Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Pepsi: Breathtaking Design Strategy (2008) [pdf]

jimedwardsnrx.files.wordpress.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 276 posts

Re: Pepsi: Breathtaking Design Strategy (2008) [pdf]

#121

Post by _carbyau_ »

NavinF wrote: post #116
lofatdairy wrote: post #67

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 presentatio…

>Once he freaked out in a meeting because a CD did not work in the CD player, so he took the CD out and smashed it in to pieces on the conference room table. The IT guy , who was standing behind him, ended up going to the hospital because the shards from the CD flew into his eyes Did the author of this article ever try breaking a CD? They don't shatter like that and the shards certainly aren't gonna fly far enough to…

I sense ambiguity in the sentence: "a CD did not work in the CD player, so he took the CD out and smashed it in to pieces"

Did he smash the CD or the CD player? What was "it"?

Re: Pepsi: Breathtaking Design Strategy (2008) [pdf]

#122

Post by hamburglar »

NavinF wrote: post #116
lofatdairy wrote: post #67

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 presentatio…

>Once he freaked out in a meeting because a CD did not work in the CD player, so he took the CD out and smashed it in to pieces on the conference room table. The IT guy , who was standing behind him, ended up going to the hospital because the shards from the CD flew into his eyes Did the author of this article ever try breaking a CD? They don't shatter like that and the shards certainly aren't gonna fly far enough to…

Having once found myself in a room with a hard tile floor, sound-dampening paneling, and a very large stack of old CD-ROMs that were to be thrown away, I can assure you that if you work on your technique over a few dozen iterations, you can reliably get them to shatter very nicely into little bitty shards.

Re: Pepsi: Breathtaking Design Strategy (2008) [pdf]

#123

Post by ncmncm »

Pepsi, Tropicana and the like, and their parent companies, are a direct cause of the Metabolic Syndrome epidemic in (particularly) the US, other former UK colonies, and UK, causing many times the preventable deaths from COVID, year in and year out.

The "cause of death" noted for these cases never mentions metabolic syndrome (variously, fatty liver disease, cirrhosis, processed-food disease), but rather secondary illnesses it drives, most notably high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, obesity, and circulatory illness. Most of these are products of high uric acid level, itself a byproduct of fructose processing in the liver. Fructose is processed only in the liver, like other toxins, and most similarly to alcohol.

The standard to diagnose high uric acid has risen sharply in recent decades as levels themselves have risen with sugar intake, so people with a deadly uric acid level do not learn of the core problem. They instead are told of the high blood pressure and diabetes, and get medication for that, masking it but not its harms.

We should not be allowing sale of these products; or at least, labels should warn of their fructose content. We could start seeing "contains no fructose!" on packaging, instead of "non-fat". (Because fat, even saturated fat, it now turns out, is harmless.)

(Fructose in normal food, particularly fruit, comes with enough fiber to divert most of the fructose to your gut bacteria. Juice and soda strip away this protection.)

Re: Pepsi: Breathtaking Design Strategy (2008) [pdf]

#124

Post by iancmceachern »

swyx wrote: post #78
shoo wrote: post #45

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 itsel…

i'd like to have whatever the author of this document is having

This is good stuff, you can't make it up.

It looks like lots was going on at the Arnell group at this time. In this article it even quotes Arnell as saying this work for Pepsi in OP as "Bullshit"

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/why-the-firing-of-weird-design-...

You can't make this stuff up

Re: Pepsi: Breathtaking Design Strategy (2008) [pdf]

#125

Post by iancmceachern »

lofatdairy wrote: post #67

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 presentatio…

And he called this work for Pepsi "BS"

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/why-the-firing-of-weird-design-...

Re: Pepsi: Breathtaking Design Strategy (2008) [pdf]

#126

Post by ad404b8a372f2b9 »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #102
ianseyer wrote: post #42

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...

Their new design was just yet another example of how the currently in vogue "minimalism everywhere" design aesthetic sucks. The Tropicana case study is such a great example because the effects were so drastic, but only really because there were easily substituted goods - consumers basically thought the carton was just "generic store brand OJ". My guess is that other recent brand redesigns to this boring, same, sans-s…

On that subject, https://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/ tracks the desecration of all these once colorful, beautiful, expressive logos into this new bland style that's in vogue.

Re: Pepsi: Breathtaking Design Strategy (2008) [pdf]

#128

Post by eternalban »

jorgesborges wrote: post #46
mushufasa wrote: post #6

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 debat…

I agree that brand and marketing is of paramount importance here. But to say this is sophisticated and well-thought is a stretch. It's funny precisely for its lack of sophistication, for how many millions of dollars and countless hours were spent creating something that lacks real value, that's crafted together with the well-meaning exuberance of a teenager trying to look "deep" or earn brownie points.

I think the sophistication is lacking in the criticisms voiced in the comments.

Regardless of the excessive & laughable b.s. factor of this high level design concept document, the proposal meets its brief: design a rebranding strategy that can be used in 2d, 3d, kiosks, blah, etc. as required, without each needing their own design proposal.

So this designer latched onto geometric features of original pepsi logos, extracted some pattern, adjusted the sizing using golden ratio (thus the art history tour), and then went on to apply it to various use cases.

So maybe the design sucks, or possibly you can think of a more sophisticated approach to providing what is effectively a meta-design for a product suite, but this fairly simple approach that is proposed can in fact satisfy the design brief, in a fairly simple manner. Simple is good, right?

Re: Pepsi: Breathtaking Design Strategy (2008) [pdf]

#129

Post by exodust »

mc32 wrote: post #74
ianseyer wrote: post #42

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...

I don’t know how management allowed them to kill the metaphor of the straw tapping an orange. It’s a good metaphor for the product's “fresh” marketing message (putting aside the “flavor packets” thing. The one thing I think the new design had right was the lighter green for the type. That’s about it.

The straw in orange is also a fun and friendly image, without going overboard. It invites people to "solve" the visual equation. Straw + orange = fresh juice. A clever design for young and old. Amazing they replaced it with a boring glass of OJ.

Replacing the horizontal convex "Tropicana" with the straight vertical and using a more serious font, was another blunder.

Re: Pepsi: Breathtaking Design Strategy (2008) [pdf]

#130

Post by aaronbrethorst »

IncRnd wrote: post #86
swyx wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i'd like to have whatever the author of this document is having

Quite possibly that is coke.

They're required to call it "nose candy" when they work on the PepsiCo account. /s
Post reply on HN