Pepsico's Controversial Advertising

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Global soft drink giant, PepsiCo, is a brand that needs no introduction. Headed by Chief Executive Officer Indra Nooyi, PepsiCo is a food and beverage company with total profits in 2017 of $10,789 million (PepsiCo, 2017a) and an ever-present ranking on the esteemed Fortune 100 list (Fortune, 2017). In April 2017, PepsiCo collaborated with model and social media mogul Kendell Jenner, which resulted in the release of controversial advertisement. The commercial went viral upon being released and was deemed so insensitive, it was axed the following day due to the severe backlash it received (The Sydney Morning Herald [TSMH], 2017). The two-and-a-half-minute commercial is filled with trivialising imagery throughout the nondescript photoshoot and …show more content…

The BLM movement is a collectivist subculture that works to raise awareness of systematic social prejudices faced by African Americans to enact change and to encourage relevant conversation (Ashburn-Nardo, Thomas, & Robinson, 2017). Given the recent activism in America, how could PepsiCo possibly think that a celebrity with a can of soda could resolve issues as entrenched as these? It is insulting yet typical of a capitalistic economy, where profit maximisation will always be the primary objective (Horrigan, 2002). Unsurprisingly, the inauthentic scene was highly criticised for hijacking, oversimplifying and undermining important social and cultural issues, instead of acting as a vehicle for enabling and encouraging positive …show more content…

Yet, Taylor (2017), highlights that not everyone despised the beverage behemoths attempt at bridging the divide and found that in fact, 44% of survey respondents saw PepsiCo more favourably after watching the commercial, though, he does agree the message encoding was poorly executed. Therefore, the online hype was not necessarily a true reflection of how the general population received the advertisement. Although, in an effort to protect the brand and market share and realising they had “missed the mark”, PepsiCo pulled the advertisement within 24 hours of its launch (PepsiCo,

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