Behind the Pop Culture Roots of Pepsi's Modern Retro Redesign

Blame Pepsi for the plot of Home Alone. Each holiday season, a new generation of viewers watches McCaulay Culkin’s Kevin McCallister fume as his bed-wetting cousin Fuller shotguns a 1990-vintage can of Pepsi just before they’re supposed to share sleeping quarters. When Kevin’s brother Buzz eats the last slice of cheese pizza, Kevin flips out and is sent to sleep alone on the third floor, cursing his family en route. Ultimately, he's still sleeping when his family dashes off to the airport, ultimately leaving him alone at home. Much as those viewers remember the orgy of holiday violence that follows, they recall the word Pepsi wedged between the red and blue halves of a globe on Fuller’s can. When Pepsi asked its consumers to draw the Pepsi brand as part of a recent study, none drew the brand’s current logo at the time. They all drew a version similar to the one on Fuller’s can—including Gen Z consumers, who weren’t alive at the time that logo was in use. Pepsi and Fuller are part of the reason Kevin has been Home Alone every holiday season since 1990. “You can't go through an ‘80s movie without seeing a Pepsi logo,” said Kevin Moeller, PepsiCo Beverages North America (PBNA)’s consumer insights lead. “I have an eight year old son now, and we constantly go back and watch movies from my childhood, and every time he jumps up on the couch and says ‘there's a Pepsi logo,’ it's not the one that he has grown up with in his eight years.” Pepsi’s logo hasn’t looked that way since 1997. While older customers had an affinity for the logo of their youth, those ages 30 and under built memory structures around Pepsi’s cameos in pop culture. Corey Feldman’s Mouth showing up to the Goondocks with a Pepsi in 1985’s The Goonies, a Pepsi can full of donations to save Ferris Bueller in 1986’s Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Marty McFly’s Pepsi Perfect in 1989’s Back to the Future Part 2 or the Pepsi logo showing up just about everywhere Arnold Schwarzenegger walks in Terminator 2 were just some of the ways the old brand imprinted on younger generations. That’s before they looked up why Madonna’s Like a Prayer was so controversial. Shaq and Skee-Lo Think Small in Pepsi’s Epic New Campaign With Pepsi preparing to celebrate its 125th anniversary this year, its consumer, design and analytics teams took roughly two years to listen to customers before committing to its first redesign since 2008. Carl Gerhards, PBNA’s senior director of design, notes that the brand placed the Pepsi name back in its red and white globe, went with bold letters and an all-caps typeface, angled certain letters to signify modern progress and added the Pepsi Pulse amplified ellipses around the logo for a more dynamic digital presence. It also gave its globe a black outer circle as a nod to its black-labeled zero-sugar line—which was reformulated earlier this year. At 125 years old, Pepsi was still learning about what consumers wanted from its own brand. By listening to its customers, facing hard truths about its brand and embracing its legacy, Pepsi returns to a familiar goal: Becoming the choice of a new generation. “This nostalgia piece is very much about moving forward,” said Umi Patel, PBNA’s vp of insights and analytics. “We wanted to make sure that this is a brand that is forward-looking and forward-going.” Forgetting the present PBNA spent the last two years studying consumers of all ages, diving into focus groups, conducting virtual evaluations of what its product looked like on the shelf and using biometric eye tracking to see how long buyers’ eyes lingered on their product. According to Moeller, they were reaching a similar conclusion: “They were not buying Pepsi that looked like what it did in the ‘80s or earlier.” The 21st Century bombarded Pepsi’s customers with a whole lot of branding, and the brands Pepsi added to the mix didn’t stick. PBNA’s Gerhards said the soft, tilted logo from the 2008 redesign and the accompanying lowercase type were not only unmemorable, but overly complex. By comparison, the ‘80s and ‘90s vintage was far more simple. Why didn't people like Pepsi's last logo? It's complicated. “Between everyone rewatching these classic movies and encountering our brand from the past, and then the hardened, the difficulty in recalling the complicated thing that we were for the last 13 to 14 years … those two things just lead us to this insight that we couldn't ignore,” Gerhard said. Even more insulting, the 21st logos weren’t considered “fun” by most consumers. The PBNA team likes to say that their products “instigate moments of unapologetic enjoyment” and that their brand is “heritage done right.” However, during their testing process for the new brand, Moeller said that—compared to the most recent brand—Pepsi loyalists found it “more energetic, more modern, more playful and much more fun.” “It reminds me of some of the early focus groups when we had consumers seeing the first design of our new visual identity system on a 12 pack and they literally cheered,” he said. Future nostalgia Basic visual design principles tend to reward simplicity by drawing the eye to fewer elements and forcing the viewer to remember less, but more important detail. With the newest logo bridging the gap from ‘80s multiplexes to 2020s smart devices, Moeller and Gerhards collaborated on making a new design work in all its modern spaces. Gerhards noted that the new logo was an immediate upgrade on trucks, uniforms, billboards and in the grocery and convenience store aisles. Pepsi Kicks Off 125th Birthday With New Look and 125 Days of Celebrations “Visibility is huge,” he said. “On the shelf, if you look at our unified logo now—especially if you looked at the ends of our 12 packs—they're all Pepsi.” As Pepsi closes out 2023 by dipping into its history—including its own issue of People magazine, 125 days of giveaways and a Pepsi 125 Diner restaurant activation in New York—its new branding takes careful steps toward the future. In digital form, the logo’s pulse now radiates from the logo in dynamic animation rather than sitting static. Meanwhile, its black outline blends into the labels of its zero-sugar products that the brand has promoted alongside its traditional offerings during National Football League games, the Super Bowl and UEFA Champions League soccer matches. With Future Market Insights seeing nearly 15% annual growth in the zero-sugar category during the last two years, Pepsi customers watching Fuller mischievously sip sugary ‘90s Pepsi in Home Alone will more likely do so with a Pepsi Zero Sugar in their hands. “As we look at the growth of the category, we know Zero is going to drive that growth,” Patel said. “People are looking to enjoy what they love about cola, but reduce their sugar consumption and calorie consumption, so as we were redesigning it had to lead with Zero.”

Rebrands

Behind the Pop Culture Roots of Pepsi's Modern Retro Redesign

Home Alone and other 20th Century media made Gen Z and others strongly identify with a logo the soda company didn’t use in their lifetime

Jason Notte

About

Subscriptions

Events

Publications

WORK SMARTER - LEARN, GROW AND BE INSPIRED.

Subscribe today!

Jason Notte