A million(s?) dollar study for a global brand is justified by things like:
* Research to see if the brand logos/names are misunderstood or offensive for a particular market/culture.
* Research regarding brand recognition before/after the proposed changes.
* A lot of design/thought behind how the brand will look in the many communication channels/products that it owns.
Second of all, do you actually think anyone who reads this document will associate positive feelings with Pepsi?
All it's making me think is "Man, those Coke ads with the polar bears were pretty cool."
These things are done for the execs not consumers. Same goes for Tropicana.
Can verify this is highly important. E.g. using the letters 'Af' as a prefix for a product marketed in Africa. Turns out that is a very offensive word.
1. A link is posted to HN whose content can easily be made fun of, because it appears bizarre without context.
2. People on HN jump at the opportunity to make fun of said link so they have something to take a dump on. It’s a wonderful ego-trip. They cannot get enough of it. Most of those who do not need the ego-trip to feel better about themselves usually move along without comment.
3. Comments like yours which are trying to be curious instead of mocking are “raining on their party”, i.e., ruining their ego-trip.
4. Instead of engaging with you on a level of thoughtful discussion, i.e., “let’s explore why such a bizarre document exists instead of just mocking it because there is nothing to be gained by doing that”, such commenters are more than happy to take a dump on your comment too.
Instead of engaging with your comment in its entirety, they will nit pick on the fact that your comment features the word “sophisticated” and base their entire response on that. Anything to keep the ego-trip and judgement going.
Now granted, there’s a lot of ignorance, also in this thread, as to why companies develop elaborate philosophies behind their brands to an extent which seems far-fetched for the average person. But it’s also true that in the marketing field, especially on the higher levels, it’s really easy to start bullshitting. And this document is not only a great example of this, it’s an example dialed up to 11.
I agree with you that content which is presented “to be laughed at” inherently spawns some degree of non-productive, toxic discussion. But I also believe that we should never not call out bullshit when we see it.
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?
I think we can all agree this PDF goes out of its way to convince the reader that it's anything but simple.
- Pepsi DNA
- Pepsi Energy Fields
- The Pepsi Universe
It's all gold, to be honest. I love this document.
It's just that the effort is making something completely ridiculous
I can laugh at this as agency nonsense with the rest of the crowd, and I think some of it may be warranted. But, it is still ultimately how business works insofar as brand matters, small tweaks to brand can have huge ripple effects; mightily so when the product is the brand, and disregarding anything brand or marketing related is foolhardy.
I agree though that the HN crowd as a CEO would want lots of effort to study how to make the most recognizable and liked brand.
Yes "sophistication, data-science, a/b testing, consumer science(the real type)". None of that is in the pdf.
Most of my BFA is in graphic design and it's not my only art and design education, so I'm pretty well-versed in artsy fartsy Bauhausian high-concept visual communication. From the very first days as a Freshmen you start with exercises like finding as many ways as you can to create a palpable sense of tension with only two black squares on a white background by changing the scale and placement, or making two identically colored swatches look like two different colors by placing them on a field of a different color. Professors deliberately don't give you a set guidelines in these exercises because the artistic roots of design don't work that way— you have to understand the way visual components work together on a visceral level before you can effectively reason about them... even pretty straightforward things like effectively setting paragraphs of text or kerning letters can be pretty nebulous, and that's much more straightforward than at abstract logo design.
Could you imagine the pressure of being the art director wielding those nebulous and subjective processes revamp a worldwide household name in one of the most image-focused markets to ever exist? Or being the executive with zero domain knowledge tasked with evaluating the work of this firm? And while the early parts of the process can be subjective, there are vastly more wrong answers than right ones when it comes time to reveal your final product.
This tension means selling your vision is just as much a part of the design process as creating it, and that's a tough job. Check out this 27 minute long pitch film legendary designer Saul Bass made to sell his rebranding of Ma Bell:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKu2de0yCJI
That was a huge initiative and it required a lot of explanation— not just explanation of individual decisions and the reasoning behind them, but explaining how he saw the context of the company, all its individual parts, and how people perceived them before deciding how he was going to affect the changes he was hired to affect. But it's all very, very digestible because he's a designer and that's what designers do. They figure out how to take complex or nebulous ideas and concepts and efficiently and effectively communicate them (usually) visually.
And while some of this breathless report makes good sense, much is far from digestible. Parts of it brought to mind this famous Francis Ford Coppola quote:
"We were in the jungle, there were too many of us, we had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little we went insane."
It dabbles in bits of knowledge most folks would consider obscure, presents not-obviously-useful conclusions based on them and then wraps the whole burrito up in a cloak of grandiosity. I mean, when someone places the theoretical framework of a corporate identity revamp on a timeline with some of humanity's most significant achievements, you better strap on your bullshit-proof vest. It seems more designed to make readers feel insecure about not connecting the dots (or maybe zillions of circles) and therefore less likely to confidently push back. I'm really not sure how else the assertion that a circle trisected by two very deliberately placed, but relatively straightforward lines could even subconsciously conceptually intersect with the earth's magnetic field. 90% of that study of perimeter oscillations was psuedo-analytical pointless bullshit.
This sort of thing annoys the hell out of me because it reinforces the view of design as entirely subjective fluff propped up with bullshit when most professional design is actually pretty well reasoned.
Consumer research existed long before IT started A/B testing everything.
It’s interesting to contrast this with the same company that had the awareness to recognize that basically no one ever types out “Mountain Dew” in its entirety and adopted the _de facto_ name it had acquired in the new millennium: mtn dew.
Everything you see here is NOT sophistication. It has no science it's just an illusion.
The use of geometry and technical jargon gives the illusion of legitimacy however this stuff is no more legit then the word 'science' in 'scientology'. Which means that exactly like scientology, the content is illegitimate but borrows vocabulary from legitimate fields like "science" to make it seem real.
The use of analogies like DNA help people form connections with irrelevant things and these analogies don't actually communicate any new information. They serve to create a feeling of catharsis when you realize that there is a connection, but the connection is actually worthless. You learn nothing new.
Take the analogy: "Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're gonna get." The quote is worthless. You already know life is random. You already know chocolate boxes are random. A comparison is made and a new connection is formed in your brain. But is there actually any new information here? No. It's a trick to make you think the quote is profound when it is really a bunch of mundane stuff you already know.
You've been bamboozled, along with every exec that fell for this report. Possibly the person who wrote this report tricked himself as well.
(And though I have absolutely no idea, one might suspect that modern boxes of supermarket chocolate are assembled by machine and all contain a constant, predetermined number of each type.)
The quote was made famous by an old US movie starring Tom Hanks. The movie is called Forrest Gump. Fittingly, the character who said that quote is mentally challenged.
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 debated for weeks or months by the highest level executives as well as whole departments of marketers. They probably had multiple documents like this from multiple agencies. With that level of internal debate, all the granular side-by-side process diagrams are a necessary part of the UX here, to guide along the audience that only sees the pdf and can't talk to the agency designers.