Cola Wars

The Cola Wars are a campaign of mutually-targeted television advertisements and marketing campaigns since the 1980s between soft drink manufacturers The Coca-Cola Company and PepsiCo.

As of March 2011, Pepsi was in third place behind Coca-Cola and Diet Coke. In 2010, Diet Coke outsold Pepsi; Coca-Cola sold 1.6 billion cases of its regular soda and 927 million cases of its diet soda, while Pepsi sold only 892 million cases.^[2]

Coca-Cola

Coca-Cola advertising has historically focused on wholesomeness and nostalgia for childhood. Coca-Cola advertising is often characterized as "family-friendly", and often relies on "cute" characters (e.g., the Coca-Cola polar bear mascot and Santa Claus around Christmas).^{[citation needed]}

One example of a heated exchange that occurred during the Cola Wars was Coca-Cola's making a strategic retreat on July 11, 1985, by announcing its plans to bring back the original "Classic" Coke after recently introducing New Coke.^{[citation needed]}

Notable promoters of Coca-Cola have included Bill Cosby, Whitney Houston, Paula Abdul, Weird Al Yankovic, George Michael, Christina Aguilera, Max Headroom, Celine Dion, Elton John and most recently, Taylor Swift.^{[citation needed] [3]}

Pepsi

Celebrity endorsements

Pepsi adverts often focus on celebrities choosing Pepsi over Coca-Cola,^{[citation needed]} supporting Pepsi's positioning as "The Choice of a New Generation". Celebrities who have promoted Pepsi include Mariah Carey, KISS, Tina Turner, Britney Spears, Beyoncé Knowles, Pink, Enrique Iglesias, David Bowie, Rod Stewart, Jim Varney, Elvis Presley, One Direction, Michael Jackson, Brian May, Roger Taylor, Madonna, Spice Girls, Shakira, Amr Diab, Ray Charles. Also including aritsts who have also promoted Coca-Cola like Christina Aguilera and Elton John.^{[citation needed]}

Pepsi Challenge

In 1975, Pepsi began showing people in blind taste tests called the Pepsi Challenge, in which they preferred one product over the other, and then they began hiring increasing numbers of popular spokespersons to promote their products.^{[citation needed]}

Drink Pepsi, Get Stuff

In the late 1990s, Pepsi launched its most successful long-term strategy of the Cola Wars, Pepsi Stuff. Consumers were invited to "Drink Pepsi, Get Stuff" and collect Pepsi Points on billions of packages and cups; they could redeem the points for free Pepsi lifestyle merchandise. After researching and testing the program for over two years to ensure that it resonated with consumers, Pepsi launched Pepsi Stuff, which was an instant success. Tens of millions of consumers participated. Pepsi outperformed Coke during the summer of the Atlanta Olympics - held in Coke's hometown - where Coke was a lead sponsor of the Games. Due to its success, the program was expanded to include Mountain Dew and Pepsi's international markets worldwide. The company continued to run the program for many years, continually innovating with new features each year.^[4]

The Pepsi Stuff promotion became the subject of a lawsuit. In one of the many commercials, Pepsi showed a young man in the cockpit of a Harrier Jump Jet. Below ran the caption "Harrier Jet: 7 million Pepsi Points". There was a mechanism for buying additional Pepsi Points to complete a Pepsi Stuff order. John Leonard, of Seattle, Washington, sent in a Pepsi Stuff request with the maximum amount of points and a check for over $700,000 USD to make up for the extra points he needed. Pepsi did not accept the request and Leonard filed suit. The judgment was that a reasonable person viewing the commercial would realize that Pepsi was not, in fact, offering a Harrier Jet. In response to the suit, Pepsi added the words, "Just Kidding", under the portion of the commercial featuring the jet as well as changed the "price" to 700 million Pepsi points (see Leonard v. Pepsico, Inc.).^{[citation needed]}

Cyberwar

Coca-Cola and Pepsi engaged in a "cyberwar" with the re-introduction of Pepsi Stuff in 2005, to which Coca-Cola retaliated with Coke Rewards. This cola war has now concluded, with Pepsi Stuff ending its services and Coke Rewards still offering prizes on their website. Both were loyalty programs that give away prizes and product to consumers who, after collecting bottle caps and 12- or 24-pack box tops, then submitted codes online for a certain number of points. However, Pepsi's online partnership with Amazon allowed consumers to buy various products with their "Pepsi Points", such as mp3 downloads. Both Coca-Cola and Pepsi previously had a partnership with the iTunes Store.

