With a polar bear choosing Pepsi in a blind taste test, Pepsi has pulled off a Super Bowl stunt that marketers will be arguing about for years. Mark Ritson asks whether this is a masterstroke of differentiation or proof that distinctive assets are almost impossible to hijack?
Pepsi has unveiled its Super Bowl LX ad and it is, by any measure, an interesting piece of work. The spot, directed by Taika Waititi, features a polar bear presented with two unmarked cola cups in a rerun of the infamous blind taste tests that once dominated the cola wars. The bear samples both, pauses, and then definitively selects Pepsi Zero Sugar. The tagline hammers the point home with characteristic Pepsi swagger: ‘The Choice.’
It‘s a simple ad. But anyone with even a passing familiarity with ancient marketing history will recognize that Pepsi has done something either brilliantly audacious or monumentally stupid. Possibly both. Because this single ad brings together two of the most potent strategic weapons in soft drink history and pits them against each other in a 30-second experiment in marketing theory.
‘The Pepsi Challenge’ is one of the defining campaigns of the 20th century. Launched in 1975, it was elegantly simple, brutally effective and impossibly difficult to counter. Pepsi set up tables in shopping malls across America and invited passing consumers to taste two unmarked colas and pick their favorite.
More often than not, they picked Pepsi. Suddenly, the brand was no longer the also-ran chasing Coca-Cola. It was the cola that tasted better. ‘The Challenge’ embodied everything traditional marketing theory holds dear about differentiation. Find a meaningful point of difference (the taste), dramatize it compellingly, then invest heavily in the message and watch market share follow. And it worked. Pepsi narrowed the gap with Coke throughout the late 70s and 80s and ‘The Challenge’ became a textbook case in competitive positioning.
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The Coca-Cola polar bears occupy equally hallowed ground but on entirely different terrain. The bears first appeared in 1993 in a commercial created by Ken Stewart at Creative Artists Agency. Stewart conceived the idea while watching his labrador retriever stare at the television and the ad was an immediate sensation. The bears returned the following year – and the year after that – and have remained a fixture of Coke’s marketing ever since. They appear on packaging, in theme park experiences, on Christmas trucks and across decades of advertising.
Research consistently shows the bears are among the most recognized brand assets in the world, sitting comfortably alongside the contour bottle and the Spencerian script in Coca-Cola’s palette of distinctive brand assets. They exemplify everything the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute would later articulate about how brands grow: consistent visual devices that build mental availability and make a brand easier to notice and easier to remember. The bears are not about persuasion; they are about presence. Decades of deployment have burned them into consumer memory so deeply that you cannot see a polar bear holding a drink without thinking of Coca-Cola.
To take one of Coke’s most distinctive brand assets and deploy it within Pepsi’s most famous differentiation vehicle is a breathtaking move. This 30-second ad casts a much bigger shadow than its runtime or innocuous narrative suggests. This is not just Coke against Pepsi. It is differentiation versus distinctiveness.
Professor Byron Sharp and the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute have long argued that meaningful differentiation between competing brands is rarer than most marketers assume. To be clear, Ehrenberg-Bass does not deny that differentiation exists. A cola and a lemonade are obviously different products. A zero-sugar variant differs from full sugar. These are real, functional distinctions. But within a competitive set of similar products, consumers typically do not hold the strong differentiated brand perceptions that marketers like to imagine. Brands grow primarily through mental and physical availability. Being easy to think of and easy to buy. And distinctive assets are a crucial mechanism through which that mental availability is built.
By this logic, Pepsi may have made a significant error. Exposing millions of Super Bowl viewers to a polar bear drinking a cola could generate as many Coke associations as Pepsi ones. Perhaps more. Pepsi obviously plays with expectations to make the case that the bear now prefers their brand. And it obviously infuses its ad with logos and pack shots galore. But we know that brand characters trump logos and packs for impact and that Coke bear gets a lot of airtime in that Pepsi ad.
My bet is that on the shallower, distracted, slightly pissed system-one plane of cognition, the reptile brain of most consumers locks on to that polar bear and jumps straight to Coke. One nicely executed 45-second spot with a bunch of pack shots does not trump 30 years of memory structures.
But if traditional positioning theory retains its validity, if brand-level differentiation is a powerful force in consumer decision-making, then Pepsi may have played a masterstroke. The humor of watching Coke’s own beloved mascot reject Coke in favor of Pepsi is genuinely funny. It subverts expectations. It makes the taste superiority memorable in a way that another celebrity endorsement never could.
The talking-point potential is certainly enormous. And then there’s the well-known multiplier effect of animals in ads to contend with, too. The ad has been pre-released and, despite a relatively underwhelming script, has already ignited on social media. If the ad genuinely persuades even a small percentage of viewers that Pepsi tastes better, ‘The Challenge’ will have done its job once again, 40 years on from the first two paper cups hitting the white tablecloth.
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The immediate metrics will tell us nothing useful. Pepsi will trumpet reach, media reaction and social engagement. Coke will stay silent, reluctant to give airtime to its rival, content to let ambiguity work in its favor.
What matters is not whether people liked the ad but whether they can correctly recall which brand it was for. Expect the results to be low for both brands. Despite the industry hullabaloo around Super Bowl advertising, its lasting impact is remarkably piss-poor. Ipsos has observed that more than half of Super Bowl ads achieve less than 1% brand recall the morning after the game.
So in a week’s time, when consumers are asked what brands they remember from last night’s game, will they say Pepsi, Coke, or both?. If Coke achieves significant branded recall from an ad it did not pay for, Coke wins and Pepsi loses. And the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute gets another notch on the marketing bedpost.
Coca-Cola has not advertised during the Super Bowl since 2020. If Coke were running its own ad in the same broadcast, viewers would encounter both brands during the evening and the recall data would be muddied. But with Coke absent, Pepsi’s polar bear spot may be the only trigger for Coca-Cola all night. The sole piece of cola advertising that 120 million viewers see will feature Coke’s most famous asset, paid for by Pepsi. If the distinctiveness argument holds, that is not a bold competitive move. It is an $8m act of charity.
Is Pepsi about to spend $8m reminding America about Coca-Cola? Or is this a brilliant way to reignite the taste tests for a new generation? Either way, this latest skirmish in the oldest battle in marketing is a lot more interesting than the game itself. Because this is not just an $8m ad, not just the battle between two big brands, it’s a brilliant moment to watch the class between the two Ds of marketing.
Mark Ritson is a former marketing professor, brand consultant, and multi-award-winning columnist. He is also the founder of the MiniMBA in Marketing, which kicks off April 7. Find out more.
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