Pepsi too has represented itself like a friendly brand just like Coca Cola, but they primarily focused on the teens and young adult consumers. Pepsi’s advertisements have been clever but have mostly featured young celebrities to impress their target audience. Some such celebrities include Micheal Jackson, Britney Spears, etc. Pepsi has also used Indian celebrities like Ranbir Kapoor & Priyanka Chopra and cricket stars like Virat Kohli & Harbhajan Singh in their advertisements to endorse their product.
Pepsi has been giving Coca Cola a competition in advertising for a long time. Just like the ‘Thanda Matlab Coca Cola’ advertisement campaign, Pepsi too started a ‘Pepsi Thi Pee Gaya’ advertisement campaign. Pepsi has time and again done advertisements as an open challenge to Coca Cola. Take Pepsi’s ‘The Pepsi Challenge’ for an example. It started in the year 1975 and proved to be a huge hit for the company.
So, for ‘The Pepsi Challenge’, people were challenged to take a blindfold test, where they were made to taste two soft drinks one of which was Pepsi and the other was Coke. The participant didn’t know which one he drank first and was asked to choose the soft drink, whose taste he liked more. According to the brand, more than 50% of people liked the taste of Pepsi more than Coke. Now, you must notice that both the brands differ a lot when it comes to taste. Where Coca Cola has a fizzier and less sweet raisin vanilla taste, Pepsi has a less fizzy citrussy sweet kind of taste. Nevertheless, ‘The Pepsi Challenge’ proved a success for the brand.
Another instance will be the Pepsi’s Halloween advertisement of the year 2018, that featured a Pepsi can with a Coca Cola drape wishing a scary Halloween. There have been many such advertisements by Pepsi in a way to try and look better than Coca Cola.
So, we can say that Pepsi has appeared to be a more appealing brand for young consumers, but at the same time also tried desperately hard to look like a superior brand against Coca Cola.