Pepsi x Kendall Jenner — When Purpose Meets Poor Creative
Covers lectures
F7-04 · F7-05 · F7-11
Pepsi x Kendall Jenner — When Purpose Meets Poor Creative
Module: F7 — Communications Strategy Type: Anti-Case (Failure Analysis) Cross-references: F7-04 (creative effectiveness), F7-05 (emotional response), F7-11 (creative evaluation and approval)
The Situation
On 4 April 2017, PepsiCo released a new advertisement featuring Kendall Jenner, the model and television personality. The ad depicted Jenner leaving a photoshoot to join a street protest of unspecified cause, where attractive young people of various ethnicities marched with generic signs reading "Join the Conversation" and "Love." The march arrived at a line of police officers. Jenner, in a moment of manufactured tension, walked to the police line and handed an officer a can of Pepsi. The officer took a sip. The crowd erupted in celebration. Conflict resolved. Peace achieved. Through the medium of a carbonated soft drink.
The advertisement was pulled within twenty-four hours. PepsiCo issued a public apology. The backlash was immediate, widespread, and devastating. It was mocked on social media, condemned by civil rights organisations, and cited by marketing commentators as one of the worst advertisements in modern history. The daughter of Martin Luther King Jr. posted on social media: "If only Daddy would have known about the power of Pepsi." Saturday Night Live parodied it. It became a case study in how not to do purpose-driven marketing — before the phrase "purpose-driven marketing" had even fully entered the mainstream lexicon.
This case analyses what went wrong, why it went wrong, and what it teaches about the relationship between creative strategy, cultural authenticity, and the organisational dynamics of advertising approval.
The Data
The Creative Execution
The Pepsi ad was produced in-house by PepsiCo's internal content creation team, Creators League Studio. It was not developed by an external advertising agency. This detail is significant and will be examined in the analysis.
The execution contained the following elements:
The protest. The ad depicted a large, photogenic street march. The protesters were young, attractive, and diverse in a carefully curated way. They carried signs with messages so vague as to be meaningless: "Join the Conversation," "Love," peace symbols. The cause of the protest was never identified. There were no specific grievances, demands, or issues. The march was an aesthetic — the visual language of social protest stripped of any actual social content.
The celebrity. Kendall Jenner was positioned as the protagonist. She was shown in a blonde wig during a photoshoot (the glamorous world she inhabits), noticed the protest passing by, removed the wig (symbolically shedding her privilege), and joined the march. The narrative arc — from privilege to solidarity — was intended to be aspirational. In practice, it was perceived as trivialising.
The resolution. The climax of the ad — Jenner handing a can of Pepsi to a police officer — was the moment that drew the most intense criticism. At a time when the Black Lives Matter movement had placed police-community relations at the centre of American public discourse, the image of a wealthy white celebrity resolving racial tension by offering a soft drink to a police officer was received as breathtakingly tone-deaf.
The brand role. Pepsi was positioned as the agent of peace and reconciliation. The can of Pepsi was not merely a product; it was the solution to social conflict. This elevated the brand's role far beyond anything credible — from a refreshment to a vehicle of social justice — and did so in a context where the actual issues were matters of life and death.
The Public Response
The response was swift and overwhelmingly negative.
Social media. Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram erupted with criticism within hours of the ad's release. The criticism was not confined to activists or marketing professionals; it spanned the full spectrum of public commentary. The predominant emotional responses were anger, contempt, and mockery. Anger at the trivialisation of protest movements. Contempt for the cynicism of using social justice aesthetics to sell soft drinks. Mockery at the absurdity of the premise.
Civil rights organisations. Organisations connected to the Black Lives Matter movement and other social justice causes issued statements condemning the advertisement. The criticism was specific: the ad appropriated the visual language of their movements — marches, confrontations with police, solidarity — while emptying it of all meaning and conflict.
Media coverage. The advertisement received extensive negative coverage in news outlets globally. The New York Times, The Guardian, BBC News, and virtually every major media outlet covered the backlash. The coverage was not merely entertainment-section commentary; it was treated as a news story about corporate insensitivity.
Internal response. PepsiCo pulled the ad within approximately twenty-four hours of its release. The company issued a statement: "Pepsi was trying to project a global message of unity, peace and understanding. Clearly we missed the mark, and we apologize." The company also apologised to Kendall Jenner, stating it had "put her in this position."
What the Brand Intended
PepsiCo's stated intention was to create a "global message of unity, peace and understanding." The ad was produced during a period when many major brands were exploring "purpose" as a creative territory — the idea that brands should stand for something beyond their product category, aligning with social causes and cultural movements.
The purpose movement in marketing was, at the time, gaining significant momentum. Unilever's "Sustainable Living" brands (including Dove's "Real Beauty" campaign) were held up as evidence that purpose-driven brands grew faster than non-purpose brands. Marketing conferences featured panels on "brand purpose." Consultancies sold purpose-finding workshops. There was a prevailing narrative that consumers — especially younger consumers — wanted brands to take stands on social issues.
