Pepsi’s Fading Marketing Glory, a Lesson for the Contemporaries?
With its recent global marketing campaign, Pepsi tried to regain its marketing mojo and replaced the old tagline ‘Live for Now’ with ‘For the Love of It’ after seven years. Earlier, marketing was limited to product quality, strong logo, mission statement, and a catchy tagline. But now, it is more than that to remain stagnant in the eyes of the viewers.
Marketers, more often, desire to control the antecedents of the brand repurchase by developing deep emotional bonds between customers and the brand. Emotional attachment offers special promise as an effective basis of loyal brand repurchasing, which the iconic brands like Pepsi have been doing for a long time. However, with the increase in the online presence, we are seeing traditional brick-and-mortar business dip their feet into the waters of modern marketing. In the past, marketers used to think that all you needed was a quality product, strong logo, mission statement, and a catchy tagline to establish a brand. No doubt, a well-established brand once after achieving authenticity thrives for consistency to shine high among the other players, which can be done by leveraging tech for branding.
But even if you are leveraging the technology to enable your brand to have a greater reach, you are lacking somewhere in between losing the real feel of your brand which
Influencer Marketing Gone Wrong for Pepsi
Previously in the year 2017, Pepsico teamed up with the world’s biggest supermodel Kendall Jenner to target a soft drink at millennials. Yet just 24 hours after airing its latest celebrity-driven TV campaign, Pepsi has had to defend itself from a series of negative social reaction calling the entire campaign as balderdash. The new rehashed global campaign, even though not blamed for the content, did gather criticism for the brand of forgetting its talisman for being the epitome of
Pepsi’s Marketing through Music Zeitgeist
In an attempt to boost the sagging sales, Pepsi in the year 2018 put images of two dead music icons — Michael Jackson and Ray Charles, on its cans for summer. In a way, the cola brand tried to reach back once again to its pop culture glory days, which the brand envisaged can help it raise the sales. The marketing through packaging attempt in order to keep pace with Coke made Pepsi pour out more money into its struggling soda business.
To touch back its starting root where the beverage company started the legacy of becoming a musical heritage to the world, Pepsi again released the music composition with Now United. I however feel, when Pepsi released campaigns back in the 80s, 90s, or early 2000s with names like Beyonce, Michael Jackson, Britney Spears, Lady Gaga, Nicky Minaj, and Madonna — it actually worked in extreme good favor of Pepsi, making it as one of the brand owning constant brand-consumer connection. The mentioned musical talents used were real, who earned their own places without brand involvement. But, with Fuller and Now United, the campaign feels like a brand-originated music property, having coercion of creating music.
What do the Experts have to say?
Naresh Gupta, CSO & Managing Partner, Bang in the Middle
Pepsi was always in sync with youth culture and iconography. It possibly still is, it’s just that the young audience has moved on. They have more things to chase, and the advertising needle has moved on too. Pepsi is still at the youth street and music culture, but this is where the Handset Category has completely dominated the mind space.
So the recent campaign is largely the quintessential Pepsi. Young. Peppy. Full of energy. But this is all about it. It will get a small noticeability and the audience will move on. In many markets the competing brands are doing this very stuff better than Pepsi, raising a big challenge for Pepsi. Is there a way out? I guess there is. Provided Pepsi starts to behave differently. There are lessons it needs to learn from brands around them.
Pepsi is not iconic and I don’t think the recent attempts to find purchase from youth either through purpose-driven advertising or through street culture will help it. Pepsi was ahead of the curve when it was iconic. It’s now chasing a shifting target and losing out. “For the love of it” is actually a pretty soft appeal. This isn’t going to bring them into the forefront. And to me, it looks that Cure Fit is doing a better job with similar appeal.
Nima Namchu, Employee No -1, BB&J
Like many brands in the recent past, Pepsi seems to have succumbed to the wave of political correctness that came out of the darkness one night like Stephen King’s Fog and engulfed the world of marketing. In their attempt to come across as a brand in sync with the changing times, they, like many others, appear to have lost their voice and have ended up spouting the same sanctimonious sermon that all the others, big and small, have been. A little differently, maybe, but not enough.
Also, with the grim realities of fragmentation of media and pressures of quarterly targets, we have been seeing fewer large, “big idea” campaigns. Most brands are just thinking smaller tactical, touchpoint-led “ROI-driven” campaigns. Which, while helping managers retain their bonuses, don’t add much to a brand’s aura in the long run.
