Hi Backchannel readers,
It’s Jessi, with a question: what was Pepsi thinking?
This is not rhetorical. I have watched Pepsi’s infamous advertising blunder nearly a dozen times now, and I’m still looking for the message. Near the beginning — the 37th second, to be exact — as a crowd of protesters marches, or more like ambles, down the street, one person toward the top of the frame wears a pink hat. Or at least, I think it’s a pink hat; she is very very small. That’s about as much of a social stand as I can discern from the video, which suggests the country’s mounting political protests are about as much of a party as San Francisco’s annual Bay-to-Breakers costumed race/street festival.
There was a time when neutrality was socially acceptable, and even expected. Politics were private, and the business of business was, well, business. That time is over. Recently, I moderated a discussion on the topic at an event held by the Business Marketing Association. (Believe it or not, it was before Pepsi.) Following the election, many companies have experienced the pull to choose sides on issues, and to work with their advertising agencies to express their positions. This isn’t driven by their values so much as their desire to connect with customers who expect them to have values. As Michael Maslansky, who runs communication strategy firm Maslansky + Partners, said, “The era of the fence-sitter corporation is over. You have to pick a spot, an audience, a set of values you want to live by.”
If brands don’t take positions their customers will use the internet’s tools to call them out anyhow. Consider Urban Outfitters. Last September, a trans customer who wears makeup and identifies as “gender-fluid” wrote an essay for Mic complaining of being turned away at an Urban Outfitters dressing room. The clothing retailer for millennials did more than apologize; it announced a position: “We do not endorse any laws that discriminate against the LGBTQ community, and we have supported charities that are actively fighting the anti-LGBTQ HB-2 law in North Carolina.”
Last week, I plucked a shirt from the rack in a Manhattan Urban Outfitters and went to find the dressing room. An outsized sign above a set of unisex stalls read: “All Gender Dressing Rooms.” It’s a bold stand to take, and one that suggests Urban Outfitters knows exactly who its customers are.
The types of tech companies Backchannel covers most frequently have led the way on this sort of thing. Very early on, for example, when Alphabet was still just Google, the company announced it wouldn’t do business in North Carolina if the state continued to discriminate against transgender people. In 2014, at the height of the national debate over gay marriage, Tim Cook came out publicly. More recently, tech companies have spoken out about the immigration ban. And then there was Airbnb’s Superbowl ad, which implied criticism of Trump’s travel ban on a very public stage and made a company commitment to helping refugees. The ad began: “We believe no matter who you are, where you’re from, who you love or who you worship, we all belong.”
By contrast, Pepsi’s ad offers up nothing about what the soda maker believes. And unlike Urban Outfitters, when Pepsi addressed criticism, it didn’t take a stand on police brutality and other political issues consumers raised. Instead, the brand apologized…to Kendall Jenner. Jenner, who has done no better than Pepsi in aligning her personal brand with a set of values, is reportedly in Paris recovering from the trauma of her big miss by avoiding social media. It’s a vacuous move that won’t soon be forgotten — if only because the memes are endless.
