How Pepsi and Kendall Jenner Changed The Way Brands Talk About Social Justice
By Jenna MacGregor
Image: Brent Lewin
It’s not every day the perfect storm of corporate greed, celebrity ignorance and a general disrespect for current social movements come together to create one of the most widely hated commercials of all time, but on April 4, 2017, Pepsi did just that.
The company’s Live for Now campaign, which featured model and reality TV star Kendall Jenner ‘solving’ a clash between police and protesters with a can of Pepsi, sparked immediate criticism, with basically the entire internet taking to Twitter to point out how insensitive it was for PepsiCo to use the aesthetic of social movements such as Black Lives Matter to sell the kind of soda you settle for when out for dinner.
Less than a day later, PepsiCo posted a (not very good) apology on Twitter, but while it was “intended to [defuse] the crisis, [it] only inflamed Twitter more,” as Abigail R. Meister argued in her 2019 thesis on the ad’s crisis management response. Hours later, the company followed up with a direct apology/response to a critical tweet from Bernice King, daughter of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and an anti-racism activist in her own right, all the while working behind the scenes to pull the ad. Unfortunately, none of that was enough to ward off the massive hit to the brand’s reputation. According to Meister, “the day before the Kendall Jenner commercial went live, Pepsi had a 2% net positive sentiment on Twitter… by April 8, the company’s net sentiment had dropped by fourteen percentage points, sitting at -12%.”
PepsiCo did eventually recover, but in the meantime, other brands were taking notes, turning the company’s mistakes into a kind of ‘what not to do’ manual that has gone on to define how companies use social activism to market their products to this day.
Brands had been trying to use ‘woke washing’ for years before Pepsi’s ill-fated ad
In some ways, it was surprising to see Pepsi fumble an ad so badly. According to a 2012 interview with then-PepsiCo exec Brad Jakeman, the company had “long presented itself as the hip, fashion-forward, culturally aware, live-for-the-moment alternative to its bigger, more classic rival Coca-Cola. Coke is timeless and Pepsi is timely.” But in other ways, it made perfect sense—other companies had been trying to use performative ‘woke washing’ in ads for years. In 2012, Starbucks launched its Race Together campaign, meant to draw attention to race relations in America by having baristas write “Race Together” at the top of coffee cups and encouraging them to engage in conversations about racism with customers. Unsurprisingly, Twitter users called out the campaign for being a misguided and hollow attempt to not only comment on a sensitive and nuanced topic, but worse, profit off a social ill.
Companies’ attempts to appear socially relevant only ramped up following Donald Trump’s election as U.S. president. “The record-setting protests around Donald Trump’s inauguration were followed by rapid response activism in the wake of his sudden travel ban on Muslim-majority countries. Recent protests against racist police brutality, the Flint water crisis, and the oil pipeline through Standing Rock had caught national attention, but remained relatively fringe causes,” Fast Company columnist Joe Berkowitz explained in 2020. “Protesting against Trump, however, quickly became a mainstream activity. It appeared the hashtag-Resistance was commodifiable, and Pepsi was the first brand that attempted to cash in on it.”
They did so by producing an ad where young, attractive protesters for an unknown cause line the clean streets of what could be any American city (ironically, the ad was filmed in Bangkok). The vagueness of the ad itself highlights how Pepsi was working to make money off the existence of social movements while simultaneously avoiding politically or morally aligning themselves with a specific cause. The crowd held comically vague signs displaying positive buzzwords like “love” or “peace,” which mirrored the similarly empty message of the ad as a whole: Know that we stand with you, so long as you don't ask what exactly we're standing for.
After George Floyd’s murder, it became clear that companies had learned important lessons from Pepsi’s failed ad
The backlash to the ads release extended far past the online world. According to YouGov BrandIndex, the following months saw Pepsi's brand reception reach its lowest point in over eight years, and the purchase consideration score with millennials went from 27% in early April to 24% in mid-July 2017. And other companies took note. In 2020, following the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, consumer brands quickly produced commercials, ads and social media posts proclaiming their support. For Starbucks, this looked like donating $1 million in Neighbourhood Grants to promote racial equity and allowing employees to wear BLM shirts and buttons while at work (after being called out for banning them). YouTube pledged $1 million to address social justice. Companies like Netflix and Marvel made statements that specifically named anti-Black racism. Of course, these pledges and statements often turned out to be as performative as posting a black square on Instagram. But still, these decisions clearly took critiques of Pepsi into close consideration. In fact, they show an evolution in brand activism, one that produces a marginally better outcome for the communities they focus on, while still maintaining the central motivation of company profit.
Pepsi proved that when an ad is all performance and no action, people will not hesitate to call out that fact. To avoid this, brands now turn the act of donating or ‘giving back’ into a public spectacle that often includes selling products with their logos plastered on it. For example, in 2020, Marc Jacobs Beauty released a new collection, Enamoured (With Pride), which included a limited-edition version of their popular lip gloss that was clad in rainbow packaging and sold for $29 USD each. In a sentimental Instagram post announcing the campaign, the company pledged to donate $10,000 to two LGBTQ+ organizations. Of course, the post carefully left out the fact that the money Marc Jacobs Beauty would make off the collection would far exceed that amount.
But while they’ve gotten more sensitive, their motivations remain the same: profit
Brands have also moved away from placing celebrities and public figures in their more political ads, clearly realizing that no pretty nepotism baby can shield them from criticism. Positioning a millionaire white woman as the focus point of a protest meant to replicate movements for the underprivileged and oppressed was a mistake so glaringly large it's almost shocking an entire team of PepsiCo employees approved it. Now, brands either do not include any public figure at all, or they work with someone within the community their ad is focused on. But this isn’t the progress you might hope for. When it comes to race, this often looks like using the ideas, words and images of a Black woman in February, or following a scandal, then never working with her again. It wasn't until Too Faced cosmetics was called out for an uninclusive shade range in their incredibly popular Born This Way foundation, for example, that they partnered with beauty influencer Jackie Aina to expand the shade range, adding 11 more shades to bring the total to 35. Because so much brand activism is performative and meant to garner attention, positive changes will only occur after being called out. Hiring and properly paying people of colour should not be done as a response to backlash or a decrease in profits, it should be the norm. Unfortunately, for many, progressive change cannot take place without an audience.
Clearly, though companies have changed their methods, they still all operate with the same motivations. Pepsi just happened to perfectly encapsulate the most sinister aspects of these types of advertisements: the deployment and sanitization of progressive aesthetics and ideas to serve corporate greed. The flashy use of the ‘woke’ ideology that was never intended to foster any tangible progressive change as much as it was meant to increase profits for an already massive conglomerate.
This is why, five years later, we still talk about the ad that launched a thousand memes. Pepsi’s controversial ad showed other brands that they could continue to use oppression and tragedy to their advantage by simply altering the way they package it. That’s why they no longer claim their products will solve the world's greatest problems; instead they try to market the image that they are ‘one of the good ones’, standing alongside you on the front lines, offering you a shield that just happens to have their logo on it.