About a month ago we talked about the benefits of marketing nostalgia but there are also specific times not to market nostalgia. These soda bottles can be found right now on the shelves of your neighborhood grocery store. They are Pepsi and Mountain Dew ‘Throwback’ bottles featuring classic logos from the early days of each brand. When I first saw them I was dumbstruck with brand confusion. The problem? Pepsi just introduced a sprawling modern revamp of their entire identity system that has been making a few headlines to say the least. Now is not the best time to be throwing it back when they are struggling to throw it forward.
I say struggling because you have the new logo on bottles, cans, boxes, displays, etc. on most shelves and now you also have an odd end-cap featuring these throwback logos. Note how I said ‘most shelves.’ That’s because I have a hunch that if I walk into my local store I can still find a Pepsi logo of the previous generation (on the less popular Wild Cherry Pepsi or an outdated display, perhaps). So add all of this up and there is a chance that a consumer could end up seeing three different versions of the same Pepsi logo in stores right now (1. New logo, 2. Logo immediately previous to the update, 3. Throwback logo). The logo immediately previous to the update can’t be helped as they are still very early in a large-scale branding transition. The impression they could have prevented was introducing this Throwback series.
This minor strategic blunder should help bolster all our collective branding confidence. As marketers, we often find ourselves looking to the big dogs (Pepsi, Apple, Starbucks) for inspiration but even they get it wrong sometimes — as evidenced by a campaign that needs to be thrown back for another year or so when there’s less confusion on store shelves and in consumers’ minds.