Pepsi’s innovation was implying consumption transforms the buyer’s identity

Evidence

But clearly, this campaign had nothing to do with the traditional hard sell, with the product, and what it might do for you, front and center. Pepsi’s advertisements and their imitators were in some sense just an even softer version of the soft sell, which pictured an ideal and associated it with the product. Into this category one might put both the “Arrow Man,” a dashing figure who wore Arrow shirts in the 1920s, and the Marlboro Man, solitary smoker of the Great Plains. But no one who smoked Marlboros wanted or expected to become a wrangler. The Pepsi difference was to suggest that consuming the product somehow made you into what you wanted to be. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 554

Categorization

• XREF: Builds toward the modern personalized advertising model and the self-branding era of social media. — connects to: Coca-Cola’s 1971 campaign fused the era’s liberation ethos with consumption — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 596; Pepsi packaged counterculture values to sell soda to mainstream America — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 555; Advertising shifted from promising cures to selling consumers a better version of themselves — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 213 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Pepsi packaged counterculture values to sell soda to mainstream America #expands (0.90) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 555
• Advertising shifted from selling product qualities to selling user identity #corroborates (0.90) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 550
• Advertising shifted from promising cures to selling consumers a better version of themselves #corroborates (0.82) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 213
• Pepsi commercialized Marcuse’s vision of unrepressed liberated life #expands (0.80) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 560