Last year around this time they redesigned the cans. Millions of dollars in the making, the result, as many critics loudly announced when it first dropped, is a flop – little more than a played-out font from 2004. A while back they redesigned Tropicana. Also in the making range of millions of dollars, the result, as consumers railed, was such a flop it was recanted from the marketplace. And I noticed on Grant McCracken’s blog a while back that they followed those up in fine flopping fashion with a third misreading of the intersections between consumers and “design sensibility” by messing with Gatorade.

Sales numbers on the horizon suggest that a big G and a small lightning bolt have confused consumers once again. I would have noticed the change on store shelves, but my wife refuses to drink the stuff any more because it’s too sugary so I don’t look there anymore. Maybe it’s not even in Canada. When it comes to Gatorade or, for that matter, Tropicana, I don’t really care. But more on that later.

In discussing the Gatorade switch, Grant points to that maddening corporate drive to be “cool,” “hip” and “edgy,” rightly pointing out that this youthful cachet is worth about 2% of the culture. Arnell certainly seems to be a guy who has had much success in flexing his cool so, I guess, when the decision from the top down was to engage in some redesign he probably thought his ideas would “evolve the brand.”

Whether it was genetic drift (chance deciding a trait like a bad font will be passed on from designers who used it in ‘04) or random mutation (caused by an error during meiosis or DNA replication), PepsiCo’s evolution has been something of a Darwinian debacle of late. Perhaps the reason for its recent failures is that PepsiCo does not understand evolution or, at the very least, appreciate that the brand-as-being is about so much more than its phenotype.

Let’s begin with the most known of Darwin’s ideas, natural selection. For those of you who didn’t have to teach Intro to Anthropology over the course of too many years, this is when genetic mutations that enhance reproduction become more common in later generations of a population. Like innovation itself, successful changes in the traits of a population rely on the degree to which change is introduced and maintained in that population. PepsiCo’s redesigns are mutations of the kind that are introduced from outside the population and, because they don’t “work,” are rejected. In the world of cola, they’re no Rae Dawn Chong. The lesson here is that, in the quest for brand fire, make sure you hire a design consultancy that doesn’t just understand the brand but, when possible, has love for the brand.

PepsiCo’s failure to understand its own evolution is, ultimately, a failure to understand itself as part of an organism collective that consultants typically refer to as “consumers” but, for the sake of being an anthropologist who hates ascribing nouns to people that transform them into distant others who we are not, I will call the “population.” Were PepsiCo’s new brand traits to be found particularly robust, useful and pleasing to the population, they would have been selected. Instead, they’ve been rejected.

As a lifelong citizen of the Pepsi population, this saddens me. But I know why Pepsi failed. It failed because these redesign efforts behaved, with Arnell as the figurehead and fall guy, as if they were nomadic marauders from another population thinking they could roll up and shoot some of their sperm into what was a perfectly happy, peaceful population and turn our hair blonde and our eyes blue.

With Tropicana, as soon as we saw the smoke from your fire we got our spears, snuck up on you in the grocery aisle and killed your ass. To doubly punish PepsiCo for its transgressions, some of the population started spreading the word like wildfire about how Tropicana is made. So much for the fresh & natural branding, huh? Who knows what the state of the design intruder might be when the Gatorade numbers come in? Oh, and by the way, my population and I remain ready, willing and able to form a hunting party to kill the Pepsi redesign.

With Pepsi, PepsiCo made the mistake of the outsider. Pepsi isn’t Nooyi’s brand. It’s mine. I was there before her. I will be there after her. It isn’t Arnell’s brand either. His Newsweek ranting about washing his hands over the entire affair makes that very clear.

Who are these outsiders who think they can mess with my brand? Given the extent to which social media figures in our lives, how could they ignore evolution by population consent and put their hopes of introducing new traits into the hands of one man?

You’d think that there would have been some kind of co-creation exercise planned way in advance of Arnell getting his designer hands on Pepsi. Between “consumers” and “cool” something along the lines of an online Design Your Pepsi campaign might have fared better. I say might because, in terms of design, the Pepsi population was doing just fine, thank you very much. Those of old enough to remember had already survived and adapted to the evolution of the can and, within the existing ecosystem, continue to keep that DNA alive by ordering a bottle from nearby Central American restaurants.

It’s the DNA I’m worried about. Mess with it too much and you’ve got a sick and dying mutant. Don’t test its limits and you’ve got a weak and apathetic brand. The middle ground is not visual design – phenotype is an expression of change, not change itself. The middle ground is the DNA itself – code, culture and the memories of a population.

