Pepsi’s hat tip to the emoji generation:

in the world like Pepsi will in 2016,” Nooyi said, according to an archived webcast of her presentation. “Our design center has designed all these emojis.”

The company tested the PepsiMoji campaign in 2015 in certain markets, including Canada, Thailand and Russia. Marketers urged Pepsi product drinkers to post images to social media paired with hashtags #PepsiMoji and #SayItWithPepsi.

The quirky emojis featured in test markets include one taking a selfie, another one snorkeling, one waving a flag and another gushing tears of joy.

Emojis deliver

marketing messages “graphically, quickly and in a relatable way,” Torontobased branding consultant Jeff Swystun said in an interview.

“They are a shared language now across cultures and I think that’s why brands are gravitating to them,” he said.

The move comes after rival Coca-Cola first launched a popular Share-a-Coke campaign in 2014, and revived it in 2015. Coke tagged bottles with hundreds of different first names and other phrases like “BFF” and “Better Half.” Many consumers posted pictures of themselves with bottles that used their name.

Like Coke’s Share-a-Coke campaign, the Say It With Pepsi campaign is aimed at bolstering soft drink sales as consumers increasingly ditch sugary beverages. Pepsi’s carbonated beverage sales fell 2% in 2015 and 2% in 2014, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

A heavy emphasis on social media is central to the campaign, much like Coke urged consumers to post photos of their drinks to Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat and other social media.

But the company needs to take into account that they may “turn off” older generations, or could come off as trying too hard to “look cool,” Swystun says.