Pepsi Calls for Responsibility

“Last week, I felt like the Obama campaign,” fretted a young man in my Chinese 130 section this past Tuesday, bracing himself for the class’s unfathomably early first test. “But today...today just feels like the Obama administration,” he continued, as abounding hope and endless possibilities were subsumed by have-to’s and familiar realities.

His is a common sentiment, not only at post-shopping period Harvard, but everywhere in the country. With the President staging an aggressive, cross-country political capital spending spree to drum up support for his stimulus package (tentatively titled H.R. God, I Hope This Works) the rapture surrounding his anointment as Savior of America has been tempered by the emergence of a far less attractive mantra than Hope: Responsibility.

That Pepsi has attempted to tie itself in recent months to the banner ideals of the former-Senator’s campaign, then, is both entirely logical and slightly confusing. While for decades the brand has touted itself as the “alternative” soda, the beverage of choice for whatever letter generation the day’s youth happens to have been prescribed, “responsibility” is not a word that comes to mind when one thinks of Pepsi.

In response to a recent two to five percent drop in sales across different PepsiCo. properties, the Pepsi cans, bottles, and advertisements with which we are all familiar have been redesigned. The original white tilde has shifted into a sort of off-kilter, swirling “smile,” the size of which differs between Pepsi products. “A smile will characterize brand Pepsi, while a grin is used for Diet Pepsi and a laugh is used for Pepsi Max,” the trade paper Advertising Age noted late last year.

Many industry journalists have noted a striking resemblance to the rising sun over red and white American plains on the formerly-ubiquitous “O” Obama logo. Though PepsiCo. Vice President of Marketing Frank Cooper has rejected such comparisons, his defense was nonetheless peppered with Obama-isms. Pepsi has historically been a “catalyst for change,” he stated, and the company believes that the world has reached a “critical moment again,” in which Pepsi’s “thirst for positive change” will be welcomed.

Quite serendipitously, Pepsi has timed the re-redefinition of their classic brand with a political phenomenon, firmly clamping itself to the new president’s coattails in an effort to reinvigorate its image as “the forward thinker’s choice.”

Historically, Pepsi has navigated the management of its image deftly. While the red, white, and blue graphic in question is now as recognizable as the name Pepsi itself, it was a relative late-comer to the brand’s image. Originally wrought in the 1940s as a show of patriotism and support for a nation at war, the Pepsi Globe stuck, though its message soon evolved from one of simple national encouragement to one that aimed to relate the brand to the hipper American ideals of ingenuity, newness and—yes—hope that characterized the American century. A commercial spot from the 1970s, with the motto “You’ve Got a Lot to Live, and Pepsi’s Got a Lot to Give,” for instance, showed clips of a young man pole-vaulting over a high bar, between rapid-fire shots of marquee lights, cabaret scenes and PYT’s playing the electric guitar. America will continue to reach new heights, said Pepsi, and you kids can have a rollicking time along the way.

The climate into which the retooled brand has now entered, however, is markedly different from where it has been before. The concept of the American Dream is not only in the midst of a reevaluation, the morality of aspects of that Dream is in question. If, in coming years, the old unbridled pursuit of happiness (corporate greed, sub-prime mortgages) comes to be synonymous with a decaying economy and an injured American spirit, might this threaten the boundless optimism to which Pepsi has tied itself? Will the benefits of identifying the Pepsi brand so closely with Obama’s clarion call for a new era of hope carry over during a more tempered, less oratorical Obama administration?

They seem to be confident that it will. The Super Bowl “MacGruber” ads, staring Kristen Wiig and Will Forte, were a clear effort to associate the beverage with Saturday Night Live, a show now enjoying a post-election bout of cultural relevance. Likewise, Will.i.am’s recent Grammy night performance was directly followed by a highly coordinated Pepsi advertising tie-in, in which the new slogan “Every generation refreshes the world. Now its your turn.” bookended a short video that both analogized our time to the 1960s and unashamedly compared Bob Dylan to Will.i.am, the YouTube star who occasionally raps.

So today, as Pepsi gives us a new image and a new declaration, I’m moved to ask: our turn to what? Labor Department projections are simply not as attractive as efforts to build up a newly prosperous, post-Nazi-beating America. Nor will accounting for multiple misguided wars be as sexy as the race to send a man to the Moon. Previous generations were certainly faced with their own adversities, but historically, the youth consensus has been that the troubles were the result of poor leadership or malicious enemies abroad. President Obama has declared that the wars and troubles we face are in fact all of our wars and troubles, marking a new era in which Americans may not feel as free from the burden of responsibility for the state of the nation as they once were. The question then becomes, as more and more people find themselves without homes and jobs, will consumers come to hold Pepsi’s recent rebranding as a symbol of a promised hope that resulted in an all too real reality check?

Probably not, if only for the reason that consumers will simply get used to the new can’s revamped globe and lower-case lettering; Pepsi has, miraculously, become pepsi. Soon the innumerable Photoshopped “O”bama logos that now grace a legion of Facebook profiles will be replaced. “O”bama lawn signs will be plucked, stickers will peel, and all the while pepsi will remain its newly diminutive self.

But as a recently revealed internal branding document entitled “Breathtaking Design Strategy” claims, the new Pepsi logo is in fact based on the tried-and-true, God-given Golden Ratio; they call it “aesthetic geometry.” Or in AdSpeak, “We can’t believe you paid us that much money to move some lines around.”

The biggest problem PepsiCo. faces, it seems, will be curbing vandalism–one can imagine how the new logos could easily be transformed into Pacmen, Pokèballs, or any number of other, more vulgar things. If you’ve seen the new look of pepsi, I think you’ll agree with me in wishing them good luck and Hoping for the best.

—Columnist Ruben L. Davis can be reached at rldavis@fas.harvard.edu.