Pepsi's ad was an attempt to participate in this movement. The execution, however, revealed the gap between aspiring to purpose and authentically embodying it.
The Analysis
Failure of Creative Strategy (F7-04)
The first and most fundamental failure was strategic, not executional. The ad did not fail because of poor production values or weak casting. It failed because the creative strategy was built on sand.
No strategic foundation. A credible purpose campaign requires a genuine connection between the brand's actions and the cause it claims to support. Dove's "Real Beauty" campaign worked (for years, at least) because Dove could credibly claim to be doing something about beauty standards — reformulating products, using non-airbrushed models, funding self-esteem programmes. Pepsi had no equivalent connection to social justice. The brand had taken no public positions on racial justice, police reform, or any of the movements whose visual language the ad appropriated. The purpose was fabricated for the advertisement, not rooted in the brand's behaviour.
Binet and Field's framework. Effective emotional advertising creates genuine emotional responses — warmth, amusement, empathy, surprise — that build positive associations with the brand. The Pepsi ad attempted to generate an emotional response (inspiration, unity), but the gap between the trivial brand role (a soft drink) and the serious cultural context (police brutality, racial justice) produced the opposite emotional response: contempt. When the emotional response to an advertisement is negative, the brand associations formed are negative. The ad did not build brand equity; it destroyed it.
Creative effectiveness evidence. The IPA evidence base shows that the most effective campaigns are those where the brand plays a credible role in the emotional narrative. In the John Lewis Christmas campaigns (Case 01), the brand's role is credible — a department store associated with thoughtful gift-giving. In the Pepsi ad, the brand's role — solving racial conflict — was not credible. When consumers detect inauthenticity, the emotional response shifts from the intended territory (inspiration) to an entirely different territory (anger, mockery).
Failure of Emotional Response (F7-05)
The emotional response framework helps explain why the backlash was so intense.
The intended emotional response was inspiration and unity — the feeling of diverse people coming together, transcending differences, finding common ground. This is a legitimate emotional territory for advertising. Many successful campaigns operate in it.
The actual emotional response was a compound of several negative emotions:
- Anger. Viewers who had personal connections to social justice movements — who had marched, who had been arrested, who had lost family members to police violence — experienced the ad as a trivialisation of their lived experience and their cause.
- Contempt. The cynicism of using protest imagery to sell soft drinks — stripping social movements of their substance while retaining their aesthetic — generated a response of moral contempt.
- Mockery. The absurdity of the premise — that a can of Pepsi could resolve a confrontation between protesters and police — invited ridicule. The ad became a meme not because it was charmingly foolish (as some self-aware campaigns intend) but because it was earnestly, obliviously ridiculous.
Orlando Wood's framework (2019) offers additional insight. The ad exhibited several left-brain features that undermine emotional effectiveness: a didactic narrative structure (character sees problem, character acts, problem is solved), idealised and generic characters (no specificity, no depth), and a resolution that was too neat, too easy, too instantly gratifying. The right-brain features that drive genuine emotional engagement — complexity, ambiguity, betweenness between characters, a sense of place and time — were absent. The ad was a left-brain construction wearing right-brain clothing: it looked like an emotional story, but its structure was a rational argument (Pepsi = unity).
Failure of Creative Evaluation and Approval (F7-11)
Perhaps the most instructive failure in the Pepsi case is what it reveals about the organisational process that approved the advertisement.
In-house production. The ad was produced by PepsiCo's internal content team, Creators League Studio, without the involvement of an external advertising agency. This is significant. External agencies, for all their flaws, provide a degree of creative challenge and cultural perspective that internal teams may lack. An external agency with diverse creative and planning teams might have identified the cultural risks of the concept at the briefing stage. The internal team, operating within PepsiCo's corporate culture and approval hierarchy, may have lacked the distance — or the authority — to challenge the concept.
The approval chain. For a global brand owned by one of the world's largest food and beverage companies, the ad would have required approval from multiple layers of management — brand managers, marketing directors, legal review, and likely C-suite sign-off. Every person in this chain approved the concept. This suggests either that the cultural risks were not raised, or that they were raised and overruled. Both scenarios indicate a systemic failure in the creative evaluation process.
The absence of cultural counsel. The ad dealt with themes of protest, police, racial diversity, and social justice — themes that are deeply political and culturally sensitive in the United States (and globally). There is no public evidence that PepsiCo consulted with cultural advisors, community organisations, or individuals with lived experience of the movements the ad depicted. The absence of such counsel is itself a failure — not of creative judgment, but of process design. A robust creative evaluation process for culturally sensitive material would include external perspectives as a matter of course.
