No Go LOGO

OMG, the new Pepsi logo is here!

I don't know how things are in your industry, whether it be healthcare, finance, education or big tech, but in the marketing world, everyone is buzzing, and not just from the caffeine. 

There's hair-on-fire excitement everywhere you look, from the mahoggany-festooned C-suite boardrooms to the millions of Zoom/Teams/Skype meetings that never seem to end because Chad has one more question.

Pepsi is on people's lips.

OK, let's be honest, it's not. I don't know if the folks at Pepsi are just plain dumb or if they're a victim of news cycle misfortune. The introduction of their new logo has all the pop of a half-drunken can of Diet Pepsi inadvertently left behind a garage refrigerator from 2007. 

They got upstaged. 

Not by the mass school shooting in Nashville and the murder of three young children. Thanks to 250 million ammosexuals and gun fetishists, that's hardly news anymore. 

On top of that there was the kerfuffle over the I (Heart) NY redeaux. I know purists and old timey art directors are pining for the original iteration, but personally if more than three of my cerebral axions concerned themselves with this, it would be three axioms too many.

And of course, there was the news of the first (though more are sure to come) criminal indictment of a US president, you know if we're forced to call him that.

The lead balloon failure of the new logo stands in stark contrast to the previous Pepsi Logo reinvention. You may recall that in 2008 or 2009, I'm sketchy on the dates, the Pepsi brain trust spent $18.9 billion on a logo refresh mission that had more moving parts and granular examination than Oppenheimer's Manhattan Project.

Do not doubt me on this. See for yourself and checkout this amazing pdf that details all the critical details. 

They left no stone unturned. Nor did they bother to run the document through anyone's Bullshit Meter.

It's still amazing to me that multinational corporations, with billions in market cap, can be so blindsided and distracted by such nonsense. When, and I may be biased here, they could have applied their marketing dollars to hire the best and brightest copywriters in the land to reverse their misfortune, instead of chiseling them down on their already paltry day rates. 

What effect will the new red, white and blue can have on the Pepsi-resistant drinkers of brown, sugary, fizzy water? I suspect, NONE.

To wit:

CUSTOMER: ...and I'll have a Diet Coke.

WAITRESS: We don't have Coke, is Pepsi OK?

CUSTOMER: Nah, just water then.

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At the urging of my friend Dana Markee, I tried the new Bard AI machine and asked it to write a blog post about today's topic. I like to think I emerged the victor in these blog posting Cola Wars, you tell me...