I went shopping at the grocery store today. As I was wheeling my cart around, striking aluminum bottles with sharp design caught my eye. I thought to myself: “Oh, must be a new kind of beer.” But closer inspection revealed that they were actually Pepsi bottles – limited edition bottles for the 2012 Super Bowl.
My immediate reaction was to think the Pepsi marketers clever; they are trying to make a soda look more like beer, which is the beverage of choice at most football game-watch gatherings. True, Mountain Dew has held similar campaigns in the past (the Green Label Art series), using aluminum packaging as a shock factor to create hype. However, Mountain Dew’s strategy involved inviting artists to create graphics and illustrations that would wrap around the bottles, giving each bottle an urban, graffiti look. In the case of Pepsi however, the limited editions appear to employ familiar visual cues to evoke the look and feel of traditional beer packaging design.
I thought this was quite smart because the social norm in America is to drink beer while watching sports. Though sports fans include women, men are the predominant consumers of sporting events and will often hold game-watch gatherings. Drinking beer is considered a manly thing to do. In order to promote increased sales during the Super Bowl season, Pepsi has disguised itself to appear more "manly."
Borrowing associations from a different category is an interesting tactic.
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