PepsiCo’s Chief Design Officer gives exclusive details of Pespsi’s rebranding

By Joseph Ekeng

The iconic Pepsi logo has remained the same for the past 14 year and has been an inspiring symbol of what Pepsi represents all over the world.

But recently, the soft drink giant gambled with the idea of changing the design. After a lot of behind the scenes brainstorming and countless hours of tweaking and re-tweaking, a new Pepsi design was born.

The new brand identity was revealed by Mauro Porcini, the SVP and Chief Design Officer of PepsiCo, who described it as “unapologetically current and undeniably Pepsi”.

The new logo features a blend of the Pepsi wordmark and globe, painted in black and blue, which radiates into the world with a new, ownable pulse.

Awed by the overwhelming positive feedback he has received since the launch, Procini recently took to his social media handles to pen an emotional personal story, giving exclusive background details of the ideation process that led to the new design concept.

In a long note which he captioned, ” A personal Pepsi story, behind the scenes ” Procini revealed how he and his team worked to come up with the new Pepsi.

In his words, “The first prototypes of this new can, after we reviewed hundreds of different iterations in the previous years, landed on my desk in the early summer of 2021, completely developed in-house by our PepsiCo Design & Innovation team.

“And on that desk stayed, for the past two years. Very few people in the company had seen it back then – just the beverage business leadership team that we partnered with to create it, and our CEO, Ramon Laguarta.

“I would look at that new can every day, under my screen, sitting by the current one, while having my meetings in Zoom. And I would share it with a series of PepsiCo stakeholders that I was interacting with, confidentially, and almost abruptly, at the end of my video calls on totally different topics, to test their reactions, to check if they liked it. And 100% of them loved it.

“I had another set in my house in the Hamptons. Every weekend during the summer I have guests over. They are all close friends. Many of them are designers, architects, artists, or business leaders working in the design and fashion industry. I guess creative people attract creative people. I would share the cans with them too. Before and after. And they all loved the new one. Consistently.

“With time passing by, I started to become more and more confident that this was the right design. And the right decision for the business too. And I started to pitch it to the company with more passion, more resilience, more conviction, together with my design team, and with Todd and his marketing team.

“And finally the company gave us the blessing and the funding to make it happen in the market. From that moment we started a process to do everything you do when you launch a new product, including formal and extensive “consumer research”.

“But to redesign a brand as iconic and loved as #PEPSI is not easy. It’s crazy difficult actually. You never know how billions of people that consume it all around the world will react to it once in the market. And you don’t want to be the person to get that design wrong. As a designer, you can do thousands of projects right, and make a mistake with the redesign of one of the most renowned brands in the world, and you will be remembered just for that one mistake.

“You can only imagine the pressure.

“And so, you can also imagine our joy, as a team, last week, when we saw your overwhelmingly positive reactions.

“Design is “an act of love”, as I state in the first sentence of my book. As designers we gift our users something that we conceived with love for them, trying to add some form of value to their lives. That value could take any shape, and it could be as simple as adding some form of beauty into their daily routine.

“But there is no more painful love than the one that is not reciprocated! Therefore I am so deeply grateful to you all, because in the past days, we did feel your love back. The love of hundreds of millions of people.”

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