what's that yin-yang-looking logo thing for pepsi called? and where did it come from?

i remember in the ol' days, pepsi used to use four colors... red, white, navy blue and light blue on their packaging.

somewhere a long the way... it seems that the two blues merged into a new, "electric" blue color.

anyway... any info on the round logo thing?

the Pepsi Globe

As I understand it, the shape was simply originally a circle, its the bottlecap. Originally Pepsi bottle caps were green, but they changed to the red and blue in the 30s.

When PepsiCo was founded in the mid-60s, the corporate symbol was the Pepsi circle drawn to look 3D, like a sphere, with a grid of longatude and latitude lines drawn on to make it look like a globe. A few years ago the corporate symbol was changed to a sphere made up of multi-colored lines, one color for each main division.

In the mid-90s the bottle symbol was redrawn to likewise look sphere like, although without the grid.

It is properly trademarked as the "Pepsi globe".

Back in the 30s, nobody associated with Pepsi had ever heard of ying-yang, and Pepsi has had various internet rumors and urban legends relative to the symbol and its supposed religious origins, similar to the Scamway spread rumors about the moon and stars at P&G.

their logo has definitely improved over the years. it was pretty stodgy until the 90s.

also, i couldn't help but notice that the "pepsi globe" seems to have something rather similar to the "coca-cola wave" right through the middle of it.

my favorite pepsi logo was the diet pepsi logo of the late 80s... that sort of looked like the at&t logo. i thought it was a cool "interpretation" of the original logo.

[ 01-21-2006, 08:13 AM: Message edited by: popologist ]

Originally posted by SamC:
As I understand it, the shape was simply originally a circle, its the bottlecap. Originally Pepsi bottle caps were green, but they changed to the red and blue in the 30s.

i wonder if the switch to red, white & blue was due to "patriotism"... because of World Wars and stuff.

Originally posted by popologist:
i wonder if the switch to red, white & blue was due to "patriotism"... because of World Wars and stuff.

Don't know. I do know that the red circle on Lucky Strike pack (then a super popular brand) was green, but was changed during WWII because something in the green dye was needed for the war. The motto was "Green Luckies have gone to war." But the companies gave away Luckies to servicemen who got used to the red packs and they never switched back.

There also was beer brand, which you still see around now and then, called "Red, White and Blue", which attempted to pick up drinkers truned off by all those German and German sounding names.

thanks SamC. interesting stuff. [img]smile.gif[/img]

Pepsi changed their overall color to blue in the mid 90s so as to distinguish themselves from Coke.

And it's worked. Nowadays, red cans bring to mind Coke and blue cans bring to mind Pepsi. Visceral and subconcious association is a powerful thing for marketing, which is why companies who have TV commercials tend to have very catchy and memorable jingles and catch phrases, like the Yahoo! yodel or the "Obey your thirst" motto for Sprite.


SEV [img]smile.gif[/img]

Sometimes we even refer to Pepsi as "blue" or "big blue." Or I'll call them the blue guys.

You get the idea.

According to a "trivia" quiz on the Pepsi website, the Pepsi color changed from green to RW&B in 1941, so popologist's theory seems likely true.

I also read that Coca-Cola has been involved with the Olympics since the 20s. Even in pre-WWII Europe where colas were not popular (the only Euro country where Coke had real success pre-war was Germany). Even in the 1980 event in Moscow, where Coke was not normally available. So when the Olympics were held in Atlanta in 1996 the little irritating mascot character was unveiled and it was mostly BLUE. In KO's home town. The KO people was very insulted.