Interview with PepsiCo. China
PepsiCo created a unique take on celebrating emojis. The designs incorporate the essence of Pepsi — the brand’s iconic globe shape and the colors of blue, red and white — for a universal language that is proprietary to the brand. The free downloadable PepsiMoji keyboard sparks conversations with regionally specific emoji designs, GIFs, video and a built-in photo booth.
Over 600 proprietary designs were unleashed in multiple mediums – from over 1B bottles and cans to sunglasses and stadium appearances – in more than 100 markets globally.
The process of getting in touch with PepsiCo. China is not smooth. After contacting the PepsiCo and get their email, I was trying to contact PepsiCo China directly through connections.
Finally, I have my interviewee who is in the digital team of the marketing department in Pepsico China. The interviewee P works in Shanghai, so we did an email interview. This post is the highlights of the interview.
The interview starts with the question of the intent of the PepsiMoji, P suggests that EMOJI has attracted much attention as a favorite social language for young people. Pepsi has been advocating the courage of young consumers to express. Therefore, PepsiMoji becomes the best way of communicating between brands and consumers. The target audience of the Emoji campaign in China are "Young people, 18-25, both men and women, who love music, like to try new things, love adventure, be themselves."
In fact, PepsiCo China started preparations of PepsiMoji from last year, but the real start of the popularity is in the summer of 2016. With the help of Rio's global events- the Olympic game, cooperated with the "Zou Shi Ming" and "Su Bing Tian" (Famous Chinese Athletes) to filming ads. These athletes champions holding the PepsiMoji cokes, contributed to the "Win (Pronounced as same as ‘grab a can’ in Chinese) Now" campaign.
" For all brands, emoji does not represent the sole exclusive label, even you can see all sorts of emoji around the network, if not revealing Pepsi logo, you do not even know which brand creation. So we do not intend to get recognition, but rather to get closer to young people who age 18-25 through the PepsiMoji campaigns, our target audience is even younger, such as whom into Secondary Meta-culture. " P said in the interview.
Not as same as the PepsiCo Global, PepsiCo China did not use #say it with Pepsi to promote the PepsiMoji, but abandoned the #sayitwithpepsi, chose "Win now" as a slogan. P said: "there are puns, and has ‘live for now’, the tone of PepsiCo." P also mentioned that PepsiMoji is an original design from Pepsi Global Team. The Chinese market design and the global ones are not the same. Chinese market design is covering all aspects of Chinese social life, but we are not all on-line to the consumer to see. During Chinese New Year, there will be elements representing Chinese culture, such as red envelopes, couplets, etc.
Regarding to whether considering Emoji as language, P comments:" We (PepsiCo. China) consider it as an International language, it must be one of the points, because the language has tens of thousands of species. However, emoji represents a facial expression, It is a language that everyone can understand also has a high degree of acceptance. Personally, I like emojis, when you don't want to talk, an expression, a Emoji, it is you."