Pepsi gets 90s-style refresh to lure younger customers from Coca-Cola
Pepsi is rolling out a new logo under a retro rebrand in an effort to steal younger customers from Coca-Cola.
The refreshed logo, colour palette and typeface is reminiscent of the cans sold in the Nineties when a Pepsi cost less than 50p.
Under the first rebrand since 2008, the new design has “Pepsi” horizontally inside a red, white and blue striped “globe” symbol in a thick black font.
Rather than the circular emblem having more red than blue, the two colours are now balanced, with red above the company name and blue below. It is the biggest change since the switch from the white and red cans of the 1980s to the blue Pepsi can of the 1990s.
Pepsi paid for a Concorde plane to be painted blue to commemorate the change, and paid the Left-leaning newspaper The Mirror millions to go “blue for a day”.
It is the first rebrand since 2008, replacing the blue can which featured “Pepsi” in lower-case below the globe icon.
Ben Parker, a director at soft drinks firm Britvic, which makes and sells Pepsi in the UK, confirmed that the new logo would be available in the UK from March.
“The vibrant new look will grab the attention on the shelf, playing a key role in drawing younger consumers into the category,” he said.
The redesign was launched in the US last year.
Mauro Porcini, PepsiCo’s chief design officer, said: “We designed the new brand identity to connect future generations with our brand’s heritage, marrying distinction from our history with contemporary elements to signal our bold vision for what’s to come.”
Pepsi, which turned 125 years old last year, has played on nostalgia previously, reviving a 1980s design on millions of cans in North America in 2018.
But it was the 1990s that were a key decade for the brand, catalysed by the famous 1992 advert featuring supermodel Cindy Crawford which propelled the drink into popular culture.
In the advertisement, a red Lamborghini pulls into a rural petrol station before Crawford gets out of the car wearing a white bodysuit and shorts – a now infamous image.
She gets a Pepsi from a vending machine and, in view of a group of young boys, drinks the can in one go – prompting one to say: “Is that a great new Pepsi can or what?”
Off the back of this success, the brand launched its “Pepsi Stuff” campaign in 1996 in time for the Olympic Games – which were sponsored by its rival, Coca-Cola.
Customers could buy soda and earn points to redeem for branded T-shirts, hats and leather jackets, with the slogan, “Drink Pepsi, Get Stuff”.
Pepsi Max was also a product of the Nineties in what was widely seen as an attempt to challenge the popularity of Diet Coke.
The brands have long targeted each other in marketing campaigns, including the 1975 “Pepsi Challenge”, a blind taste test held in shopping malls to see which soda drinkers preferred.
But in 2010, both Coke and Diet Coke outsold Pepsi for the first time, leading The Wall Street Journal to declare: “Diet Coke wins battle in cola wars.”
Between 1990 and 2018, Pepsi’s market share in the US fell from a fifth to just 8.4 per cent, as its marketing budgets lagged behind Coca-Cola.
Mr Porcini said last year that the revamp was an attempt to regain the brand recognition the older logos had with customers, after research showed that when asked to draw the Pepsi logo from memory, most people reproduced the logo from the 1990s, which was first introduced in 1987.
“Instead of rejecting it, we decided to embrace it,” he said.
Todd Kaplan, the chief marketing officer of Pepsi, said: “This new visual system brings out the best of the Pepsi brand’s rich heritage, while taking a giant leap forward to set it up for success in an increasingly digital world.”
Pepsi sales jumped 8.1 per cent to £443.5 million in the final quarter of 2023 ahead of the rebrand.
It is not the only brand to embrace vintage designs in an effort to tug on the heartstrings of consumers.
In 2021, Burger King took its branding back to “when it looked best” by playing on its original logo of its name sandwiched between burger buns, replacing a logo which had been introduced in 1999.
Kodak and NatWest have both taken a step back in time in recent logo redesigns, as companies look to utilise nostalgia and brand recognition to drive sales and encourage customers.
