Pepsi (2008)Copied

The new logo arrived as the face of PepsiCo's three-year, $1.2 billion campaign to overhaul all its beverage brands, which meant it was going on, in the LA Times' words, "a zillion billboards". It was made by Arnell Group, the agency also behind the Tropicana packaging redesign that PepsiCo had just abandoned. That should have been a warning.

The change was small and mostly subtractive. The red, white and blue globe lost its shading, and the centred horizontal wave became a diagonal swell rising to the right. The bold capitals became a reedy lowercase pepsi. The swell was supposed to be a mouth: a smile for Pepsi, a thinner smirk for Diet Pepsi and a laugh for Pepsi Max. Almost nobody saw a mouth. The LA Times columnist Dan Neil saw "a curiously pregnant white diagonal line traversing the logo." BevNET reported that the design had "been lampooned as resembling a fat man with a T-shirt riding up his belly, and a “ plumber’s crack” as well". A smile that reads as a beer belly is not a small miss for a soft drink.

Then came the explanation. In February 2009 a document titled "BREATHTAKING Design Strategy", dated 2008.08.04 and branded Arnell Group, surfaced online. The LA Times said it appeared to be authentic but that Arnell had not confirmed it. It calls itself "a strategy based on the evolution of 5000+ years of shared ideas in design philosophy creating an authentic Constitution of Design", and draws a timeline from the Vastu Shastra through Pythagoras, Vitruvius, Descartes and Le Corbusier. Beside the golden ratio, which "starts with a square", it sets "The Pepsi Ratio", which "starts with a circle." It reminds the reader that "Leonardo Da Vinci studied the proportion of the human face and applied his findings in the Mona Lisa painting." It also spells it "Golden Ration" once, which is the one part of the deck that feels human.

From there it leaves the planet. The Earth's magnetic field is set against "Pepsi Energy Fields", and we learn that "Emotive forces shape the gestalt of the brand identity." A page on "Gravitational Pull" proposes the "Establishment of a gravitational pull to shift from a “transactional” experience to an “invitational” expression", with diagrams of light bending towards the "Pepsi Aisle" under the heading "Relativity of Space and Time." The finale maps a Pepsi Planet, Galaxy and Universe and states that "The universe expands exponentially with f(x)=ex. [1 light year = 671 million miles per hour]." A light year is a distance, not a speed. Neil's summary: the logo "apparently is capable of the Einsteinian bending of light along shopping aisles. Take that, stubbornly Newtonian Coke."

Nobody has published the fee, and the deck made sure everyone wanted to know it. The LA Times reported speculation that Arnell was paid "in excess of $1 million". AgencySpy later quoted an unnamed source who was "unwavering about the $10 million figure", while admitting it was not sure whether that covered only the logo. Either number buys a lot of Mona Lisa.

The critics were not kind. Neil called the deck "a Dilbert-esque parody of overwrought ad agency triplespeak" and the logo "some strange foreign knockoff of Pepsi -- Pipse, maybe. I’m pretty sure I hate it." He wrote that in design and marketing circles it had "gotten a reception roughly as warm as might be given a bagpipe player stepping onto an elevator." Designer John McWade called it "Static, empty, vaguely bland" and added: "It conveys no energy, no motion, no effervescence, and, well, it’s not young." Scott Montgomery of Bradley & Montgomery said "It does make the design business look a little bit ridiculous and expensive." Creative Bloq, years later, was blunter: "hate this one. Hate it." It called the memo "deliriously unhinged". Fortune's 2024 headline did the maths: "How one company justified a million-dollar logo redesign inspired by the Mona Lisa—and moved just two wavy lines".

Pepsi lived with it for 15 years. In 2023 it went back to a flat globe with a centred wave and the wordmark in the middle, which Creative Bloq described as the moment "to kick the bums out and go back to basics".

Our verdict: the redesign was a weak, thin, off-balance take on a strong mark, and the deck turned a mediocre logo into a legend. It is the clearest case on record of an agency confusing length of justification with quality of idea. Five thousand years of design history went in, and what came out was a globe that looked like it needed a bigger T-shirt. Reverting in 2023 was not a refresh; it was an admission.