From Idea to Product: Pepsi’s Summer Launch

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It’s the hottest summer in living memory and you want a cold drink. Or you want an ice cream. Or you want a combination cold drink and ice cream, and that’s what Pepsi Zero Sugar are bringing you. Their new range of ice cream flavours like Raspberry Ripple come in colourful branded cans with an image of a cone underneath the familiar Pepsi brand.

Pepsi and in-house agency Sips & Bites are launching the Zero Sugar Ice Cream cans with a new brand character, and we’re making it our Ad Of The Week. But that’s not all – it’s also our Idea Of The Week, as we ran the ice cream flavour Pepsi concept through our Test Your Innovation platform as well as the standard Test Your Ad testing.

It gives us a set of results that shows us the strength of the underlying idea, the potential barriers, and provides insight into how Pepsi are overcoming those barriers with the ad.

First of all, let’s focus on the ad, and the delightful new character it introduces. Pidge the Pigeon is an ordinary bird, the kind you’d see in any British city… or is he? As soon as our heroine starts to drink her ice cream Pepsi, Pidge’s calls of “Coo! Coo!” turn into “Cool! Cool!” and the bird turns a very fetching shade of raspberry. Put the can down and the CGI disappears – drink it and Pidge returns.

It’s a charmingly quirky use of special effects to get across how fun and refreshing the new brand is – it can make even the pigeons playful. As a vivid new brand character, Pidge has plenty of potential for future investment, should Pepsi want to turn him from a one-off into a Fluent Device. But even just in this ad he’s an effective asset, with a 3.9-Star Rating putting Pidge’s debut in the top quintile of soft-drink ads.

The commercial also does exceptionally well on short-term Spike Rating and on Brand Fluency – both absolutely crucial measures for a brand extension, giving Pepsi its best chance of a strong sales launch and meaning it dodges the risk of its audience missing who the product is coming from. The tagline, “Deliciously Confusingly Not Real Ice Cream,” is a tongue-in-cheek nod to potential product confusion (and a way of defusing it).

Whether that’s a risk Pepsi need to mitigate is one of the things we can discover from exploring the concept’s Test Your Innovation results. In Test Your Innovation, we focus not just on people’s own personal emotional reaction to an idea but on whether they’d back the idea in the marketplace by “buying shares” in it.

This way we get both sides of the reaction to a new idea – instinctive response (Emotion Into Action) and a more detached opinion on likely performance (Buy Shares Rating). They come together to produce our predictive Star Rating, guiding brands to the new ideas with the strongest potential.

The most important finding in the Pepsi Ice Cream test is that the idea performs far better among a sample of 18-34-year-olds than it does in the general population. This is also one of the demographics that people predict the new product will do well with in the Test Your Innovation diagnostics. And they also predict likely locations and occasions for the new product – out in the park or at a picnic table, and enjoying a cold drink, for example.

Of course, these are the exact circumstances we see in the ad – a young adult, at a picnic table, enjoying a cool, refreshing drink. While Pepsi didn’t use this test in launching the product, it’s still an example of how Test Your Innovation can suggest creative pathways for ads. Even if you still need a flash of inspiration to come up with Pidge.