Pepsi's Nonsensical Logo Redesign Document: $1M for This?

With these types of documents, it's obvious they are done after the fact for fluff and to justify design decisions that were made by people different than the ones who wrote the document. At worst, the weirder stuff in the document was commissioned to be an absurdist marketing gimmick when it "leaked" to the press and they wrote stories on it.

It's like the Apple document for their logo redesign that showed that it was really something like 37 distinct circles placed in mathematically-relevant positions.[1] Yeah, no.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2013/05/17/does-the-apple...

It is possible to pay a lot of money for branding - it’s a huge part of company’s image and it may be worth it. Chermayeff & Geismer, Pentagram, Interbrand, etc. can deliver exceptional value for $$$ spent.

But man, this Pepsi logo presentation reeks of ill-informed executives drinking the branding coolaid to fix the company image. There cannot be any other explanation. This logo was presented to executives at Pepsi Co and was approved by them. How did they not realize the amount of bullshit in that presentation, it’s truly perplexing.

There are two completely separate issues here. One is the cost. No doubt the $1m (if that was what was spent) is what this type of work costs. There could be various phases, testing, steps, research, experts that go into coming up with a new logo design. [1] But the story would not have any interest (in a mainstream news site; 2009 or otherwise) without the 'dog bites man' angle in this case 'and it cost $1m'. Leave out the $1m (or some other large number that a common man would understand) and nobody would care.

Next are the issues highlighted. The document is apparently large so we have no idea of the context or what else was said. While on the surface it sounds screwy (and probably is) the outtake is clearly presented in a way to show the most interesting angle to grab attention.

[1] I am also reminded of military contracts with the $100,000 hammer the story then details how the same hammer would cost $5 at home depot and nothing else as far as why the hammer is priced at $100,000 (and there are reasons I say that as someone who has bid and worked on military contracts).

Please add (2009) to the title.

To me, the obvious reading of this was always pretty simple: they wanted to rip off the Obama for America branding, to capitalize on a massive youth movement, and created this doc as a kind of “parallel reconstruction” of how they got there.

Relevant Lemon Demon song "Redefine your Logo" which appears to be about the Pepsi Logo. https://youtu.be/qImHuiYnVQ0

I'm still not 100% this document is really real and not just an elaborate troll, but I think that may be my mind the idea that this remarkable piece of surrealist art was passed off as a serious business document.

With nine of the pages (one third of the total 27) appearing to be mainly the result of running a vectorise tool:

$333333/9 gives $37037 per page

$37037/30 (assuming a generous 30 clicks to assemble the page) gives $1234.56 per mouse click

Nice work if you can get it - I suspect their facial expressions on submitting the invoice resembled one of the smiley faces on page 23.

Super-cheap compared to Gillette's recent target consumer feel-bad ad.

Phil Knight (Nike) paid $35 for their first logo. Also he had just randomly found the designer (a student at the time) while walking through an art department hallway.

Does anyone have a link to the PDF mentioned in the article? The one in the article redirects me to a job posting site...

on the other side, an art school graduate was rumored to be paid much less than $1000 for the Safeway Groceries logo, which they used in every imaginable way for the next fifty years to build their extensive business

I actually think this work is genious. Although I cannot understand it.

They should make their logo a blue and red potato.