image by Lawrence Yang
Pepsi’s rebranding by Peter Arnell got a lot of press, most of it bad. This was fueled in part by the leaked design brief (which read like a parody of creative director hubris).
For the record, Pepsi’s new logo is ugly, but Pepsi’s overall rebranding is a success. I only realized this when I saw the new logo in context:
For the first time in a long time I noticed Pepsi instead of mindlessly shoving my cup under the fountain. Mission accomplished.
Pepsi’s problem is that Coca-Cola’s logo is iconic. It will always be classic, never dated. Meanwhile Pepsi is “the one that’s not Coke.” That’s why Pepsi has to periodically refresh their look to boost shelf presence.
Now let’s look at the Tropicana rebranding, also by Peter Arnell, which was a $35M failure.
image from BNET
The new package design doesn’t “read” as orange juice. With the too-modern type and washed out yellow (not orange) juice color, it reads like a cheap house brand. Meanwhile the iconic Tropicana straw stuck in the orange doesn’t just beat out the new Tropicana, it beats out everything else on the shelf:
File this one under: “if it ain’t broke, don’t hire an egotistical creative to fix it.”
Thoughts:
- Branding doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It happens over time and in context: crowded grocery store shelves, Poquito Mas soda fountains, and on billboards you pass at 80MPH.
- Seriously, look at your product in context. On a store shelf, in an RSS reader, in a list of bookmarks, as a logo surrounded by other logos, etc.
- Interesting, the new Pepsi logo and the old Tropicana orange both pass the squint test.