February 3, 2010
Pepsi Throwback is, er, back. This is Pepsi Cola the way it was originally formulated, with lots and lots of sugar. And this is a good thing, because for once Pepsi doesn’t have all those nasty chemicals in it, just good, natural sugar.
Huh?
Wait a minute, wasn’t sugar bad for you? Didn’t we get rid of sugar in soda because it rotted children’s teeth faster than Elmo rotted their brains? Didn’t sugar cause obesity? And what about all the lab rats that got cancer from sugar?
Well we got rid of all that nasty sugar and replaced it with nice, factory-fresh, new-car smelling chemicals, most of which have more bonds in a single molecule than their names have letters. Many of these chemicals have been found to be able to wipe out small towns with only a single teaspoon in the water supply.
See what has happened? With all the chemicals and strange substances in our food, the public has swung so far the other way that even a repeat offender like sugar looks good. Following this trend, I’m waiting for Coca Cola Throwback, produced from the original formula which included cocaine. That’s not an urban legend, that’s true.
So throw back some Throwback. You’ll never miss the chemicals. You get enough of them in your tap water anyway.
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While I’m on the subject, I have to give credit where credit is due. Pepsi got the cans right. Those Throwback cans have character. They are colorful and easily identifiable.
Today’s Pepsi logo is squashed, tilted on its side, and it seems to be sneering at you. The font is a boring lower case Arial and the names are printed so small (and sideways) so that the only way to tell regular from diet from caffeine free from Max is to bring a secret decoder color chart with you to the store. Making matters worse, stores stock bottles of caffeine free right next to Max, which has roughly double the caffeine of regular Pepsi. What genius put them in bottle of near-duplicate design?
One day soon, a poor, colorblind old man will die from a caffeine induced heart attack because he couldn’t tell one bottle from another. I look forward to the lawsuit.
Mr. Blog's Tepid Ride 
Aaargh! You are so right about the nitwits who keep re-designing Pepsi cans. I’m not a colorblind man, but I have inadvertently purchased caffeine loaded Pepsi when I meant to get caffeine-free, only because the color of the cans varied from each other by a nano-shade.
And yes, the logo does appear to be sneering at me. Must have been designed by damned teenagers….
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The person who did the Pepsi can also redesigned the Tropicana OJ container. It looked so little like Tropicana that consumers thought it was a store brand and sales dropped so far that they went back to the old design in only a few short months. That person also rebranded Gatorade as “G.” Gatorade sales then dropped, by some estimates as much as 15% because Gatorade now looks like a Gatorade knock-off. Despite all of this, every article about the rebrandings refers to that executive as a “genius.” I’m wondering why she is not “unemployed.”
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Um, “she” is a “he”—Peter Arnell. There was a big article about him in Newsweek that called him a “crazy genius” and here’s a link to a video of him on Ad Age’s website defending his Tropicana debacle:
http://adage.com/video/article?article_id=134889
Crazy or genius? The jury is still out on that one.
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You are totally correct. The “she” I was referring to, however, is PepsiCo honcho Indra Nooyi, who decided to rebrand the ranges in the first place and approved the changes.
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Good point! I didn’t know that the head honcho was a woman. Why do executives feel they have to “rebrand” popular items anyway? Especially with Tropicana and their iconic orange with the straw stuck in it. People were looking right at cartons of the new Tropicana on the grocery shelves but it was like they were invisible. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
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