Breathtaking Pepsi...

The disclosure of the Arnell Group's Breathtaking design strategy for Pepsi was leaked to the web yesterday to a flurry of comments from "they must be smoking something" to "is that all you get for $1M?"

If you have ever designed a logo for a brand, you will know that you feel the pressure of your colleagues and the consumers that use the brand - they have a high expectations: They all want to be surprised and delighted.

Then there is also the pressure of the creative people engaged with the process who want to leave their own mark on a project... and finally your own thoughts and feelings that hopefully are a vision for the brand. You ask for input from all these sources, and then hope to build consensus behind the direction you want to take.

The deck rationally steps the business through a process that takes the design from "convention" towards "innovation", and roots those steps in both the history of iconic Pepsi designs, and the universal lessons of design. It effectively takes debate out of the process, and presents the new brand design as a predetermined event. Tough to argue with, impossible to debate.

It is a high-minded concept, well argued. But whether all of this is necessary to update the logotype and globe... well, I will leave that up to you to decide.