Mountain Dew’s new logo returns to its Appalachian roots

A rolling river. A burst of sunshine. Mountains. Evergreens. One stray citrus leaf. In some ways, the new Mountain Dew logo and brand system looks more like an advertisement for the National Parks than a soft drink, and it marks a massive departure from the razor sharp logo the brand has used since 2009. The new wordmark spells out the brand’s full name again, with curves that flare the M in “Mountain” like a classic boot-cut jean. A new shock of yellow outlines the words—I’m told that yellow captures the “refreshment” of citrus, though it also works in color tones from the sun. In the backdrop? An intricately detailed natural vista.[Image: PepsiCo]“In the past, Dew was always perceived as being the sort of extreme, singular, rip-it-off-the-mountain type positioning,” says JP Bittencourt, VP of marketing for Mountain Dew, who notes that the brand launched in 1943 as a mixer for moonshine in the hills of Appalachia. “There was this sort of lost legacy that we’ve gone back to reclaim that’s about just having a damn good time outside with friends.”The new logo and brand system—which will roll out in May 2025—reinforces a significant shift in tone we’ve already seen at Mountain Dew over the past several months. While the catchphrase “Do the Dew” is back, the vibe hardly feels the same as it used to. Now, a mascot known as The Mountain Dude—a Lebowski-esque figure donning a green fur coat in commercials and IRL at tailgates—serves as the brand’s chiller alternative to X-games-style personalities.“I think there’s just something very American about that in the outdoors. The United States has the plains of Yellowstone, the riverbed of Yosemite,” says Bittencourt. “That outdoor aspect is just something that’s very evocative for us, and it also does, from a product perspective, really connote a lot of refreshment, of freedom.”[Image: PepsiCo]Revisiting the Mountain Dew logo of the pastOverall, sales volume is slightly down for soda this year, but revenue has grown from price increases. Coke still dominates the category, with 19% of the market, while Dr. Pepper has gained on Pepsi to sit in a tie for second/third place with about 8% of the market apiece. Mountain Dew is the 6th most popular soda in the United States, and it’s held a solid 6% of the soda marketshare for over a decade (trailing about two points behind Sprite, and one behind Diet Coke). Undoubtedly, PepsiCo would like to see its unique, citrus-forward beverage gain more market share like Dr. Pepper—and a PepsiCo says this rebrand is about re-establishing Mountain Dew’s “refreshment credentials” as something that “gives you a little bit of a citrus kick that kind of gets you . . . off your ass,” according to Bittencourt.“Loyalists know how awesome Dew tastes,” he continues. “But for consumers that haven’t had Dew in a while, it’s not, maybe the most front of mind.” [Image: PepsiCo]The rebrand led by PespiCo Chief Design Officer Mauro Porcini started with an audit of what was wrong with the last Mountain Dew brand, which launched in 2009. With an abbreviated wordmark “Mtn Dew” and an explosion of digital facets, it conveyed a bit of Y2K, and a bit of the great flattening experienced across brands and interface a few years ago.“It was a period in time where the minimalist, very sophisticated, elegant, Apple-like design was very trendy. Many brands were looking at the different kind of design language—and so we used it with Pepsi, and also in Dew,” says Porcini. “We made a brand with the ambition to be very modern . . . but [Dew] became almost aggressive in its design language, not conveying too much what was inside the can, but trying to position the brand in this very modern, harsh way.” [Image: PepsiCo]Multidimensional designPorcini’s team popped Pepsi back into multidimensional space last year, with a high contrast “pulse” to wake up the sleepy brand almost like the bass bump of a speaker. Mountain Dew, however, wasn’t sleepy. It was a fluorescent buzzsaw. Considering its evolution, Porcini faced a fork in the river: Lean into Dew as a high octane energy drink, or rethink the brand as something else altogether.The strategy was discovered by retracing the brand’s heritage. The Mountain Dew logo wasn’t always so aggressive. It actually evolved from folksy to funky for the first 50 years of its run, before getting X-tremified in the early aughts. The new brand system embraces much more of a come-as-you-are vibe, though it’s hardly quiet. A thick black extrusion lifts the wordmark off the can—which is important for both pizazz and sheer legibility, because the logo’s backdrop is an illustrated landscape.That vista will do a lot of work across the greater Dew brand. Some of its colorways will subliminally match standards established by Pepsi last year—its rays of sunshine are laced with black to connote Zero Sugar and silver to signal Diet. But the system purposefully leaves plenty of room for Mountain Dew’s more eye-shocking colors, like Code Red and blue Ba