In 2017, one of the world’s largest beverage companies released a celebrity-led advertisement that collapsed within 24 hours. Two years later, a brand selling adult incontinence products — a category most marketers would consider unmarketable — launched a platform that won industry awards, expanded globally, and is still scaling into new segments nearly a decade on. The two cases form a natural experiment in what actually determines digital marketing outcomes, and the answer has little to do with budget.
Marketing analysis tends to treat campaign failures as creative accidents: a bad script, a tone-deaf casting choice, an unlucky cultural moment. The comparison examined here suggests something more structural. When a heavily resourced campaign fails catastrophically while a modestly resourced one compounds value for years, the difference is rarely found in the creative work itself. It is found in the organizational system that produced the work — how the brand gathered insight, who was empowered to say no, and whether anyone asked how the message would make people feel before the public answered the question for them.
The slow build: how a taboo category produced a durable brand platform
TENA, the adult incontinence brand owned by the Swedish hygiene company Essity, faced a marketing problem harsher than most: its product category is defined by embarrassment. Roughly a third of women experience bladder weakness, yet the condition carries enough stigma that many will not discuss it with a doctor, let alone engage with a brand about it (Kersten, 2021; Marketing Week, n.d.).
TENA’s response, beginning around 2017, was notable for what it did not do. It did not launch a single high-stakes awareness campaign. Instead, it built a multi-phase digital ecosystem: educational content about pelvic health, social media resources designed to normalize the condition, and the My Pelvic Floor Fitness app, which gave users a practical daily tool rather than a product pitch (Digital Marketing Institute, 2019; TENA, n.d.-a). The cumulative effect repositioned TENA from a medical supplier into an everyday support system, and created safe digital spaces where women could learn and engage without exposure.
Only after this functional foundation was in place did the brand attempt emotional positioning. The “I Will Be Me” platform, launched in the UK in 2019 and expanded globally in 2020, reframed bladder weakness through confidence and identity rather than management and discretion (Adobo Magazine, 2021; Marketing Week, 2021). The insight underneath it came from listening: research showed women did not want to be defined by a medical condition, so the campaign featured real women reclaiming their lifestyles rather than actresses performing reassurance (TENA, n.d.-b; Kersten, 2021). The sequencing matters analytically. Emotional brand claims landed because two years of useful, unglamorous groundwork had earned the brand the right to make them.
The ecosystem’s durability is evident in its continued expansion — including a male-focused initiative launched in 2025, extending the same playbook to a segment that suffers the same stigma with even less public acknowledgment (Ads of the World, 2025). A platform built on infrastructure and insight, rather than on a single creative execution, turned out to be reusable across markets and segments.
The fast collapse: a systemic failure mistaken for a creative one
Pepsi’s “Live for Now Moments Anthem,” released in April 2017, is by now a standard entry in lists of marketing disasters, but the interesting question is not whether it failed — it is how a company of Pepsi’s sophistication allowed it to ship. The advertisement showed Kendall Jenner leaving a fashion shoot to join a stylized protest and defusing tension with police by handing an officer a Pepsi. At a moment when American protest movements were centrally about racial injustice and police violence, the ad compressed those struggles into a feel-good gesture with a soft drink as the resolution (Wired, 2017; Astute, 2019). The backlash was immediate and total; Pepsi pulled the ad and apologized within roughly 24 hours of release (Weidlich, 2017).
Read as a creative misstep, the episode is unremarkable — brands misjudge tone regularly. Read as an organizational outcome, it is damning. A multimillion-dollar production, developed by Pepsi’s in-house content studio, passed through every layer of internal approval without anyone empowered to flag what much of the public recognized within minutes (Dan, 2020). Commentators examining the failure have pointed to the structural risk of in-housing creative work: internal teams face pressures — proximity to the brand, career incentives, absence of outside perspective — that make candid challenge unlikely (Dan, 2020). The approval chain functioned as an echo chamber, and the absence of meaningful social listening meant the organization had no early-warning system for cultural risk (Malesic, n.d.).
The influencer choice illustrates the same governance gap through a different lens. Effective influencer strategy requires alignment of reach, relevance, and credibility (Hemann & Burbary, 2018). Jenner supplied enormous reach and no relevance or credibility in social justice conversations — a mismatch that a functioning review process would have surfaced as a threshold question, before production, not after release.
What actually differed: three structural variables
Insight versus assumption. TENA’s positioning was derived from consumer research into how women actually felt about their condition; the campaign was the output of listening. Pepsi’s ad was the output of an internal thesis about what young consumers wanted to see — unity, optimism, cultural participation — that was never tested against the people living inside the culture being borrowed (Astute, 2019; Zahay & Roberts, 2018). Both brands spent money on production; only one spent effort on understanding.
Ecosystem versus event. TENA distributed risk across a multi-phase ecosystem in which no single asset carried the brand’s fate; a weak piece of content could be replaced without damaging the whole. Pepsi concentrated its bet in one high-visibility execution, which meant a single misjudgment produced total, public failure. The ecosystem approach is also the more resource-efficient one: educational content, an app, and community engagement compound over time, while a withdrawn advertisement is a pure write-off.
