It is 2023 now, and with the Theorist
wheel of channels finally complete, I think it's time for a rebrand. We really
want these channels to go back to their roots, you know, like really back to the basics. No, no,
no. I don't just mean going back to 2011. I mean, we're going all the way back
to before the dawn of color. We are going black and white here, people. Yeah,
just differentiate all the channels in shades of gray. That won't be confusing at all. And you know
what, circles? Nah, they're outdated. They're not hip and fresh. Nowadays those gen Zers, those zoomers,
they want them triangles, baby. Four quadrants, three sides. We're making this thing into
the Theorists Triforce, the Theory-force. So that way, subliminally, you're reminded
of some of your favorite old retro gaming franchises but for a new modern age. And then
to really hammer home what we're doing here, we need the word “theory" to be big front and
center, bigger, even bigger. Huge. Make it huge. Hello Internet! Welcome to Food Theory,
where you can always stop in for a crisp and refreshing swig of information.
Have you seen the new Pepsi logo? One are the oldest brands in cola has a new logo set
to land on all Pepsi packaging and fall of 2023, and the internet is already fizzing about it
months before its eventual release. The new logo, which departs a lot from the sleek, flat,
subtle Pepsi design of the last decade, now punches shoppers in the face with lines,
angles and a kind of “it's Pepsi, whether you're like it or not” vibe. As soon as this new look
was announced, every armchair marketing guru from Twitter to TikTok started passing their judgment
on this new design. The Internet's collective big feelings only escalated after learning that
Pepsi spent a whopping $1 million to design this thing. Which just goes to show that I've
been in the wrong industry this entire time. In all seriousness, though, please don't
tell our editors and graphic designers that they could just slap together something
that looks like a five minute Photoshop job and bang out seven figures. This is putting
me in a really tough spot here Pepsi. But to that point, the Internet already has plenty
of bones to pick with this new logo, which at first glance strikes me as a little bit weird.
All these angles in the font, the design of the ‘P’ makes it look like “Depsi”, some sort of sad
store brand cola. Then there's the lettering size, which feels slightly too big for where it's
placed. The color scheme that makes you want to schedule your next eye exam. There's a
lot going on here, and even though this new logo looks nothing like the previous one, at the
same time, there's something familiar about it. If you're a soda aficionado like I am, or you're
tuning in to the over 65 demographic, shout out to you 3% of our audience. You probably notice that
this new rebrand is just Pepsi’s logo from 1962, just with an extra strange font in the middle. So
all of this has led to the collective question: What's going on with this thing?
Why would Pepsi create a worse version of their own 60 year old logo?
When I first saw it, I thought, Well, I guess we just chalk this one up to another
huge corporation flushing a bunch of money down the drain. But after doing some digging,
it turns out that I couldn't be more wrong. Yep. I'm here to tell you that Pepsi is actually
laughing all the way to the bank with this one. This logo is like the 4D-chess of the fizzy
beverage world. If you hate this new Pepsi logo, watch this episode. And I pretty much guarantee
that by the end you're going to like it, or at the very least, you're going to be forced to
respect it. And I guess if you already liked it, well, then you can just lord your superiority
over me and then get a lot of knowledge about Pepsi that you can trot out at parties.
Trust me, I am planning on using all of this information in this episode at my next
family get together with my Aunt Corey, who drinks nothing but Pepsi. So this one's
for you Aunt Corey. To understand what Pepsi is up to here it's helpful to know the
history of their logos. As it turns out, Pepsi has drastically changed its logos a lot of
times, unlike other soda brands like Coca Cola, which is famous for never changing the core logo.
