I would rather quaff a flagon of turpentine than drink Pepsi, yet I remain sentimental about the brand. As it happens, Pepsi-Cola was invented in 1898 in my hometown of New Bern, N.C., by pharmacist Caleb Bradham, thus ensuring his place in the history of gout.
My wistful interest in Pepsi was raised to alarm last fall when PepsiCo Inc. unveiled the redesign of the soft drink's logo. Gone is the familiar globe with the white horizontal waveform, a design that in its friendly graphical lilt connects to Pepsi's century-old visual heritage. The redesign -- just now hitting shelves and billboards -- is a flattened derivative of the previous one with a right-slanting organic swell, a curiously pregnant white diagonal line traversing the logo.
It looks like some strange foreign knockoff of Pepsi -- Pipse, maybe. I'm pretty sure I hate it.
With the consumer economy largely on Thorazine, now might seem an unwise time to do an extreme makeover of your trusted brand, but logo revamps are all the rage. Call it Recession Rebranding. In the last year Xerox Corp., Anheuser-Busch and Best Buy Co. have spruced up their graphics. Heinz ketchup got rid of the traditional pickle on its label (alas, poor Gherkin, I knew him, Horatio).
"People are running around saying, Oh my gosh, we've got to do something," says Scott Montgomery, creative director at advertising design firm Bradley & Montgomery in Indianapolis. "There are all these pressures. Sometimes it's a good thing, if you can make sure you're not throwing away something important."
That's a big if.
Created by Arnell Group, which was also behind the recently abandoned redesign for Tropicana orange juice packaging, the new Pepsi logo will be front and center in PepsiCo's three-year, $1.2-billion campaign that will overhaul all its beverage brands. Pepsi will overtop the cultural levee with this redesigned logo, plastering it on a zillion billboards, merchandise, point-of-sale signage and ad inventory for TV, radio, Web, mobile, pro sports and social media.
The very ubiquity explains why people who would never drink Pepsi -- like me -- care about the company's brand mark. Such mega-advertising swamps our shared psychic space and makes us invested whether we like a product or not. Which is to say, if you have eyesight, you're a stakeholder.
In design and marketing circles, Pepsi's new logo has gotten a reception roughly as warm as might be given a bagpipe player stepping onto an elevator.
