Pepsi gets a makeover

Posted on 27. Oct, 2008 by Jonathan Cherry in Branding

Pepsi is one of those brands that has just never seemed to really take off in South Africa.

For whatever reason, nothing about the brand or the product has really captured the heart and taste buds of the nation like their competitor has.

Now the global Pepsi brand is undergoing another logo design transformation…because frankly it’s time for one.

Frank Cooper, Pepsi’s VP-portfolio brands said; "We felt like, as we move out of this traditional mass marketing and
mass distribution era into today’s culture, there’s an opportunity to
bring humanity back, both in terms of the design but also in the way we
engage consumers," he said. "By making the logo more dynamic and more
alive … [it is] absolutely a huge step in the right direction."

The new logo is a white band in the middle of Pepsi’s circle that
loosely forms a series of smiles: A smile will characterize brand
Pepsi, while a grin is used for Diet Pepsi and a laugh is used for
Pepsi Max. [via Adage]

A vague brand redesign rationale always sounds like somebody was tasked to come up with some fancy meaning to justify why the agency spent 5 months and ‘north of $1 million’ on coming up with almost the exact same logo that they had before, but with a weird grin as the white bit.

More: Laughing lion blog

Looking pretty similar are:

…and…

5 Responses to “Pepsi gets a makeover”

Kevin

27. Oct, 2008

Hi John,
Not sure if you read Seth Godin’s blog, but he’s brilliant and he wrote an interesting entry about Pepsi’s logo re-invention:
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/10/your-brand-is-n.html
Kevin
richard

27. Oct, 2008

The logo looks Obamafied to me…
The Pete

27. Oct, 2008

I always get confused with Pepsi and Korean Airlines Ident and the new Pepsi one looks even more like the Korean Air one.
Pepsi Air in the future?
Cherryflava

27. Oct, 2008

Thanks Kevin – yip ‘the logo is not the brand’ and no matter how many times Pepsi does fiddle with this thing it doesn’t change the fact that Coke tastes better.
Although if Pepsi Raw had to make its debut in SA, We may well be convinced to switch from Coke Zero.
It’s all about the product.
Craig Wilson

17. Nov, 2008

Looks like the logo for the Cape Town group on Flickr to me;
http://www.flickr.com/groups/capetown/

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