In space

In 1985, Coca-Cola and Pepsi were launched into space aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger on STS-51-F. The companies had designed special cans (officially the Carbonated Beverage Dispenser Evaluation payload or CBDE) to test packaging and dispensing techniques for use in zero G conditions. The experiment was classified a failure by the shuttle crew, primarily due to the lack of both refrigeration and gravity.^{[citation needed]}

The "Coca-Cola Space Dispenser" (Fluids Generic Bioprocessing Apparatus-1, or FGBA-1) was designed to provide astronauts the opportunity to enjoy Coca-Cola and Diet Coke in the weightless environment of space, and to "provide baseline data on changes in astronauts' taste perception of beverages consumed in microgravity."^[5] It held 1.65 liters each of Coca-Cola and Diet Coke. An astronaut would dispense the carbonated drink of choice into a "Fluids Transfer Unit" or sealed drinking cup through a quick connect on the dispenser. To save power, the dispenser would chill the liquid on demand via cooling coils between the storage container and the quick connect fitting. The FGBA-1 and 18 of the "Fluid Transfer Units" flew aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery in 1995. (STS-63)^[6]

Further development led to a Coca-Cola fountain dispenser (Fluids Generic Bioprocessing Apparatus-2 or FGBA-2) intended as "a test bed to determine if carbonated beverages can be produced from separately stored carbon dioxide, water, and flavored syrups and determine if the resulting fluids can be made available for consumption without bubble nucleation and resulting foam formation".^[7] This unit dispensed Powerade sports drink in addition to Coca-Cola and Diet Coke, and it flew on STS-77 aboard Space Shuttle Endeavour in 1996. However, the FGBA-2 did not work as expected.^{[citation needed]}

Competition

Many of the brands available from the three largest soda producers, The Coca-Cola Company,^[8] PepsiCo^[9] and the Dr Pepper Snapple Group, are intended as direct, equivalent competitors. The following chart lists these competitors by type or flavor of drink.

Flavor/type	PepsiCo	The Coca-Cola Company	Dr Pepper Snapple Group
Cola	Pepsi	Coca-Cola	RC Cola
Diet Cola	Diet Pepsi / Pepsi Light Pepsi ONE Pepsi Max Pepsi Next	Diet Coke / Coca-Cola Light Tab Coca-Cola Zero	Diet Rite Diet RC
Cherry-flavored cola	Pepsi Wild Cherry	Coca-Cola Cherry	Cherry RC
"Pepper"-style	Dr Slice DOC 360	Mr. Pibb / Pibb Xtra	Dr Pepper
Orange	Mirinda Tropicana Twister Tango Slice	Fanta Minute Maid Simply Orange	Crush Sunkist
Lemon-lime	Teem Slice Sierra Mist 7 Up (in countries other than the US)	Sprite Lemon & Paeroa	7 Up (in the US)
Other citrus flavors	Mountain Dew Kas Izze Citrus Blast	Mello Yello Vault Fresca Lift Lilt	Sun Drop Squirt
Ginger ale	Patio	Seagram's Ginger Ale	Canada Dry Schweppes Vernors
Root beer	Mug Root Beer	Barq's Ramblin' Root Beer (until 1995)	A&W Root Beer Stewart's Rootbeer Hires Root Beer
Cream soda	Mug Cream Soda	Barq's Red Creme Soda	A&W Cream Soda
Juices	Tropicana Dole (prepackaged only, under license)	Minute Maid Fruitopia Simply Orange	Mott's Nantucket Nectars Snapple
Iced tea	Lipton Brisk (ready-to-drink products only, under license from Unilever)	Nestea (manufactured by Nestlé in the US and by a joint venture between Nestlé and Coca-Cola elsewhere) Gold Peak Tea Fuze	Snapple
Sports drinks	Gatorade Propel	Powerade Aquarius Vitamin Water	All Sport
Energy drinks	AMP Rockstar	Full Throttle NOS Relentless Burn Monster	Venom

See also

• My Coke Rewards
• Pepsi Challenge
• Pepsi Stuff

References

v t e Soft drink topics Brands Cola Wars List of brand name soft drinks products List of soft drinks by country Types Cherry cola Cream soda Cola Diet soda Energy drink Ice cream soda Lemon-lime Sports drink Frozen carbonated beverage Ginger beer Ginger ale Lemonade Root beer Health Soda tax Fat tax Companies List of soft drink producers The Coca-Cola Company Cott Dr Pepper Snapple Group PepsiCo