Why? Well because since the early days of its history, Pepsi has differentiated itself
by being the, quote unquote Cool Cola, the one that keeps up with the times. And they do
that by changing their logo a lot. The original Pepsi logo debuted in 1898, right next to us
here in North Carolina. Our little Pepsi neighbor friends. The word Pepsi was actually based on
the word dyspepsia, which means indigestion. And it came out as one of several drinks at
the time designed to settle your tummy and cure what ails you. The Pepsi logo debuted in
this bright red font that was full of spikes, which felt a lot more hot topic than refreshing
beverage. Through the 1940s they kept the concept but softened up the lines a few times to copy the
look and feel of Coca-Cola's swoopy curvy design. Since Coke was dominating the market. We've
talked in previous episodes about how Coca Cola ramped its marketing budget way up
during the Great Depression and won big as a result of it. So at this point in its
history, Pepsi wasn't ready to become the cool cola. It was just trying to survive for a
couple of decades by riding Coke's coattails. That all changed in 1950, when Pepsi decided to
step out of Coke’s shadow by rebranding itself based on the cool, hip word of the moment.
Patriotism. That's right. Following the Allies victory in World War II, there was this
huge surge of Go USA! sentiment, which Pepsi then took advantage of in the most American way
possible: by exploiting it for marketing. Pepsi slapped their logo, which would go from cursive
to block letters right in the middle of a red, white and blue globe, implying that America was
the global winner and that winners drink Pepsi. They marketed themselves throughout the 1950s and
sixties as the drink for those who think young, thereby differentiating themselves from your
dad's Coca Cola. Because this is the brand new era of rock and roll, baby. You got the Beatles,
you got Elvis. They're comfortable with those hips a shakin’. This, then, is the angle that they
stuck with for the rest of the brand's history, you can even see Britney Spears echoing the same
line in her 2002 Pepsi Super Bowl commercial. When the counterculture movements got started in
the early sixties, Pepsi updated their logo again and came out with a new marketing slogan, The
Pepsi Generation, all about the new cool kids, the hippies. They flattened their globe logo
to meet the new generation's mod aesthetic. About ten years later, they were ready to
prove again that they were cool and with it. So in 1975, Pepsi launched the Pepsi Challenge,
where they dared people to compare Pepsi to Coke and move on from their, quote unquote, outdated
notion that Coke was better. Continuing to hammer home the idea that Pepsi was younger, it was
hipper, it was more fun. I like imagining Pepsi as like the living embodiment of
the like “hey, fellow kids” meme just slap Pepsi’s logo right there on that meme.
1991 was a seminal year for the Pepsi logo, commonly known as the breakup, where Pepsi removed
their name from the now iconic Globe and sent it floating off into the ether. The Pepsi logos
from then on would all feature italics letters that slanted forward because Pepsi is a forward
thinking soda for new generations. As time would go on, the logo would lean more blue to erase any
shared similarities with the rival Coke. Pushing toward 2000, we got into the weird quasi 3D
era of Pepsi, where the Globe got rounder, and Pepsi announced the Joy of Cola movement
featuring a young child of the new millennium to shift Pepsi again to yet another new
generation. Like other logos at the end of the nineties and beginning of the 2000s,
everything got shiny and 3D before eventually returning in the 20-teens to flat, overly casual
designs that could be turned into app titles. Pepsi's current logo prior to this new rebrand
is a version of this flattened globey stripey ball with an all lowercase logo intended to mimic
the casual branding of cool tech companies from the last ten years. This logo is also supposed to
kind of look like an emoji, subliminally evoking a smile, indicating that unlike certain stodgy
older brands, Pepsi is younger, a little cheeky. It knows how to text and understands what
an eggplant splash really means. This last branding update, which debuted in 2008, cost
Pepsi $1,000,000 to design. And for the first time in Pepsi's long history of marketing,
it was widely considered to be a swing and a miss. The logo wasn't symmetrical. The name
is shoved awkwardly to the side, and instead of coming across as a drink for cool people, it
instead came across as a drink for marketing try-hards. People called it a rip off of Obama's
logo in the wake of his successful 2008 campaign, and it was viewed as somehow both lazy
and overwrought. It's been languishing in branding purgatory ever since. So why did
I just drag it through an entire page worth of Pepsi history? I do this to highlight just how
important it's been for those last hundred years that Pepsi look cool in the eyes of the public.