Memories rule. For a brand like Pepsi, memories are the DNA. In the cool consumer consultancy realm of brand heritage, they are the lifeblood. This is where PepsiCo should be investing – on and in the population itself. Through the narrative modes of words, pictures, songs, dances, whatever, populations tell their stories, transmit their myths and values, teach the young, celebrate the past and maintain the Durkheimian organic solidarity that, quite frankly, PepsiCo is lacking.

My memories are rich: Mom buying a case every Saturday; a Pepsi and a Mars bar during Love Boat and Fantasy Island every Saturday night; sitting on the front porch on a sweltering August day during a rainstorm with a cold one; accompanying the first beef patty I ate in Negril while watching Tiger and Frankie Paul on stage; the disappointment every time I go into a fast food joint and discover it’s aligned with Coke; and so on and so on.

Memories are a basic, 101 ingredient of Web 2.0. How could PepsiCo have missed that and spent on Arnell? I don’t know, but every time I pop a can in the office I wonder why my drink is in such a lame can. Then, wrapped in memories of bottles in the days before online contest codes when you peeled the rubber from the cap to see if you’d won a free one, I wonder who relied on a focus group (not the population!) to tell them that Pepsi Natural was a better name for Americans than Pepsi Raw. After that, I wonder when PepsiCo in Canada is going to get it on shelves here. All this wondering….shouldn’t I know? I’ve been living in the Pepsi population since I was first allowed to drink pop. Like my most recent memories of the brand, that’s sad. For PepsiCo, sad is bad.

I find myself noticing what seems to be an increase in the amount of successful attack advertising in the past few years – where one firm or another in a highly competitive market calls out a rival directly. It’s a risky move – the idea is to polarize middle-of-the-fence consumers to your side, but can damage your brand if not done well.  I have included my three favourites for your consideration below:

1. Mac vs. PC

No-one, and I mean no-one, has taken the p*** with a competitor as much as the iconic PC vs. Mac ads, first aired in 2006, with a succession of follow-up spots. Can you remember such a devastating competitive attack- either before after this campaign?

Going much deeper than a technical comparison of products, Apple attacked the very brand identity of its rival – and managed to imply that any user of a PC was frumpy and out-of-touch. Windows , representing the PC market, has struck back with multiple efforts trying to shift this image, but has met with varying success. The strength of the initial attack was so strong that it will take both time and investment to overcome.

2. Audi vs. BMW

Audi: “Your move, BMW”
BMW: “Checkmate”
Pretty much anyone who saw these signs: “Oh, Snap!”

These duelling billboards appeared in Southern California- with the BMW ad appearing not long after the AUDI version went up. Note that the BMW response is that of a local dealership toward the national Audi Campaign. The social media space  is where the damage was being done, so that was the arena where Audi planned a comeback, where they recruited participants to the AUDI facebook site- and asked them to photoshop an appropriate response.

The success of this comeback campaign was not clear…..while the internet certainly picked up on the BMW Checkmate damage that was done to the AUDI brand, it was an interesting way for AUDI to use social media in an interesting way to try and  mitigate the impact of the negative word of mouth.

In terms of the consumer decision making process for automobiles, automobiles have both an important technical element, as well as a strong brand identity element, which means comparative/attack ads aimed at these components are fairly commonplace.

3. Rogers vs. Bell:

In some cases, the attacker actually subverts the advertising images and messages of a rival – as recently seen in the recent Rogers (top image), and Bell (bottom image) tv and print ads:

In this case, both have launched integrated marketing campaigns battling for share of the ‘couch’. Part of this bitter rivalry is founded in the nature of the two businesses…..Rogers started as a cable company, and moved into mobile/home phone. Bell started as a home phone company – and moved into cable. As such, both have expanded into each other’s home territory….meaning that hostilities are high.

Sadly reader, I think most of my posts will involve Japan in some way (reflective of the substantial percentage of my life that was spent there). I can say that this kind of comparative advertising in Japan is VERY rare….extolling the virtues of your own product is one thing, but directly bashing your competitors is another story. Trying to promote shame and embarrassment in others is a social taboo.

Also, speaking as a guy who has some experience in personally selling both products and services, I can say that this full-contact approach can be risky- and seems to work best only when there are very cut-and-dried technical or price-point differences which are directly related to the customer’s purchase decision criteria. Saying “Ours is better/best” seems to be ok, but “Company B has terrible XXXXXX” can backfire – it implies that you recognize them as a real threat that needs addressing. .

In terms of an integrated marketing campaign, the comparative approach provides free advertising to your rival, as you are essentially paying to increase the brand awareness and recall of every brand you mention.

Having said all of that that, it is difficult to argue with the relative success of the campaigns outlined above, as all have been at least mildly successful in our North American markets (at very least, it has prompted plenty of people to blog about it). So, I would ask the reader:

• What are the risks of taking this approach?
• Why are they successful/Why do they fail?
• Can you find any examples where this approach did not work?