It's on!

Now I’m reliably informed that the last time that Pepsi was a serious player in the Kenya market was some time before I was born, in other words back in the day when the original Kenyatta wielded power from the house on the hill. At some point they decided to say adieu to Kenya and left us in the kind and caring hands of the boys and girls from Atlanta (Coca Cola).

Pepsi of course has been running a ‘soft launch’ in this town for a while now, and it is no longer a surprise to find a Pepsi Max, Seven Up or Miranda strategically located in the drinks section of your friendly neighborhood petrol station convenience store, often lovingly encased in a new Pepsi-branded refrigerator.

This new billboard campaign however is the first that I have seen of them going ‘above the line', and it is interesting to me at two levels, firstly because of the old adage that ‘you only get one chance to launch something’, and secondly because of the structure/construction/messaging of the ad itself.

I’ll begin with the former. Imagine that you are the brand manager for Pepsi hapa Kenya. How would you launch it? Bare in mind that you already have in place a fairly good distribution system – your product is on the shelf – and that you are dealing with a brand that is already fairly well known, especially amongst your core target audience. How would you go about officially announcing to the people of Kenya that ‘Pepsi Imefika!’

Would you hold a big bash and bring in some teenage heartthrob to headline it? Would you slaughter 5,000 goats and liberally distribute the Nyama across the towns and cities of the republic? Would you blow all your budget on a TV ad directed by Quentin Tarantino and starring Will Smith, Lil Weezy, 50 Cent and Mike ‘Sonko’ Mbuvi? Would you take up the sponsorship of both Gor and AFC? Would you set up a street basketball league with a grand prize of 10M? Or would you just give every Kenyan who registered to vote a free cold Pepsi? The decision would be yours, and of course making these sorts of decisions is exactly what marketing is all about…

Now I don’t watch the necessary programming or listen to the relevant radio stations to know what else Pepsi is doing to launch and build their brand here in Kenya, so I’ll have to work with the billboard that I’ve been seeing around the place – “Dare for More!” (Da da da…)

Pepsi, globally, can be described as the ‘cheeky little brother’ of its big competitor, Coca Cola. Where Coke is wholesome (image-wise), family friendly and endorsed by HRH Father Christmas, Pepsi is younger (they are, after all, the guys who invented Generation X), cheekier, funnier, cooler and edgier (though never too edgy). The general idea (for the core tween-age market) is that you drink Coke with your dad/grand dad but you drink Pepsi with your Peeps (there’s a headline in there somewhere).

I have to say that I’m a touch disappointed with what Pepsi has come up with as the opening verse in the song that they no doubt intend to be singing to us for many years to come. Do not be fooled by the angled font and the torrent of gushing brown liquid, what we have here is a pack shot and a headline.

Now there is nothing wrong per se with a pack shot and a headline, in fact if in doubt a pack-shot and a headline is probably your best bet, for the simple reason that the worst you will probably achieve will be to boost your visual equity (assuming of course that the headline makes something approaching sense). That said, for a brand that is declaring that the world should ‘dare for more’, I would have expected them to dare a touch more…

When it comes to billboards, which are one of the most powerful ways to quickly build a ‘big brand feel’, the headline is pretty much everything – it’s the beginning, the middle and the end. The headline has to capture the essence of all that you want to say in, according to various studies that I have seen, ideally no more than seven words – remember that we tend to absorb billboards by osmosis, so your message better be clear and to the point.

I kind of feel that ‘dare for more’ is one of those ‘bottom drawer’ lines, one of those lines that we copywriters pull out when we are a bit unsure as to what we want to say but we still want to show that ‘we got lyrical game’. It sounds kind of cool and ‘with it’ and it will get you through the client presentation without any egg on your face, but you know deep down that it’s just a bit soft…

I can see what the ‘dare for more’ headline is trying to do – namely to tap into the psychographic of the modern urban youth who, we are told at great expense by research agencies, is hungry, aspirational, ambitious, deficient in attention, ‘lives for the moment’ (another bottom-drawer headline that one) and ever so slightly spoilt by a completely unjustified sense of entitlement. This description, which you will frequently come across packaged in various guises, is in my opinion generic to the point of irrelevancy. Pointing out that young people are in a hurry but tend not to be able to see beyond their noses is a bit like saying that the sky is blue – indeed you have spoken the truth, but exactly what light have you shone upon this murky world?

