A passport to PepsiCo
By Claire Zulkey
Rob Pothier ’18 MBA was on parental leave when his phone rang. It was someone from PepsiCo’s PR agency, calling with news about an unlikely campaign he had helped build years earlier as a summer intern. The idea had been shelved ever since.
“It's happened,” his colleague told him. The company had finally launched Cracker Jill, a campaign that married the Cracker Jack brand with supporting women’s sports, including a reimagined version of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.”
That campaign — much like his career — was the result of patience, curiosity and a willingness to bet on concepts that don’t always look like sure things. Today, Pothier leads PepsiCo UK’s Portfolio Marketing team (which he helped build) and serves as Marketing Director and Chief of Staff to the CMO. The role folds together multi-brand campaigns and partnerships, business planning and strategy, and cross-functional coordination with sales, finance and R&D.
His career journey began after Pothier graduated from Stanford, where he double majored in economics and Chinese. He then spent a year as a marketing consultant in San Francisco before his parents launched a new company, and he decided to join them.
During the next five years he managed sales and marketing for the family startup, a formative and intimidating experience. “The great thing about entrepreneurship is you can do whatever you want. The worst thing is that you never know if you're doing it the right way.” By year three, with the business on shaky footing and his first child already born, Pothier felt ready to reinvest in his future.
“If I really want to be great at marketing, I'm not going to learn it from Googling things,” he remembers thinking. “I need to go to a place that's going to teach me the right way to do it.” While at Stanford, someone once told him, “Kellogg is amazing for marketing” and the notion stuck with him.
During an admitted-student event in Evanston, he says he and his wife, Kathryn, fell in love with the school and “signed on the spot.” The description of Kellogg as “high-impact, high-empathy” appealed to him.
“When I met the people, I thought, ‘This is the type of community I want to be around. It’s not sharp elbowed, it’s not hyper-competitive, it’'s not hyper-intense for the sake of being intense.’ ”
At Kellogg, Pothier encountered marketing theory for the first time, in Professor Julie Hennessy’s classroom. “The most important thing I'm going to teach you is that you are not your consumer,” he remembers her saying on day one. “You need to change your thinking to make sure that what you’re building resonates with millions of people, not just you.” Professors Tim Calkins and Derek Rucker showed him how mysterious and high-stakes advertising really is. Professor Eli Finkel’s negotiations course left a mark.
“Everything is some form of a negotiation at work and at home. Even with kids,” Pothier recalls hearing. “That sentiment had a huge impact on both me and my wife. We’ve talked about takeaways from that class for basically a decade.”
Along the way, Pothier received the McGowan Fellowship, which covered his tuition at a moment when the family had little savings and two young kids — “financially, it changed everything for us.” Ten years later, he’s still close with fellow McGowan Fellows around the world, meeting up at symposiums and staying in touch across cities.
While at Kellogg, a tip from Marketing Club members pointed him toward PepsiCo. They described the company as a balance between pure marketing and general management.
Several recruiting events confirmed it was what he was looking for, from building campaigns, shooting TV spots, getting experience in advertising, building P&Ls and working with R&D. He applied for an internship and has been with the company ever since.
In 2023, after thinking hard about where they would go if his family could live anywhere, the Pothiers relocated to London, made possible by the UK's High Potential Individual visa, which grants graduates of top-50 global universities two years in the country without needing a company sponsor. “Kellogg is technically the only reason we got here,” he says. The alumni network helped his family find its footing. “I have never reached out to a Kellogg alumni and had them not engage.”
That international move reshaped how Pothier thinks about his own career development — a theme he shared during a 2025 Kellogg Career Management Center webinar for students weighing global rotations. Moving from a 250-person PepsiCo marketing department in Dallas to a UK team of 70 forced him to broaden rather than specialize. “Now you’re on brand for Doritos and you do everything. You do innovation, you do creative and TV, you do media, you do strategy, you do data analytics,” he says.
Today, Pothier's portfolio spans partnerships with FIFA, UEFA and Netflix. His four kids, ages 4 to 10, are particularly interested in the new snack prototypes they get to test (“whenever I come home with white bags and say, ‘Hey, here's what R&D came up with,’ they just go nuts for that.”). The children also recognize his talent partnerships, from LeBron James to “Stranger Things.” Returning to the idea of women’s sports partnerships, Pothier is building the plan for next summer's Women's World Cup.
The marketing lesson he returns to most isn't about platforms, partnerships or theory but a different concept he learned at Kellogg: to prioritize people over projects. “I’ve never seen someone prioritize a project over their people and not regret it,” he says. “I think that your career ultimately rests on your reputation and your reputation rests on the way you treat people. Kellogg was that incarnate, and that had a huge impact on me.”
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