Ten years ago Pepsi paid $1M for a logo redesign (2019)
typeroom.eu
typeroom.eu
$1mm seems like a bargain for such a high profile change to a product, that at the end of the day, sells based on little more than its branding (cola based soft drink).
I suspect that the original presentation had a lot of pointless fluff, but once you separated out the fluff, it was probably a sensible and logical approach, that led to a design that simultaneously appeared fresher, yet was undeniably recognizable as Pepsi, and was also very flexible which was important keeping in mind all the new major technology mediums that seemed to be popping up every few months around that time.
The doc clearly goes over a lot of crazy ideas. But one of those crazy ideas, the comparison to emojis, led to a massive ad campaign for Pepsi.
That would not have been possible if the logo was not designed in that fashion. As a thought experiment, look at those ads and those emojis on the bottle spinning to reveal a Coca Cola logo...it simply would not work.
What the doc actually looks like is a fairly well thought out design, that took a highly successful logo that had become rather long in the tooth, freshened it up significantly while still maintaining a clear connection to the logo it replaced.
It also contains a bunch of far out ideas to get the creative juices flowing, and at least one of those ideas did end up being a pepsi marketing campaign.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=19p9GjEMBQA (A compilation of all the Pepsi emoji ad campaigns. There are many of them)
There isn't an exact one to one mapping of emojis to the logo variants as envisioned in the original design document, but there is a very clear connection drawn between the emojis and the logo, with nearly every ad ending with an emoji on the Pepsi bottle, almost immediately transitioning to the Pepsi logo, which would not have been possible if the logo did not evoke emojis the way the logo designer shows in their design document.
Heck, it's possible that the causation went the other way. The design brief did not require a connection to emojis, but rather, the logo design with its explicit connection to emojis led to the ad campaign, either directly, because the ad campaign creators looked at the doc, or indirectly, because the logo evoked thoughts of emojis. In any of those cases, that's a sign of an extremely successful logo, and logo creation thought process.
Some of the ideas may not have been as successful (such as the "theory of attraction" or the "Pepsi Galaxy", although the latter is fairly obvious considering the wide variety of products Pepsi makes), but making a lot of these, some far out there, connections is a necessary first step in some of them potentially being successful.
I was one of those who piled onto Pepsi over a decade ago on the interwebs for this logo, but it was a great lesson in humility, because the more I look back at it, the more I was clearly wrong.
This reads like the ramblings of a madman. Or, more likely, they came up with the design rather quickly and conventionally then tried to justify the cost with this?
But for a private company they can waste money as they wish :)