Pepsi: Breathtaking Design Strategy (2008) [pdf]

PepsiCo Inc (PEP, Nasdaq) isn't merely a beverage company - as explained in this strategy document - it is a space company. The Pepsi Universe, with respect to its 8 light year characteristic length, reflects the scale of the total addressable market (TAM) that PepsiCo can expand into.

Noted short-seller and equity valuation skeptic Jim Chanos once described the TAM of space companies as infinite, because space itself is infinite. This pessimistic take anchors our low-end fair value estimate of PEP to $infinity / share. Since PEP currently trades at around $170 / share, we believe there is considerable upside to the long term buy and hold investor.

I don't think the title prepared me for this. I saw the first page and thought "oh, that's a terrible graphic, why are you moving away from the future". the mona lisa and taijitsu symbol seemed a bit over blown but still sorta grounded. I literally burst out laughing when I saw the contour lines and energy fields. Definitely was not prepared for "Pepsi Universe", either. I assume that by that point in the presentation the energy in the board room must be fever pitch for no one to point out how stupid that looks.

Edit: Upon further reading about the guy who's behind this, Peter Arnell, it turns out he's possibly the harvey weinstein of the marketing business[^1]. It's a huge shame that neither this pseudointellectual bullshit, nor his string of workplace abuses, ruined his career. A consolation is that in 2011 his company got bought out and he got sacked.

[^1]: The Newsweek article is a good read here: https://www.newsweek.com/crazy-genius-brand-guru-peter-arnel.... There's also a Gawker piece that gives a pretty clear idea of how big of a piece of shit this guy is if you can stand the fact that it's Gawker: https://www.gawker.com/244608/new-yorks-worst-bosses-peter-a...

Worth mentioning that this is the same design company that blew $35MM on a terrible redesign of Tropicana Orange Juice, which they reverted back within a couple days (but kept the mock orange cap)

https://www.thebrandingjournal.com/2015/05/what-to-learn-fro...

Always a classic, and it never fails to make me laugh when I scroll through the smiley face section. Impossible to unsee: https://www.cannotunsee.net/post/730928004/pepsi/amp

despite how silly this may seem to many in the HN audience, I will contend that:

if you were running a multi-billion dollar sugar water company whose main moat is the brand, and spent hundreds of millions on ads each year as one of the key line items in the budget, you too would want this level of sophistication and thought put into a brand refresh. Probably even more.

And you can imagine that this document was debated for weeks or months by the highest level executives as well as whole departments of marketers. They probably had multiple documents like this from multiple agencies. With that level of internal debate, all the granular side-by-side process diagrams are a necessary part of the UX here, to guide along the audience that only sees the pdf and can't talk to the agency designers.

The song inspired by this document: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EAG7pye0V1g&t=1s

The diagram of the Pepsi bottles (p7) reminds me of the classic computer art from 1968: "Running Cola is Africa", which interpolated between a runner, a cola bottle, and Africa. It was implemented in FORTRAN running on an IBM 7090 mainframe, and printed on a plotter. Maybe a bit tangential, but I've always thought it was an interesting piece of art. Kind of trivial now, but innovative 55 years ago for its use of interpolation to warp images.

https://zkm.de/en/artwork/running-cola-is-africa

The "Creation of Identity: Gravitational Pull" page is always good for a laugh

  Typical Light Path > Typical Shopping Aisle

  Light Path with Gravitational Pull > Gravitational Pull of Pepsi

  Relativity of Space and Time > Pepsi Proposition / Pepsi Aisle

I see bullshit jobs existed in 2008 also.

"a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case."

A long time ago, I ran a creative agency. One day, I realized how my and my colleagues' talents were being used to sell utter bullshit. Closed the business and switched to web-design. In early 2005, I convinced a big local banking tech company to focus on UX and UCD. Started a UX design business. In late 2015, overwhelmed by the infinite need for Dark Patterns by my clients, I killed "the business" again and switched purely to UI and frontend development.

So I guess this is the "progress" we can offer to humanity, pretty pictures and shapes with psychological tricks for corporate speculation and self-validation.

> BREATHTAKING is a strategy based on the evolution of 5000+ years of shared ideas in design philosophy creating an authentic Constitution of Design. This chart documents the origin and evolution of intellectual property.

Also known as “the circle”.

Credit where credit is due, it takes confidence to make this kind of pitch with a straight face.

Page 6/27: ah yes, the progress is truly inevitable - 3000 years of human ingenuity, starting off with numeric harmony through Euclidian Geometry, the golden proportion, the vitruvian man, Möbius and le Corbusier, all just a mere foreplay for the Big Thing to come around: behold, the tricolor perfecta of black sugared water in a can. what a time to be alive!

Former Pepsi CEO Thomas Rattigan ran Commodore Computer for a bit; former Pepsi President John Sculley ran Apple Computer. So there's a certain link to computing, for some unknown reason

Having been involved in product design at startups & (very) large companies, I can unfortunately say this is what happens at most of the big Co's. Which is why we try to avoid working with large companies and rather partner up with Startups instead.

Story time...

This one time, I was reviewing a design with a client. We were going through this new page design in Figma. In the Zoom meeting, there were people from Marketing (SEO, Social, etc.), Legal, Product managers, developers, and a bunch more of which I don't even know why they joined the meeting.

What happens during those types of meetings is that someone, usually the person highest in rank, puts the following words on the table: "so what do you guys think, thoughts?".

