Pepsi Archives - Dear June Collectibles

Wrap-Up-Pepsi’s Place in Pop Culture

Pepsi began with a pharmacist mixing a fountain drink in New Bern, North Carolina. More than a century later, its logo has appeared on concert stages, football broadcasts, celebrity advertisements, clothing, international packaging, movie tie-ins, vending machines, beach gear, and objects made for markets around the world.

That journey helps explain why Pepsi collecting is much broader than collecting soda bottles.

Across this series, we have followed Pepsi from Caleb Bradham’s early beverage through mid-century advertising, the Pepsi Generation, international expansion, celebrity campaigns, and promotional crossovers. Taken together, those objects document something larger: the transformation of an everyday consumer product into a recurring presence in American—and eventually global—popular culture.

Crossovers and Global Branding

A Pepsi collectible does not always belong neatly in a collection of soda advertising.

It might also be music memorabilia, sports merchandise, movie promotion, fashion, foreign advertising, restaurant material, or packaging from a country thousands of miles from the place where Pepsi-Cola began. As Pepsi expanded internationally and increasingly attached its name to entertainment and popular culture, the range of objects carrying its familiar red, white, and blue identity expanded with it.

For collectors, those crossovers create some of the most interesting corners of Pepsi collecting. They also make identification more complicated. A foreign Pepsi sign may look unfamiliar while being entirely authentic, and a promotional can may be sought as enthusiastically by fans of the celebrity pictured on it as by soda collectors.

1950s-1970s Pepsi Collectibles

For Pepsi collectors, the three decades from the 1950s through the 1970s offer an unusually vivid record of how an American brand changed with the culture around it. Bottles, metal signs, thermometers, serving trays, vending-machine graphics, cartons, paper advertisements, and promotional pieces all preserve different stages of Pepsi’s shift from traditional soda advertising to the youth-oriented image that came to define the brand.

This is also a period when Pepsi’s visual identity changed dramatically. The flowing Pepsi-Cola script of earlier decades gradually gave way to the red, white, and blue bottle-cap motif and eventually to the cleaner, modern Pepsi designs familiar from the 1970s. For collectors, those changes make mid-century Pepsi material both visually varied and useful for roughly dating surviving pieces.

Tag: Pepsi

Wrap-Up-Pepsi’s Place in Pop Culture

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Crossovers and Global Branding

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1950s-1970s Pepsi Collectibles

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