Frito-Lay faced growing competition and a significant perception problem: Lay's was increasingly seen as less relevant to younger, health-conscious consumers. Despite market leadership, brand perceptions were aging and failing to capture growth opportunities with diverse, evolving consumer segments.
Vivaldi conducted consumer segmentation and demand landscape analysis that uncovered emotional white spaces — territories where Lay's could build stronger, more meaningful connections. A new positioning grounded in emotional value and inclusivity was developed to reconnect Lays with a broader and more diverse audience.
The repositioning enabled Lay's to successfully reconnect with a wider consumer base — repositioning the world's best-selling snack brand around emotional resonance and inclusivity rather than functional snacking cues alone.
PepsiCo partnered with Vivaldi to address aging brand perceptions for Lay’s, which despite its market leadership was failing to capture growth opportunities with younger, more diverse consumer segments. Vivaldi conducted segmentation and demand landscape analysis that uncovered emotional white spaces, then built a positioning around emotional value and inclusivity that reconnected the world’s best-selling snack brand with a broader audience.
PepsiCo is one of the world’s largest food and beverage companies, with revenues exceeding $91 billion and brands including Pepsi, Lay’s, Gatorade, Doritos, Quaker, Tropicana, and Mountain Dew. Headquartered in Purchase, New York, PepsiCo sells products in over 200 countries and employs approximately 315,000 people. Lay’s is the world’s best-selling snack brand, generating billions in annual retail sales across more than 150 countries.
Vivaldi built a new positioning for Lay’s grounded in emotional value and inclusivity, which reconnected the world’s best-selling snack brand with younger and more diverse consumer segments it had been losing relevance with. The work was anchored in consumer segmentation and demand landscape analysis that surfaced the emotional white spaces where Lay’s could build deeper consumer connection.
The demand landscape analysis mapped the territories competitors were already occupying against the unmet emotional needs in the broader snacking category, and isolated the spaces where Lay’s brand permission and the unmet need overlapped. That overlap is what defined the positioning, because it was both authentically Lay’s and commercially unclaimed.
Scale brands tend to be marketed for stability, which means messaging skews toward the broadest existing customer base rather than toward the emerging cohorts whose preferences will define the next decade. The result is gradual perception drift, the brand remains familiar but feels increasingly aimed at someone else, and the leadership position erodes from the edges before it ever shows up in share data.
The lesson is that demand landscape work, mapping emotional white space rather than functional benefits, is where category leaders find the next decade of growth, because functional differentiation in mature categories has usually been exhausted. The repositioning is not a refresh of how the brand looks, it is a deliberate move into emotional territory the competition has not claimed.
