Recently more and more marketers are trying to stay relevant by taking sensitive social issues that have the current attention of their target audience without alienating anyone within that audience; not an easy task. Many companies have fallen short in decorum when it comes to this such as Anheuser-Busch InBev NV’s Super Bowl commercial about immigration or Audi’s ad touching on the gender pay gap. None, though, seem to have fallen so far as PepsiCo. did with their commercial, aired on Tuesday, April 4th.
Below is the video of the ad:
Before the ad even aired, the commercial received backlash from some critics who called it “a tone-deaf depiction of the Black Lives Matter movement” and others who accused it of being slanted against law enforcement. Pepsi never stated its position on the topics of the Black Lives Matter movement or police/law enforcement violence. This is the problem that most people had with the ad: by saying that everything would be resolved simply by sharing a Pepsi with the other party, therefore making light of the movement as a whole. And to top it off, they featured a celebrity, Kendall Kardashian, who isn’t known for taking up and fighting for social causes. And, to add insult to injury, the day that the commercial aired just happened to be the same day of the anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination.
From a marketing standpoint, Pepsi had received much backlash for the commercial, especially on social media with Bernice King, the daughter of MLK Jr. and the chief executive of the King Center in Atlanta, tweeting “If only Daddy would have known about the power of #Pepsi” and another tweet saying “Any product or service that is pro-Kardashian, anti-cop = hard, permanent pass. Looking at you @pepsi.”
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