That's where things start to get messy...

In a large corp, when the boss puts that question on the table, people start to feel itchy. They want to say something clever and impress the rest of the team. Automatically their starting point is: this design isn't good and needs my clever input, so I can impress the boss and put my stamp on the project.

The design that was basically approved by the same stakeholders over email, suddenly was getting 'feedback' from left and right.

'Make the font bigger'

'Make the font smaller'

'I don't like the shadows here'

'I really like how Competitor X, does it, can we do something exactly like that'.

I tried pushing back, but it was too late. I was getting swamped in seemingly clever input from people that were just trying to impress the next person.

We went back and designed 2 pages, one we thought was right, and the other one based on all the feedback that people were sharing.

Their CEO went with option 1 luckily, but it wasted a ton of time for no good reason.

Just looking at the PDF, I can imagine the conversations that lead to that 'design strategy'. Large design agencies know how to play this game, don't really care about great design and usually employ great story tellers to sell the idea to clients for big bucks.

pepsi. I thought at the time that this 'leaked document' was a brilliant piece of gorilla marketing. It was making an internet meme before they were ubiquitous, and we're still sharing it and laughing about it today. pepsi. contributing to brand omni presence pepsi.

What a load of crap. Is this what design boutiques do day in day out?

Can anyone tell me if there is even an iota of meaning in the design process?

A funny parody song of this presentation by the legendary Neil Cicierega (potter puppet pals, ultimate battle of ultimate destiny, brodyquest, mouth sounds, etc…)

https://youtu.be/fu3ETgAvQrw

When a marketing company does it for a soft drinks company does it, it gets ridiculed.

When an engineer does it for the design of rollercoasters or boats, it gets praised.

https://blogs.lt.vt.edu/2ndyearidlab/author/hohsuan/page/2/

I see little difference of concepts used for the 'fair curve' and those of designing a bottle.

This looks very similar to the deliverables I get from my UX designers. And then I get a $400 bill with “Research on choosing the fonts”, the fonts being Roboto.

This reminded me of a presentation of progress meeting that I once attended.

I left wondering if I was the only one that noticed they'd said and shown nothing at all.

I've never seen this before and I feel like I need to know the story. Is this satire or is it real? And if it's real, was it leaked or something? No way Pepsi would willingly share this with the public lol.

People get paid a LOT of money to produce a document like what you (might have) had the great joy-in-humor to just read.

This is the canonical video on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmVMh-nT200

Watching mad men for the first time right now, and I feel it. Pepsi universe is going to be the name of my next vaporwave album

Based on a sibling comment[1], it seems that this document is authentic.

I had seen it before (maybe here in HN), but I was convinced that it was a prank.

Can anyone confirm the authenticity of this ?

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32064781

I am surprised at how most of the comments here are -- I am guessing -- deeply misunderstanding the document.

The document is almost unbelievably over-the-top. I think that it must be an intentional parody of marketing-speak. If you think that it's not, can you offer any evidence in support of your view?

Obviously there's a lot of nonsense here but the logo is a good one. In a way it's even better than Coca Cola's. I can recognise the logo of both brands instantaneously but Pepsi's is simpler and has no lettering. It's also aesthetically pleasing.

What came first: logo or journey?

I wonder what was created first - the agency creating the new logo (and then backing into the justification for it), or did the justification for it actually come first & that lead the agency down the path to how the logo was ultimately created.

I'm not even joking, was this created by someone with schizophrenia or maybe during a manic episode? It reminds me of the connections my ex would make while she was manic. And those absurd connections made their way into her art.

I've been laughing about this for years. I showed it to my graphic designer in 2014. She was delighted and did a small t-shirt run so I have the face on page 23 center row far right printed on a shirt.

When this came out, someone in my dorm made a mock of it on our whiteboard. With a few extra lines, it looks like a fat guy bending over. People always look for a human shape in what they see.

Maybe this proposal is a bit excessive, but Pepsi is a billion++ company, based alsmost entirely on it's brand. They can afford, and expect some reasoning behind their logo design.

Symbolism is all around, in logos, advertising, architecture, etc. Personally I see too many modern designs, even art, merely being 'visually appealing' or 'fashionable', without any reasoning, coherence, references, or anything behind them.

The current Pepsi logo has always reminded me of the SeaMonkey logo:

https://www.seamonkey-project.org/

I was reading and laughing, wondering if HN was taking this seriously. It’s a decent logo IMO (though I think it’s unpopular) but obviously the paper is filled to the brim with complete bullshit, LOL. The Pepsi galaxy at the end is what really got me.

Just use common sense and first principles and you can make a logo. Make sure it doesn’t look like a you-know-what and you’re golden.

They should re-release this PDF as a series of NFTs

This reminds me a lot of Time Cube

https://timecube.2enp.com/

Wow. They sure do a lot of work trying to justify a shitty logo. And it worked. Let that be a lesson for us all.

Surprising just how much the logo uses the Golden Ratio in the placement of the geometries [page 19], and generation of the circle sizes [page 20].

Thought experiment: can a logo that heavily uses the Golden Ratio actually look bad? It could be the ultimate 'design for dummies' hack.

I can't help but feel amused and a bit annoyed when designers pretend their work is like a science. Yes color theory and light refraction are science-y topics, but let's face after all if the people who pay you say they want it in red and bolder fonts, you do it.