When Not to Market Nostalgia
About a month ago we talked about the benefits of marketing nostalgia but there are also specific times not to market nostalgia. These soda bottles can be found right now on the shelves of your neighborhood grocery store. They are Pepsi and Mountain Dew ‘Throwback’ bottles featuring classic logos from the early days of each brand. When I first saw them I was dumbstruck with brand confusion. The problem? Pepsi just introduced a sprawling modern revamp of their entire identity system that has been making a few headlines to say the least. Now is not the best time to be throwing it back when they are struggling to throw it forward.
I say struggling because you have the new logo on bottles, cans, boxes, displays, etc. on most shelves and now you also have an odd end-cap featuring these throwback logos. Note how I said ‘most shelves.’ That’s because I have a hunch that if I walk into my local store I can still find a Pepsi logo of the previous generation (on the less popular Wild Cherry Pepsi or an outdated display, perhaps). So add all of this up and there is a chance that a consumer could end up seeing three different versions of the same Pepsi logo in stores right now (1. New logo, 2. Logo immediately previous to the update, 3. Throwback logo). The logo immediately previous to the update can’t be helped as they are still very early in a large-scale branding transition. The impression they could have prevented was introducing this Throwback series.
This minor strategic blunder should help bolster all our collective branding confidence. As marketers, we often find ourselves looking to the big dogs (Pepsi, Apple, Starbucks) for inspiration but even they get it wrong sometimes — as evidenced by a campaign that needs to be thrown back for another year or so when there’s less confusion on store shelves and in consumers’ minds.
@TrevorJackson makes a great point via Twitter …
“What’s dumb is putting the logo on the plastic bottles. Either bring back 16 oz glass in 8-packs or don’t bother.”
I’d thought of this myself earlier. The only thing throwback here is the logo/label. It’s just different art on the same ‘ol 20 oz. Seems like they could’ve had some fun with glass bottles again. Those were great and unique. Might have made their branding error a little more forgivable had they gone all the way there.
Comment by Nick Westergaard — April 20, 2009 @ 2:16 pm
Here’s how distracted the new packaging was to me … I totally missed a critical point. This is not jut a packaging campaign – the Throwbacks are also unique because they are sweetened with natural sugar like they were in the ’60s and 70s rather than today’s high fructose corn syrup. Truly a blast from the past. But again I missed all of this … Here are some ‘official facts from BevReview.com based on PepsiCo’s media relations department: http://www.bevreview.com/2009/02/26/official-facts-about-pepsi-throwback-mountain-dew-throwback/
Comment by Nick Westergaard — April 20, 2009 @ 10:14 pm
And Pepsi sales are down 9% in Q1 to boot. Not sure a Throwback can fix that …
NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — PepsiCo’s beverage business continued to languish in the first quarter, despite heavy marketing investment and the revamping of its major brands. Read on at http://adage.com/article?article_id=136127
Comment by Nick Westergaard — April 21, 2009 @ 10:02 am
To further add to the Pepsi Brand confusion they have decided to sponsor Nascar star Jeff Gordon with the ‘Pepsi Challege’ paint scheme made popular in the 80’s. (http://i190.photobucket.com/albums/z196/robbiejr/NASCAR/JeffGordonRetroPepsiChallenge.jpg)
It looks like they are trying to get a logo on the shelf that every generation can identify with. Or they are just casting the biggest net possible to see if they can capture some sales.
Comment by Mike Gerholdt — April 26, 2009 @ 10:23 am
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