Moral of the story - if you are a big multinational company you can literally get away with murder and even increase market even with the most botched marketing campaign selling sugar water
Pepsi's cockups are no doubt the catalyst of the events that unfolded but can you say that they are responsible for someone murdering someone else during what happened? are any actions the protestors undertake in anger the responsibility of Pepsi?
Pepsi made a mistake that disappointed some folks, nobody lost anything because of what Pepsi did directly, Pepsi wasn't assisting anyone in committing a crime, they weren't out to commit a crime / help anyone commit crime like you describe.
I would say a better, or atleast much more controversial example is this - you cannot hold BLM movement responsible for the people that loot and burn, for exactly the same reason pepsi isn't accountable - because these actions (promises made -> not delivered -> riot started) are causated, but they are not correlated.
Why is or should Pepsi be responsible for this? If I send an email to someone explicitly telling them not to do something, and they do it anyway - why should I be responsible for it? Unless the bottling factory is their own, but the article doesn't specify.
If the thing is really a big deal, as in this case, maybe the exec should do more than just "send an email" and assume everything is fine.
Sending an email doesn’t absolve one of responsibility...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Fruit_Company#The_Unite...
Pepsi killed anyone? That's not what the story says at all. Accidental death is not the same as murder.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinaltrainal_v._Coca-Cola_Co.
(edit HN is botching the URL. There's a '.' character on the end)
What did work was putting two full-stops, but that was so ambiguous that I left it as-was. Wikipedia has a redirect in place so obviously HN isn't the only one with problems.