The CEO of Pepsico admitted this week that they made a major mistake with their rebranding of Gatorade. In just the first quarter of 2009, sales of Gatorade fell by a whopping 13.7% and have continued to plummet.
When the rebranded Gatorade appeared on the shelves, it was a true head-scratcher. Was this the same old Gatorade? Was it a new kind of Gatorade? Or, maybe it wasn’t even Gatorade. It was near impossible to tell. It’s amazing to me that, in their desperation to appeal to the “hip” consumers, the marketing people at Pepsi would come up with this horrible design. It’s maybe even more amazing that the powers that be at Pepsi would sign off on it.
Gatorade had always been the first name in sports beverages. And even as they faced much new competition, they were still in the position of being the brand most associated with the sports beverage category. So, it’s amazing that Pepsi would take their brand and simply flush it down the toilet. And make no mistake about it, that’s exactly what they did. From the new look on the bottle to the horrible ad campaigns (what, exactly, was going on in those ads?), they destroyed it. You would have sworn that their goal was to make choosing and buying a Gatorade the most confusing task in the world.
In the ultra-competitive beverage market, mistakes like this shouldn’t be made. It shows bad judgement on everyone’s part who had anything to do with it. Pepsico now has the task of rebuilding the brand in the midst of a sports drink war, and they’ve got no one to blame but themselves.