The briefing problem. The most fundamental question is: who wrote the brief? What did the brief say? If the brief instructed the creative team to "create a film that positions Pepsi as a unifying force during a time of social division," then the failure is in the briefing — the strategy was flawed from inception. If the brief was more modest and the creative team escalated the concept beyond its strategic foundation, then the failure is in creative development and evaluation. In either case, the system failed to prevent a strategically unsound concept from reaching production and distribution.
The Gap Between "Culturally Relevant" and "Culturally Tone-Deaf"
The Pepsi case illustrates a distinction that is easy to state and difficult to execute: the difference between cultural relevance and cultural appropriation.
Cultural relevance means understanding the cultural context in which your brand operates, acknowledging the issues that matter to your consumers, and — if appropriate — connecting your brand to those issues in a way that is authentic, credible, and proportionate. Brands that achieve cultural relevance do so by listening before speaking, acting before advertising, and maintaining humility about the limits of their role.
Cultural appropriation (in the marketing sense) means borrowing the aesthetics, language, or emotional resonance of a cultural movement without any genuine connection to it — using the movement's surface appearance to generate attention while ignoring (or being ignorant of) its substance. This is what Pepsi did. The ad took the visual language of Black Lives Matter, the Women's March, and other social movements, emptied it of all political content, and repurposed it as a backdrop for a product advertisement.
The difference is not subtle. But it requires cultural literacy, humility, and a willingness to listen to voices outside the corporate conference room. The Pepsi case suggests that none of these were present in the development process.
The Lessons
The Pepsi x Kendall Jenner case offers several clear lessons for communications strategy:
Purpose requires authenticity. A brand cannot claim purpose in advertising without demonstrating purpose in action. Purpose is not a creative device; it is a business commitment. Advertising that claims purpose without strategic foundation will be exposed — quickly and publicly.
Emotional response is not controllable. You cannot prescribe the emotional response to your advertising. You can design for a response, but the actual response depends on the audience's context, experience, and perception of your brand's credibility. When the intended emotion (inspiration) meets an incredulous audience, the actual emotion (contempt) can be the exact opposite.
In-house production needs external challenge. Internal content teams offer speed and cost efficiency, but they can lack the cultural distance and creative challenge that external agencies provide. For culturally sensitive creative — which, in an era of social media scrutiny, means most creative — external perspectives are not a luxury but a necessity.
Approval processes need cultural stress-testing. The fact that the Pepsi ad survived multiple layers of corporate approval without being stopped suggests that the approval process was evaluating against the wrong criteria. Brand consistency, production quality, and celebrity fit were presumably assessed. Cultural sensitivity, strategic authenticity, and potential for backlash were evidently not assessed with sufficient rigour.
Speed of consequences has changed. In a pre-social-media era, the Pepsi ad might have generated letters of complaint and a critical column in Advertising Age. In 2017, the backlash was global, immediate, and devastating — compressing into twenty-four hours a reputational consequence that once would have unfolded over weeks or months.
The Questions
F7-04 Application. Using the creative effectiveness evidence from Binet and Field, analyse why the Pepsi ad failed. What does the IPA evidence base tell us about the conditions under which emotional advertising works — and the conditions under which it backfires?
F7-05 Application. Apply the emotional response frameworks from F7-05 to the Pepsi case. Map the intended emotional response against the actual emotional response. What drove the gap between them? How does this case illustrate the relationship between brand credibility and emotional reception?
F7-11 Application. The Pepsi ad was produced in-house and approved through PepsiCo's internal process. Using the creative evaluation and approval frameworks from F7-11, analyse what went wrong in the approval process. What safeguards should a creative evaluation process include for culturally sensitive material?
Comparative Application. Compare the Pepsi case to the John Lewis Christmas campaigns (Case 01) or the Cadbury Gorilla (Case 04). What distinguishes effective emotional advertising from ineffective emotional advertising? What role does brand credibility play?
Both/And Application. Is there a Both/And in purpose marketing — "brand purpose AND commercial objectives"? Or does the Pepsi case demonstrate that purpose and commerce are fundamentally in tension? Use the evidence base to support your argument.
Sources
Victor, D. (2017). "Pepsi Pulls Ad Accused of Trivializing Black Lives Matter." The New York Times, 5 April.
Binet, L. & Field, P. (2013). The Long and the Short of It: Balancing Short and Long-Term Marketing Strategies. IPA.
Wood, O. (2019). Lemon: How the Advertising Brain Turned Sour. IPA.
Ritson, M. (2017). "Pepsi's ad failure shows why marketers should not lead with purpose." Marketing Week.
Shotton, R. (2018). The Choice Factory: 25 Behavioural Biases That Influence What We Buy. Harriman House.
Taylor, C.R. (2017). "How did Pepsi's ad get approved?" Forbes, 6 April.