Red faces as Pepsi gets the blues

The rumoured flop of Pepsi’s blue relaunch challenges widely held assumptions about the effectiveness of marketing

According to a Sunday newspaper and figures revealed in this issue of Marketing Week (page 10), Pepsi’s new, blue relaunch has flopped. So let’s look on the bright side.

If the story is true – and Pepsi, of course, denies it – the failure gives the lie to the stubbornly persistent notion that marketing is sly, manipulative and yet perversely popular and effective, rather like the Princess of Wales in fact.

If PepsiCo, a giant of global marketing, can painstakingly allocate $500m (350m) to the single task of increasing its brand share worldwide, and awaken to discover the money is wasted, no-one need fear the sinister forces of commerce. Profligacy on such a scale may be sinful, but fallibility is comforting.

There is, in any case, something repellent in the concept of the admass, the huge amorphous generality of consumers that can be made to salivate to the Pavlovian chime of an advertising jingle. Evelyn Waugh scorned the idea of the man in the street. There are, he said, individual men and women, each with an immortal soul, and from time to time some of them use streets. From time to time, too, they exercise judgement and turn a blind eye.

Perhaps it was folie de grandeur that made Pepsi imagine it could lead the world by the nose; that by changing its cans from red to electric blue it could change the habits of millions. Is the public imagination so very small that it can be captured by painting Concorde blue? Or by doing the same to the Daily Mirror titlepiece, or to the image of a strawberry?

And what must the little green men who live on far flung stars have thought when they espied Russian cosmonauts frolicking in outer space with a giant can of Pepsi? Was such a world worth conquering?

If it were not for the power that money confers, the cola wars could be seen for what they are. Strip away the global reputations and the billions of dollars, and you are left with a brown coloured fizzy soft drink that is unpalatable unless served at a temperature sufficiently low to anaesthetise the taste buds. It has no known benefits. Cool water is more refreshing, orange juice more nourishing, beer more intoxicating. True, it is said that if you wish to clean coins or dissolve your granny’s false teeth, overnight immersion in a cola drink will do the trick, but such claims played no part in the winning of the Pepsi Generation.

Coca-Cola came first. It was invented in the kitchen of a chemist’s shop in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1886 by John Pemberton. The name comes from coca leaves from a South American shrub; and cola, an extract from the kola nut. Interestingly, both ingredients contain stimulants. Cocaine comes from coca leaves, which the Incas chewed to give them a buzz. In addition to its mood-changing properties, the drug diminishes hunger, increases stamina and counteracts the effects of exertion at high altitudes. Kola contains the stimulant caffeine and theobromine, which is used as a diuretic and cardiac stimulant. In theory, then, the devotees of Coke or Pepsi should perform well on high ground and pee copiously. Most, however, merely burp contentedly and wear their baseball hats back to front.

But it’s neither the taste nor the content that really matters; it’s what the brand says about the user. David Ogilvy, advertising guru par excellence, puts it this way: “Give people a taste of Old Crow, and tell them it’s Old Crow. Then give them another taste of Old Crow, but tell them it’s Jack Daniel’s. Ask them which they prefer. They’ll think the two drinks are quite different. They are tasting images.”

Every advertisement, he adds, should be thought of as a contribution to the brand image. “It follows that your advertising should consistently project the same image, year after year.”

David Bernstein, no less of a guru, makes the same point when he says: “Change your style at your peril.”

You can, he explains, change content without necessarily changing form. “Coca-Cola’s advertising has changed somewhat since the last century but the can would be recognisable to a 90-year-old lapsed drinker. And no one could accuse Coke of being old-fashioned.”

Is that where Pepsi went wrong? Did the giant meddle at its peril? In changing its colour from red to blue, did it break faith with its generation, leaving them rootless, lost, abandoned and confused? Or was it simply that the whole barrage of gimmickry, hype and hoop-la was one big yawn?

Research, so they say, will reveal all. But what good will it do? According to the US marketing consultant Regis McKenna, in 1989 Coke, Diet Coke, Pepsi, and Diet Pepsi used nearly three dozen movie stars, athletes, musicians and television personalities to tell consumers to buy more cola.

“But when the smoke and mirrors had cleared, most consumers couldn’t remember whether Joe Montana and Don Johnson drank Coke or Pepsi – or both. Or why it really mattered,” he says.

And what did Pepsi do alongside painting Concorde blue? Why, it engaged the services of Cindy Crawford, Andre Agassi and Claudia Schiffer. Some people never learn.

That raises the awful thought that if Pepsi was foolish enough to ignore the basics and turn its back on the wisdom of sages such as Ogilvy and Bernstein, then the reputation of marketing remains intact. Perhaps it is all-powerful after all. But only in the right hands.