Ann Mukherjee, AB ’87, MBA ’94, discusses marketing wins from her time leading Frito-Lay and beyond.
- By
- December 22, 2025
- Marketing
Driving Growth Through a Marketing Mindset
To Ann Mukherjee, AB ’87, MBA ’94, great marketing comes down to one thing: creating value.
Mukherjee recently spoke to Booth students at the talk “Why Creating Value Is Every Leader’s Job,” hosted by the James M. Kilts Center for Marketing. She started by asking what business leaders like former Apple CEO Steve Jobs, former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, and media mogul Oprah Winfrey all had in common.
“Through their ability to think with a marketing mindset, they created value that delivered shareholder return,” Mukherjee said. “As simple as it is.”
As the former CEO of the beverage company Pernod Ricard North America, with additional C-suite experience at SC Johnson and PepsiCo, Mukherjee would know. She is passionate about shaping marketing education and serves on the steering committee for the Kilts Center for Marketing. After she made a donation to the Kilts Center in 2023, it renamed its annual marketing summit after her.
Mukherjee is also the director of Booth’s Global CEO Program in Executive Education, which equips executives with the strategic, leadership, and innovation skills to succeed in competitive markets. During her talk, she explained that in creating the program, leadership looked at the top quartile of companies in the S&P 500 from 2013–23. Total shareholder return for these companies was 21 percent on average. These sizable returns came mostly from fundamental growth—and, specifically, organic revenue growth.
“The moral of the story is, you want to be successful? You want your company to be successful?” Mukherjee said. “You better understand how to drive growth.”
Mukherjee cited four factors that helped these companies: commercial execution, operational efficiencies, dynamic innovation, and structural advantages. She went on to share specific examples of when these factors combined with a marketing mindset to increase value, including a couple from her time as CMO of Frito-Lay at PepsiCo—one of those companies in the top quartile of the S&P 500.
Reasserting Brand Relevance
After the Great Recession, Lay’s—one of the largest food brands in the world—was in crisis, Mukherjee said. The brand had been priced out, and was selling fewer chips per bag at a higher cost. As well, some at the company worried that trends toward healthy eating meant consumers didn’t want to eat junk food like potato chips anymore.
Actually, the way Mukherjee saw it, the company had stopped engaging with consumers. “The reason Lay’s was declining at the time was we had made it irrelevant,” Mukherjee said. “And we had made it irrelevant to millennials.”
“We tried to reframe Lay’s from being a junk food to a canvas for your favorite foods.”
— Ann Mukherjee
So Lay’s launched the Do Us a Flavor campaign in 2012, inviting consumers to invent potato chip flavors and vote for their favorites on social media. “We tried to reframe Lay’s from being a junk food to a canvas for your favorite foods,” Mukherjee said. (That year, the cheesy garlic bread flavor beat out sriracha and chicken and waffles.)
The campaign tapped into Lay’s dynamic innovation, relying on the R&D department to develop submitted flavors. It also leveraged Lay’s operational efficiencies to bring the new flavors to market in a matter of days.
Over the next five years of the campaign, Lay’s added nearly $1 billion in growth. “It blew the doors off of the Lay’s business after a long period of suffering,” Mukherjee said.
Growing a Behemoth
When Mukherjee became CMO of Frito-Lay in 2009, Doritos had a 90 percent share of the flavored tortilla chip market. This presented a problem, Mukherjee said: “How are we going to grow sales for a behemoth?”
The answer was to tackle a bigger market. Mukherjee said she used the behavioral economics skills she learned at Booth to figure out what other foods Doritos competed against in the broader snacking market. “We basically brought predictive consumer behavior into the organization,” she said.
They found that Doritos was competing against dollar-menu fast-food items and convenient snacks that ranged from cold leftover pizza to granola bars. Luckily, Taco Bell had approached Frito-Lay at the time about collaborating for the restaurant’s 50th anniversary. The mutual need led the two brands to develop the beloved Doritos Locos Taco.
After Mukherjee convinced the group vice president that the shell would still be a Dorito even if it wasn’t a triangle, Frito-Lay once again relied heavily on its R&D department’s innovation to develop the taco. Mukherjee said it took a year to get the shell right. Taco Bell’s commercial execution and operational efficiencies allowed the brand to keep up with demand once the Doritos Locos Taco became a viral hit.
Mukherjee said Greg Creed, CEO of Taco Bell at the time, called her shortly after launching the taco to tell her they hired so many new workers that they improved the US unemployment rate.
Creating a New Business Category
Mukherjee concluded her talk with an example far outside the consumer food industry: De Beers, a B2B diamond company.
De Beers spent years convincing men to buy engagement rings with large diamonds for their fiancées—in turn allowing them to sell larger diamonds to ring companies. Their marketing campaigns even used formulas to suggest how much of their salary men should spend. But this eventually caused a problem around 20 years ago, leaving De Beers with a surplus of small diamonds.
The company wanted to start marketing small diamonds to women, but didn’t know how. When they looked further, Mukherjee said, they learned that women were graduating from college and entering the workforce at a higher rate than ever—and getting married later.
“Every position you will hold in your career, you will have an opportunity to create value.”
— Ann Mukherjee
“The driving insight was: ‘I could be my own Prince Charming,’” Mukherjee said. In 2003, the company began marketing small right-hand diamonds for women to buy themselves. “Your left hand says you’re taken,” read one ad that Mukherjee showed. “Your right hand says you can take care of yourself.”
“They created a new category for small diamonds,” Mukherjee said. “And they created a marketing campaign that was unbelievable.”
The example, Mukherjee said, shows how a marketing mindset is relevant regardless of students’ eventual industry or role. “Every position you will hold in your career, you will have an opportunity to create value,” Mukherjee said. “Whether you work for a private company, a public company, your own startup—it does not matter. It’s what you choose to do to drive value.”
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