Coke & Pepsi: the world through cola bottle lenses.

Coke would never actually use this ad
& this 'cooler than thou' imagery
is much more Pepsi-ish.
Even on an individual transformative level,
Coke would aim to reassure you that
you were always awesome & always will be.
Coke don't want any Us & Them imagery
because it goes against their ethos that
the whole world is one big 'In Crowd'.

Cola advertising is especially intriguing, and not just because Coke & Pepsi are two of the biggest brands out there. When what you're selling is nothing more than bubbly sugar water, it allows you to wholeheartedly market an 'image' unclouded by any need to point out particular product features. And while at first glance Coke & Pepsi may be the same thing, there are subtle-yet-significant differences to their approach. For one thing, let's look closer at those product features themselves...

Since the price they paid for The Pepsi Challenge is that they are forever labelled as the 'other option', Pepsi has embraced this by focusing on the cool refreshment of the soda itself as the centrepiece of their ongoing imagery. They want you to refresh the almost innate "I'm thirsty & Coke is the first thing I think of" mindset, and see yourself as cooler than others as you make the distinctly defined choice of reaching for a Pepsi. Whether it's Madonna or Michael Jackson proclaiming Pepsi as the drink of a new generation, or the Spice Girls telling the Baby Boomers to Move Over, the Us & Them distinction has been the central difference in Pepsi's ongoing message.

Coke on the other hand, would rather you not even think about the actual flavour of Coke; the chemical nature of the kola nut flavour works in their favour here. (It is a taste quickly forgotten by the tastebuds, prompting the next sip & making it impossible to carry a Coke around without drinking it.) Coke would instead rather you idealise the sharing aspects of Coca-Cola: that it is increasingly the beverage that the whole world has in common & that when the aliens come, we'll welcome them with a bottle of Coke.

Coke & Pepsi both use a lot of youthful images in their campaigns, but a closer look reveals the devilishly detailed differences. Coke's images of youth are people playing at the beach with friends, a kind of perpetual youthfulness that even older drinkers will be able to remember & idealise as they project a Coca-Cola association back onto those memories. More often, Pepsi use younger celebrities that may not even be recogniseable to an older demographic. Pepsi's 2010 'Hit Refresh' campaign with a slogan that aimed to convince new drinkers to jump the fence. But for anyone too old to get the reference to perpetually hitting F5 to reload your social media feed, it excluded them from this conversation & for the 'cool crowd' Pepsi drinkers 'in the know', that's just the way they like it.