Last week, Pepsi unveiled a new logo. Not a new flavor, or a new version of its famous soda--just a new logo.
In general, I'm not a proponent of redesigning your logo to stay relevant. Once your logo has any amount of brand equity, there are very few reasons you should mess with it. If you're going to change the most public representation of your brand, it should be because something important has changed.
If, for example, you change your business and you want people to associate the new logo with your new product or vision, then it makes sense to create a new visual identity. Pepsi didn't change Pepsi, it's just changing what it prints on the can. Usually, that would be a mistake, but--in this case--the company did something brilliant with its redesign.
Look, Pepsi has been around for 125 years, and this isn't the first time it's made a change. The last time was 14 years ago. Despite the fact that I think companies should not change their logo every decade or so just because they want to stay relevant, most companies do not care what I think, and that's fine.
The story of that logo is pretty legendary. The design brief contains page after page of some of the most wild design justifications you'll ever read. It starts by describing Pepsi's place in the universe, the earth's gravitational pull, and even makes reference to the Mona Lisa.
The inspiration behind the new design is much more tangible. According to Mauro Porcini, Pepsi's chief design officer, Pepsi would regularly ask people to draw its logo. When they did, people almost always got it wrong.
It wasn't the shape of the red and blue wave or the white space they got wrong. Instead, they would try to put the word "Pepsi" inside the logo mark. The problem is, for the past 14 years, the word mark and logo have been separate. But that isn't how people see Pepsi's logo. So, the company decided to go with what people already think of when they think about Pepsi.
"We couldn't ignore that kind of insight," Porcini told CNN. "Instead of rejecting it, we decided to embrace it."
The lesson is simple: There is a difference between the way you think about your brand and the way your customers think about your brand. It's easy for marketing people to think about a company's logo or ad campaign as the brand, because companies spend a lot of time and money making those things a perfect reflection of how they feel about their product.
Neither of those, however, is your brand. Your brand is simply the way your customers feel about your company. The problem is that most companies miss that and only focus on what they want people to see, not what they actually see.
Your logo is just a visual cue to remind them of that feeling. The job of your logo is to remind people of all of the experiences they've had with your product and create familiarity. It's the outward expression of what people think about your product.
I'm still not sure any company needs to spend money on a new logo unless they are making a real change to their business. If you're changing a logo or refreshing your website because you think it will make you more relevant, you're probably doing something else wrong. You should fix that instead. In this case, however, Pepsi's logo redesign wasn't so much about changing how people see it, but aligning it with what people already "see." That's brilliant.
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