Shack here. This Blog Sits at the (Intersection of Anthropology and Economics) is one of my new favorite dailies; I feel like I'll be reading these archives for the next few days. The author, one Grant McCracken, on a recent PepsiCo branding debacle:
You've heard about the PepsiCo debacle? It will be a case study and a cautionary tale for many years to come.
In the apt words of Stuart Elliott,
It took 24 years, but PepsiCo now has its own version of New Coke.
The basic details: Sometime in 2008, PepsiCo Americas CEO Massimo d'Amore decided to rebrand the Pepsi, Gatorade, Tropicana and Mountain Dew.
It's epic error. It represents perhaps the largest and most cavilier destruction of brand value we will ever see.
I want to concentrate on Tropicana. A new Tropicana package was launched in January (package on right) to replace a package of long standing (on left). This was then withdrawn in late February. But not before sales had fallen 20%. Consumers were furious.
So what was PepsiCo thinking? Here's Peter Arnell, the man D'Amore asked to do the Tropicana package design.
*The objective was very, very clearly laid out. We needed to rejuvenate, reengineer, rethink, reparticipate in popular culture. *
On balance, this sounds like a laudatory end. Of course a brand should be in touch with popular culture.
But let's look at what Peter Arnell, acting as Pepsi's unofficial Chief Culture Officer, thinks this means. His first act of office, apparently, was to embark upon what BusinessWeek calls a "five-week world tour of trendy design houses."
This is where he went searching for culture? In design houses? Dude. A CCO is not just responsible for culture as defined by designers. He or she is also responsible for all the rest of American culture. And he won't find this exhaustively represented in design houses. Indeed, the rest of American culture is, I would argue, sometimes systematically excluded from the design houses.
(full excellent article here)
I find that a lot of design-house "design" has artistic merit, but takes a few generations to turn into something with both aesthetic and mass appeal. Regular consumers don't want to be challenged by their brands, they want to be comforted and affirmed. H&M, Apple, and Ikea get this: they wrap little seeds of high design in intuition and accessibility. It's cool to be cool, but if your market doesn't "get" it, you've failed.
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