While carbonated sugar water has never been my choice of poison, brand Pepsi, for me, has always stood for the energy, the innocence, the arrogance and the irreverence of youth. In one word, FUN. And that’s what the brand seems to have lost sight off while trying to tell young consumers how to live their lives instead of how to enjoy it. Remember the disastrous Kendall Jenner commercial? You can’t be fun if you take yourself too seriously.
I think “For the love of it” is the great attempt at getting that mojo back. While the commercial comes across as more of a strategy video, the line has great potential – it confidently straddles both the promise of great taste as well as a POV that should appeal to the young and the young at heart. And with music being a great vehicle of influence and change, it is a smart platform to have chosen. It transcends borders – of geography as well as time and age. You can’t go wrong with it if you sing the right words and play the right melodies.
Good luck to Team Pepsi.
Bindu Barakrishnan, Country Head, DCMN
With its latest #ForTheLoveOfIt campaign, Pepsi has taken a step away from its “Live For Now” campaign. After the PR debacle with its Kylie Jenner ad in 2017, I think Pepsi wants to play it safe this time. The new ad is all about the music and the cola drink. The music by “Now United” is catchy and the ad is clearly targeted at the younger generation. With the new ad, Pepsi is focusing on showcasing itself as a fun drink and moving away from making big statements as it has done in the past, some of which have backfired. Everything said and done, though it is understandable that Pepsi wanted to play it safe this time, the ad does miss the “Pepsi factor”
The move from “Live for Now” to “For the love of it” is a clear shift in the brand positioning. “Live for Now” is more of a bigger statement asking people to live in the present moment and make the most of it. “For the Love of It” is a very easy-going tagline just focusing on the Pepsi drink and people’s love for it. It’s more fun, and less preachy. It’s all about the cola and its taste and this would definitely have a better connect with the younger target group, which Pepsi seems to be betting on.
Over the years, Indian audiences have known Pepsi for several amazing taglines such as ‘Yeh Dil Maange More’, ‘Nothing Official About It’ or ‘Yahi hai Right Choice Baby Aha..’ they became a part of the local lingo and are used till date. Pepsi has also been known for its memorable ads featuring some big names. It has relied on some big-ticket names in both India and globally. In India, we have seen cricketing legends like Virat Kohli and Sachin Tendulkar and also Bollywood stars Aamir Khan and Shahrukh Khan promoting the brand. But neither PepsiCo nor its arch-rival Coca-Cola has been able to counter declining sales of their soda portfolio. It has been trying to diversify into healthier options such as tea, juices, oats etc to plug this gap. While this has paid off with PepsiCo finally showing profits in India in 2018 after seven long years, the needle for its fizzy drink category has not budged, rather it has dipped further. So, it is definitely true that in spite of spending a lot on famous brand ambassadors and big advertising bucks to market its Pepsi drink, it has no real results to show for it. Neither have its ads garnered much public attention in the past few years. So, it’s high time that Pepsi got its mojo back and starts creating “Aha” moments to ensure that it recaptures its position in the minds of its consumer.
The new campaign is definitely not aimed at creating a blitzkrieg. It’s all about Pepsi playing it safe and moving away from making big statements that could backfire and do more harm than good. It’s is about repositioning itself as a fun brand with music, fun, and frolic at its heart. While PepsiCo, its parent company is pushing towards the healthier drinks category, fizzy drinks still make up over half of its soft drink sales. So, PepsiCo needs the cola category to pick up and drive profitability. And this can be achieved only by going back to its roots which were always centered around music and its iconic taste and reconnecting to its youthful audience.
Does Pride Come Before a Fall?
The constant ad failure shows the importance of diversity and market research. PepsiCo’s President Brad Jakeman during the Cannes Lions Festival of 2016, filled with uber-enthusiasm announced its decision to form Creators League Studio, an in-house content creation arm. Jakeman during the event also lashed out at the ad agencies. He said that he was sick and tired of the complicated structure that working with ad agencies created. Further, he condemned the delay in the content created by the traditional ad agencies and that they cannot manage to do accordingly. The Kendall Jenner ad was produced by Pepsi’s in-house content creation arm. If you run an in-house creative department like Pepsi, do you need to really interrogate your approach and make sure you are not blinkered by your own brand? The negative acceptance of the ad showed that brand like Pepsi at least needs an outside perspective, whether from an ad agency or by conducting thorough market research.
Nevertheless, the rejuvenation through the new campaign can at least divert the fading glory of Pepsi to another corner and help it mend its brand image, if not get back the mojo.