And to show you that the last attempt they made at this in 2008 was a huge miss compared to the
90 years of success that came before. The weight of Pepsi's history as the Cool Cola, combined with
the pressure to win big this time around, creates a unique pressure cooker moment for Pepsi right
now. And it's all come to a head with this, the biggest rebrand they've done in the last 40 years.
So let's just go back and look at what started this whole discussion in the first place. This
new logo, one of the world's biggest brands with practically all the money in the universe, came
up with a logo that just looks like it's the 1950s all over again. So has the new Generation Cola
brand just given up and gone back to its roots? The answer is a resounding no. Pepsi is actually
doing what they've always done. It's just harder to make out this time. At first glance, this logo
seems to make no sense whatsoever. But here's my take: Pepsi is, in fact changing their logo for
the new generation, and this iteration of the Pepsi logo is going to nail it. Don't believe me?
Let's look a little bit closer, shall we? At first glance, the globe and letters of this logo seem to
be a big, fat retread of a bygone era of Pepsi's history, but like uglier and a little bit worse.
So how then, does this represent a connection with a new generation? Well, it's important to
identify who exactly that new generation is. And at this moment, the target demographic for all
the big retailers, brands and yes, soda companies is Gen Z, a demographic that spans late high
school through their upper twenties. And lucky for Pepsi, they also happen to be a generation
obsessed with nostalgia. From vinyl records to coastal grandma chic fashion, a resurgence of
Tamagotchis to an interest in drive in theaters. Gen Z loves old stuff. There are plenty of
possibilities for why this is the case, and Pepsi has been trying to play into several of them
with this rebrand. One thought is that Gen Z has grown up on the Internet and they've spent their
lives being exposed to mostly short lived media in the form of viral videos and TikTok trends.
There's nothing in their pop culture that feels tangible, nothing that feels permanent or
lasting. Looking for something that feels stable in a world with a TikTok attention span has
pushed Gen Z into a love of nostalgic brands that feel more historic and more stable. Brands like
Pepsi. Going hand-in-hand with that. Gen Z has grown up with the pressures of constantly seeing
their lives online, and trying to measure up to the image of social media perfection.
By contrast, nostalgia brands hearken back to a simpler time without the
pressure of an online comment section, which makes them attractive to romanticize
for Gen Z, who is stressed out and overwhelmed by constantly having to go up against the court
of public opinion. Pepsi hits the mark for a Gen Z nostalgia brand with its long history and tangible
eras. It is basically the Taylor Swift of Soda. When you combine this with the idea that Gen
Z actually has access to a lot of nostalgia brands from eBay's vintage clothing market to
Spotify retro playlist recommendations. You see how this generation is best positioned
to love and appreciate brands that embrace the retro analog side. TL;DR by leaning old
Pepsi is actually appealing directly to the new soda drinkers of today, and this
connection even goes a level deeper. While Gen Z certainly loves nostalgia. They don't
embrace the values of those older eras. This generation wants to right the wrongs of the past
to promote more ethical standards on everything from race to mental health and yes, even food.
Up and coming consumers are outspokenly against food additive, processed foods as well as the big
S-word: sugar. While Gen Z doesn't care as much about fat and cholesterol as previous generations.
30% of Gen Z claims to avoid sugar completely. How the heck is a soda company full of sugar and
sweeteners supposed to come across as acceptable to that kind of consumer? Well, it’s easy if
you know anything about subliminal messaging and you can bet that Pepsi's marketing team
knows a lot. Pepsi has always had a lot of symbolism in their logo, but did you know the
colors they use subliminally convey emotions? It's not something underhanded or unusual in
and of itself. Most brands choose a color that represents them based on how they want you to
feel about them. Even our logo for food theory it's yellow because we wanted it to convey
a happy, lighthearted perspective on food, and we wanted it to fit in with the
other yellow logos on YouTube to help people accept it as part of the food community.
