Donald Kendall, who has died aged 99, was the “stuff of corporate Americana mythology”, says Forbes. Raised on a remote dairy farm in Washington state, he got to college on a football scholarship and earned two Distinguished Flying Crosses while serving in the Navy in World War II, “before landing a job” on Pepsi’s bottling line in 1947. It was the start of a transforming 44-year tenure at the company that saw Kendall emerge as “the man who made PepsiCo PepsiCo” – and a 20th-century marketing legend.
A cultural phenomenon
When Kendall became head of the company, aged 42, in 1963, after rocket-like ascension up the sales ladder, Pepsi “trailed so far behind arch-rival Coca-Cola that the folks in Atlanta didn’t even acknowledge the rivalry”, noted Fortune in 1987. Kendall changed all that – launching a high-profile marketing assault and pursuing it relentlessly until his retirement, by which time sales had grown “nearly 40-fold”, says The Wall Street Journal.
The company followed-up its mid-1960s “Pepsi Generation” campaign, which cast the drink as “the hip upstart cola for young people and Coke as staid and old fashioned”, with the “Pepsi Challenge” taste test. By the 1980s – when Pepsi stunned its bigger rival by signing the era’s biggest music star, Michael Jackson, to promote the brand in a record-setting $5m deal – the “cola wars” had become “a cultural phenomenon”, says The Economist. The battle was a risky gambit, but it paid off in two ways. First it helped fizzy drinks win a greater “share of throat”. Secondly, it produced “the world’s best marketers”. “They brought out the best in us,” Kendall later observed. “If there wasn’t a Coca-Cola, we would have had to invent one, and they would have had to invent Pepsi”.
Subscribe to MoneyWeek
Subscribe to MoneyWeek today and get your first six magazine issues absolutely FREE
Sign up to Money Morning
Don't miss the latest investment and personal finances news, market analysis, plus money-saving tips with our free twice-daily newsletter
Don't miss the latest investment and personal finances news, market analysis, plus money-saving tips with our free twice-daily newsletter
Nonetheless, the company he built differed substantially from the old rival, says The New York Times. Kendall took greater risks: pushing Pepsi into food production by merging it with crisp maker Frito-Lay in 1965 – and later acquiring (and then spinning off) Kentucky Fried Chicken, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell. He was also a more daring player on the international stage. In 1973, Pepsi’s long Russian campaign finally came good when Kendall signed a ground-breaking manufacturing deal – making Pepsi the first US consumer product to be made and marketed in the Soviet Union (he side-stepped currency exchange complications by accepting payment in Stolichnaya vodka rather than roubles). Later, when the USSR was collapsing, Pepsi struck another coup: negotiating the right to open two-dozen more plants by agreeing to buy 17 Russian submarines and three surplus warships for scrap. “We’re disarming the Soviet Union faster than you are,” he told politicians in Washington.
The end of a more civilised era
“Be sociable, have a Pepsi”, ran an early company slogan. Kendall personified it: combining close friendships with Republican politicians with a progressive outlook that saw PepsiCo become the first US firm to appoint African-Americans to top jobs, staring down a racist campaign against the move to do so. Above all, he was “a company patriot”, painting his home mailbox in Pepsi colours. Kendall’s death coincides with nostalgia for a more civilised political scene, before “mutual contempt… swamped partisan rivalry”, says Edward Luce in the Financial Times. It was still possible, when Barack Obama was rising, to joke about US elections as a choice between “Pepsi and Coke”. Sadly, no longer.
-
Why Chinese stocks are so far out of favourThere’s little appetite for Chinese stocks despite low valuations.
-
The 62 UK areas where you could be priced out of using your Lifetime ISASaving for your first home in Croydon, Ealing, Brent or any one of these other locations? You could be at risk of being priced out of using your Lifetime ISA
-
Deepseek's Liang Wenfeng: the maths whizz who shook Big TechFew people had heard of Liang Wenfeng until the launch of his DeepSeek AI chatbot wiped a trillion dollars off US technology stocks. His pivot to AI was of a piece with his past exploits.
-
Donald Trump's tariffs spark a global game of thronesWe don’t know what Donald Trump intends or will do next. That is in itself damaging.
-
RedNote: the rise of the new TikTokRedNote, a Chinese rival to social-media app TikTok, has seen millions of US users flock to it in the wake of the US TikTok ban. That caught the company by surprise. What is RedNote and can its popularity last?
-
Australian tycoon Andrew Forrest battles it out with oil giant ExxonMobilIron ore billionaire Andrew Forrest made billions before committing himself to philanthropy. Now he is preparing for a showdown with ExxonMobil.
-
Remembering Sir David McMurtry: Renishaw founder and Concorde engineerSir David McMurtry, co-founder of Renishaw, made a unique contribution to Britain. We look back at his legacy
-
Low Tuck Kwong: the Indonesian mining billionaire who is benefitting from coal boomLow Tuck Kwong’s coal business was in deep trouble a decade ago with no future. Now, he is riding the waves of a global coal boom
-
David Montgomery's potential new ally as he seeks to buy The TelegraphVeteran media mogul David Montgomery has seen off a bid for his media group National World. But he now has his eye on The Telegraph
-
Elon Musk to Taylor Swift - the four key figures who moved markets in 2024We look at the four most influential people in 2024 who moved markets – from Elon Musk reshaping US politics to Rachel Reeves struggling as Britain's chancellor