That there is a distinct and rapidly growing urban youth market in Kenya goes without saying. Furthermore, this is a market that is overflowing with novel and innovative cultural richness. Never forget when you listen to people speaking sheng that you are enjoying the exceedingly rare privilege of watching the birth of a new language… this market segment has it’s own music style, it’s own super stars, it’s own media and, to an extent, it’s own fashion sense and visual vernacular. That this Pepsi ad reflects none of the above is to me something of a shame, and it is weaker as a result. Globally Pepsi have a long and successful history of partnering with young and cool (but not too edgy) pop stars in their prime (Madonna in the 80’s, Britney in the 90’s) to help them push their product. Me wonders whom they should be teaming up with here? Answers on a postcard please…

Always in the mix

If you’re going to spend your career in advertising, you could do a lot worse than to spend it slavishly aping the ways and actions of the great Coca Cola company.

Note I refer to the company as great, not the product, which is diabetes-inducing, tooth-loss causing and completely lacking in the ‘enlivening’ properties that one would look for were it still to contain the extracts of the kola nut and the coca leaf.

That said, at the right time, in the right place, nothing quite beats an ice-cold coke…

I am not an expert on Coca Cola, I have never worked on or for it, but I have observed it closely as a brand, consciously in recent years and unconsciously since some time in the late 70’s.

It appears to me that Coca Cola, in terms of it’s advertising, has a very simple two-pronged strategy. On the one hand, it’s communication is exceptionally functional, about as functional as it can get, whilst on the other hand, every once in a while, they roll something out that’s designed to warm the heart and make you fall in love all over again with the great purveyors of sweet dark fizzy flavored water.

The example shown here I saw yesterday whilst in the queue at Nakumatt, a most unusual experience for me. This is a classic example of Coca Cola’s functional ‘product-association’ strategy. If you observe you will see that a Coca Cola bottle is only ever shown alone if it is raised to someone’s lips, with said someone having their head thrown back and eyes closed as they enjoy a moment of unadulterated bliss (what I believe is known as appetite appeal).

At all other times a Coca Cola bottle will be shown placed in context either in association with food(s) and/or a social eating-based scenario.

Thus here we have Coca Cola with Urban Bites (Sugar, Salt and Fat). Replace Urban Bites with fried chicken, chips funga, hot dogs, burgers, pop corn (kwa cinema) or ‘nusu mkate’ and you begin to get the picture.

Nobody ever said that advertising is the work of angels. This is cold, calculated and ruthless mental manipulation. This is the use of images, and to a lesser extent language, to condition your mind into believing that a satisfying meal can only be satisfying if it is accompanied by a (ideally cold) coke. Given that the process of this conditioning begins not long after birth, and can be expected to continue for the vast majority of ones adult life, it should come as no surprise that one brand above all others has dominated the soft drinks category for the best part of a century (which in historical terms means that it is beginning to move into the category of ‘empire’).

Just as coke are the masters of relating their brand to a wide variety of meals, so to are they equally adept at relating and associating it with that quintessential human social activity – meal times.

Close you eyes, you can see the ad already. Mum, dad, three children, guka, cucu, niece, uncle, dog and two cats, all seated around a table, said table positively groaning under the load of heaped foodstuffs, everybody smiling and grinning (especially mum, who is the core target of the ad), and a big prominent bottle of coke (always full) placed front and center at the heart of everything.

Always remember when you look at an ad – there is what it says (superficially), and there is what it means. What the ad above would probably say is ‘Mealtimes taste better with Coke’. What the ad above actually means though is quite different: ‘mum, that super-special family moment that you are trying to create, surrounded by all the people that you love and hold dear, is not complete without a bottle or three of Coca Cola on the table.’

Now please note, I am not trying to portray the Coca Cola company as evil, they aren’t. What they are though is extremely and utterly professional. Marketing is a war for share of wallet, and therefore, all’s fair in love and advertising. Coca Cola remind me very much of the US Marine Corp – well funded, well trained, well equipped and well capable of kicking your…

What is more the Corp, I mean the Coca Cola company, is old enough, ugly enough and wise enough to know that occasionally you have to move beyond ‘surgical strikes’, ‘flanking maneuvers’ and ‘fire suppression’ and spend a bit of time and money winning ‘hearts and minds’. That’s why every once in a while they’ll go find a hot agency and get them to churn out a genuine ‘hit’.

Thus a while ago we had ‘Brrrr’, which was a phenomenon, but which it must be said was still at the end of the day simply a very creative way of expressing the key functional benefit of a cold coke – refreshment. More recently we have had ‘A billion reasons to believe in Africa.’ To my mind this campaign was a stroke of genius – nothing to do with coke, but everything to do with the hopes, dreams, aspirations and self-belief of an entire continent. Another generation hooked for life, job done, what’s next…?

So whether you sell coffee or tea, juice or toilet paper, biscuits or crisps or gourmet sandwiches, study the masters - learn from them, copy them and respect them. Just don’t try to beat them at their own game, yet…