For Pepsi, its colors represent its emotional values. The blue is meant to symbolize the
refreshment of Pepsi. It's thirst quenching. The red is meant to symbolize Pepsi as an
exciting, even sporty drink. And the white in the logo was always meant to represent the
drinks sugary sweetness. But now all of this is surrounded by black. Why? Fast Company posits
that it's meant to make you think of Pepsi Black. The only other place where Pepsi
has ever used this color and the only version of Pepsi with no sugar printed
right there on the bottle. More explicitly, Pepsi CEO has stated that zero quote will be
at the center of their strategy for the Pepsi brand going forward because he's seen consumers
pivoting to those sorts of options. Subliminally, consumers who don't want sugar in their drinks are
more likely to associate Black Pepsi branding as a healthier soda. Reading the color as a refreshing
beverage with no sugar that's exciting to drink. So while the new logo might look like a random
smattering of colors that don't mesh together. They're working overtime for your subconscious and
the subconscious of the new generation that Pepsi cares about the most. So having overcome Gen Z's
love for nostalgia and their aversion to sugar, at least subliminally, the last thing that's left
in the fight for this generation is attention. There has never been so many brands competing for
you to spend your money on them and with a million things to watch and pay attention to online, how
is Pepsi supposed to stand out? Well, their answer is the same as everyone else's clickbait. Take
a look again at this new Pepsi logo. It's bold, it's focused, it's clean. And between the size
of the letters and that weirdly pointy font, there's just something off about it.
It's not a beautiful logo. It's a bit ugly. And that ugliness makes it stand out. In
other words, it's clickable. Like a thumbnail where the eyes are just a little bit too big, or
a brand with a really garish color that tries to capture your attention. The new Pepsi logo
is designed to stand out in a sea of images. One thing that I think Pepsi has realized through
this branding initiative that a lot of other food and beverage companies haven't caught on to yet is
that they're not competing with the same players they were 15 or even ten years ago. It used to
be that food and beverage brands only competed with each other. Pepsi competes with Coke.
It's the classic rivalry. But now brands are competing on a whole other playing field. They're
competing against creators. Don't believe me. Well, just take a look at the episode that I did
on Prime from Logan Paul, which is quickly eating Gatorade's lunch. Feastables by Mr. Beast
has swooped in and completely crushed every competitor in the chocolate bar category.
By the way, it has made more than the $10 million that I stated in that Prime episode.
50 million? 100 million? I don't know. I just recited the publicly facing number. But Jimmy,
I know that it bothered you. So if you want to leave a comment down below, I’ll make sure
it gets pinned. Anyway, the point is that the future of these food and beverage companies is
looking a little shaky in the face of creators and their millions of oh yeah, Gen Z fans.
Other categories that are ready to be turned upside down in the next couple of years are
cereal, the entire snack aisle, energy bars and yes, soda. You didn't sponsor me Diet Coke and now
Theorists be coming for you. In order to compete with these brands, Pepsi has to attract some
serious attention. And in the age of the Internet, you don't do that by making your brand subtle.
In fact, you make it by doing the exact opposite. You make sure that it's immediately eye-catching,
recognizable in a single glance. Like maybe you put your name in huge letters on a red, white
and blue background. It's just an idea. So now you know the secrets of the new Pepsi logo, why it
matters so much to Pepsi, and exactly who it was designed for. The bigger takeaway, though, is that
every brand you see around you is trying to appeal to you or probably someone like you in a specific
way. Whether or not you realize it. The million dollars that Pepsi spent on the silly looking
logo seems like a lot. But once you understand just how much money is at stake here, that is one
thumbnail that you don't want to underperform. But hey! That's just a theory.
A FOOD THEORY! Bon appétit. And hey, if you want to learn the story of how
Pepsi once had its own Navy, click the video on the left. Or if you want to check out something
from the rival brand, crack open the video on the right which is all about how Santa Claus
created Sprite. See you next week, my friends.