Governance versus approval. The deepest difference is organizational. Approval processes verify that a campaign satisfies internal requirements — legal, brand, budget. Governance asks a different question: what could this do to the people it depicts and the audiences it reaches? TENA’s development process embedded that question by design, through research and community feedback loops. Pepsi’s process, however many signatures it collected, never institutionalized the question at all (Dan, 2020; Malesic, n.d.).
The prescriptive agenda: building governance that can say no
For brands drawing lessons from the failure side of this comparison, two structural reforms follow directly. The first is mandatory pre-launch cultural risk assessment — sentiment analysis, diverse focus groups, and structured review of any campaign that touches social or cultural themes — treated as a release gate equal in standing to legal review (Hemann & Burbary, 2018; Malesic, n.d.). The second is harder and more valuable: an independent review body with genuine veto authority, staffed with external cultural and community advisors who owe nothing to the campaign’s internal champions (Dan, 2020). The test of such a board is not whether it exists but whether it can actually stop a campaign the CMO likes. Advisory structures without veto power reproduce the echo chamber they were meant to break.
The success side of the comparison yields its own agenda, because even TENA’s playbook has gaps. Six years separated the women-focused platform from the male-segment launch — a long interval given that the back-end infrastructure, content architecture, and campaign learnings were largely reusable. Tighter cross-segment sequencing would have amortized fixed ecosystem costs sooner and compounded lifetime value across two audiences instead of one (Zahay & Roberts, 2018). And for a category built on privacy, the logical next investment is an anonymous community on the brand’s owned properties — a space where users can ask questions and engage with professionals without linking participation to their public identities. Stigmatized categories are precisely where public social platforms underperform, and where an owned, anonymous community delivers both consumer trust and the first-party behavioral data that rented channels never surrender (Zahay & Roberts, 2018; Hemann & Burbary, 2018).
Conclusion: the question that predicts the outcome
The TENA–Pepsi comparison resists the comfortable framing that marketing success is bought. Pepsi had the larger budget, the bigger celebrity, and the global distribution, and produced one of the decade’s most expensive brand injuries. TENA had a stigmatized product, modest resources, and a category no one wanted to discuss, and produced a compounding brand asset. The variable that separated them was organizational: one company built systems for hearing how its audience actually felt, and one built systems for approving what it had already decided to say.
The practical test for any campaign, in any category, is whether someone with real authority asked — before launch, with evidence rather than intuition — how the work would make people feel. Organizations that can answer that question honestly rarely produce catastrophes. Organizations that cannot will eventually produce one, and no budget line prevents it.
References
Adobo Magazine. (2021). The secret’s out: TENA sets out to break taboos around incontinence in a Victoria’s Secret–styled campaign with AMV BBDO. https://www.adobomagazine.com/campaign-spotlight/campaign-spotlight-the-secrets-out-tena-sets-out-to-break-taboos-around-incontinence-in-a-victorias-secret-styled-campaign-with-amv-bbdo/
Ads of the World. (2025). The Dry Inn Clubhouse. https://www.adsoftheworld.com/campaigns/the-dry-inn-clubhouse
Astute. (2019). Case study: PepsiCo & Kendall Jenner’s controversial commercial. https://astute.co/pepsi-kendall-jenner-commercial/
Dan, A. (2020, October 19). The Pepsi-Kendall Jenner ad is a cautionary tale about the rush to in-housing. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/avidan/2020/10/19/the-pepsi-kendall-jenner-ad-is-a-cautionary-tale-about-the-rush-to-in-housing/
Digital Marketing Institute. (2019, February 19). 6 of the best digital marketing campaigns you can learn from. https://digitalmarketinginstitute.com/blog/6-of-the-best-digital-marketing-campaigns-you-can-learn-from
Hemann, C., & Burbary, K. (2018). Digital marketing analytics: Making sense of consumer data in a digital world (2nd ed.). Que Publishing.
Kersten, E. M. (2021). Tena’s mission to break the taboo around incontinence (Bachelor’s thesis, Lund University). Lund University Publications. https://lup.lub.lu.se/student-papers/record/9042788/file/9042792.pdf
Malesic, T. (n.d.). Top failed marketing campaigns. EZMarketing. https://www.ezmarketing.com/blog/top-failed-marketing-campaigns
Marketing Week. (n.d.). From medical product to lifestyle brand: How Tena tackled the stigma of incontinence. https://www.marketingweek.com/masters-awards-tena-tackled-stigma-incontinence/
Marketing Week. (2021). Inside TENA’s award-winning campaign to reverse brand perceptions. https://www.marketingweek.com/inside-tenas-award-winning-campaign-to-reverse-brand-perceptions/
TENA. (n.d.-a). Exercising and pelvic floor. https://www.tena.us/women/living-with-bladder-weakness/exercising-and-pelvic-floor
TENA. (n.d.-b). I Will Be Me. https://www.tena-me.com/en/women/i-will-be-me
Weidlich, T. (2017). Well, that was quick: Pepsi pulls controversial ad after one day. PRCG. https://prcg.com/blog/pepsi-pulls-controversial-ad-after-one-day/
Wired. (2017). Pepsi didn’t understand the protest it tried to co-opt. https://www.wired.com/2017/04/pepsi-ad-internet-response/
Zahay, D., & Roberts, M. L. (2018). Internet marketing: Integrating online & offline strategies in a digital environment (4th ed.). Cengage Learning.
