Pepsi United – memed and maimed!
We had recently shared a link about the Kendall Jenner Pepsi advert which was, according to most critics and viewers, extremely tone deaf and in pretty bad taste. Here was a successful, rich, beautiful model, from the majority populace, who comes in and solves some sort of a protest with a can of Pepsi. This was the tone of the advert which did not go well with audiences. It was deemed to be too disrespectful to protesters and an extremely frivolous depiction of serious issues happening around the world now.
Then, there was the United scandal that happened just a few days ago. If ever there was a demonstration of how not to treat your customers, United came out with flying colours. First, they overbooked their flight – standard procedure, then they asked a certain number of passengers to deboard, offering them some compensation in return. A few of the passengers accepted but they still needed to make more room. At which point they decided on a random selection and this is where things got worse. One of the passengers, on refusing to deplane, was forcibly and physically dragged out and even sustained some injuries. You must have read about the fallout after.
And as the internet is wont to do at such times, it swiftly wears its cape and tights (and the underpants over it) and takes on its superhero persona. The internet wasn’t going to forgive United or Pepsi, at least not let them forget and how do they go about that? Well this is the age of the meme and everything can be summarised into a a hilarious sarcastic, self referential and meta response. And here we have one of the funniest and hard hitting of those responses – Kendall Jenner solving the United fiasco with a can of Pepsi!
This should ideally be a lesson to the companies about the power of social media in the information age!
