PepsiCo is planning an emoji-clad packaging campaign, with hopes that the characters will encourage people to pick up its drinks, as well as promote the beverages on social media.
The company's "Say It With Pepsi" campaign is slated to spread to than 100 countries this summer, including the U.S., Pepsico CEO Indra Nooyi told attendees at the Consumer Analyst Group of New York Conference, which took place in Boca Raton, Fla. this week.
Pepsi confirmed for USA TODAY that it created hundreds of emoji designs, including some that will have global appeal and some tailor-made for local markets — all based the shape on the iconic red-white-and-blue Pepsi circle.
"Emojis are the language of today but no one has put them in the world like Pepsi will in 2016," Nooyi said, according to an archived webcast of her presentation. "Our design center has designed all these emojis."
The company tested the PepsiMoji campaign in 2015 in certain markets, including Canada, Thailand and Russia. Marketers urged Pepsi product drinkers to post images to social media paired with hashtags #PepsiMoji and #SayItWithPepsi.
The quirky emojis featured in test markets include one taking a selfie, another one snorkeling, one waving a flag and another gushing tears of joy.
Emojis deliver marketing messages "graphically, quickly and in a relatable way," Toronto-based branding consultant Jeff Swystun said in an interview.
"They are a shared language now across cultures and I think that’s why brands are gravitating to them," he said.
The move comes after rival Coca-Cola first launched a popular Share-a-Coke campaign in 2014, and revived t in 2015. Coke tagged bottles with hundreds of different first names and other phrases like "BFF" and "Better Half." Many consumers posted pictures of themselves with bottles that used their name.
Like Coke's Share-a-Coke campaign, the Say It With Pepsi campaign is aimed at bolstering soft drink sales as consumers increasingly ditch sugary beverages. Pepsi's carbonated beverage sales fell 2% in 2015 and 2% in 2014, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
Duane Stanford, editor of trade publication Beverage Digest, said the popularity of the Share-a-Coke packaging helped convince stores to place large bins of highly profitable 20-ounce sodas in prominent spots last summer.
Tweaking product packaging to win customers' attention is commonplace among consumer product companies. But Stanford said Coke's effort was particularly successful because shoppers began searching through stores to find their names and the names of friends and family on bottles.
Pepsi's campaign is "a way to create a reason to get more shelf space and floor space in major retailers," Stanford said. "They’re trying to give people new reasons to pick up their soft drinks."
A heavy emphasis on social media is central to the campaign, much like Coke urged consumers to post photos of their drinks to Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat and other social media. Pepsi wants users to post photos of their emojis and use bottles to communicate with each other in places, such as loud concert venues, where it can be hard to hear what someone is saying.
But Swystun cautioned that it's important for Pepsi, whose brands include Mountain Dew, Diet Pepsi and Sierra Mist, to maintain authenticity as it embraces emojis.
The company needs to take into account that they may "turn off" older generations, or could come off as trying too hard to "look cool," he says.
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