and the influence piece. So I think this really just connects back to a lot of the other things we talked about. We know that people consume information in multiple places and are influenced by multiple people in different places. So, really understanding how you make all parts of the ecosystem work together to break through and connect with our different cohorts is another piece of what we're doing. And then, of course, really trying to measure impact, right? At the end of the day, did we change something in what they think, feel, or do?
I think that is what we're really trying to get to. So, to me, the work that we're doing in employee communications is really not that different from what I've done in my past communications and marketing roles. I think it's really just thinking about a certain cohort very differently.
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Signal in the Noise is a podcast dedicated to helping today's business leaders navigate the complexities of decision-making by leveraging data and groundbreaking technology—first and foremost, artificial intelligence (AI). You can also watch the interview on our Signal AI YouTube channel here.