Pepsi Exec: Obama Is the Logo Biter, OK?

Pepsi wants you to associate all the warm, gauzy feelings you have about Barack Obama with its sweet, fizzy soft drinks. Just don't accuse them of copying his logo.

At a press conference held this morning to introduce new messaging for a number of Pepsi brands, Frank Cooper, the beverage giant's vice president of portfolio brands, addressed the persistent speculation that Pepsi's new logo, introduced last October, is intended to evoke the Obama campaign's now-iconic rising sun/open road/American flag motif.

"There's been a lot of discourse about the logo," acknowledged Cooper. "It makes a good news story, but I don't know if it's rooted in reality. It's a 110-year-old brand. Red, white and blue has been part of the brand for a long time."

In fact, Cooper suggested that maybe it was Obama who committed an act of sub rosa homage in his quest to become, ahem, the voice of a new generation. "I'm not sure who followed who," he said. "This [Obama] logo was developed probably a year and a half ago. We've been around for 110 years."

Indeed, the Obama/Pepsi parallels began well before Pepsi rolled out its new logo, and for a long time it seemed to some observers that it was the senator, not the soft drink, that was cultivating the comparisons. But by the time of the inauguration, Pepsi was openly trying to surf the Obama phenomenon, with billboards reading "Hope" and the like.

And Cooper sounded more than a little like Obama on the stump this morning when discussing the Pepsi Optimism Project, its ongoing consumer attitudes study. "We believe optimism is hope with a plan," he said. "You can embrace pessimism. People can go ahead and do that. but we've seen time and again that that's a bridge leading nowhere."