The Spice of Life, Essay Example

Coca-Cola vs. Pepsi-Cola: The Spice of Life

Abstract

There are few products as ingrained in the consumer consciousness as Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola, and this is no fortunate accident. Decades of advertising and marketing of the highest and most pervasive order have established for each soft drink company a virtually monolithic status. As in any so protracted a history of marketing, errors have been made in both camps, and the statures of these enterprises have insured that such blunders were enormously visible. Then, various advertising campaigns directed from these competitors upon one another have been, ultimately, unessential and wasteful. The larger reality is that each product, in achieving a hard-won icon status, has come to a unique place in the American markets and forged a new paradigm. In a very real sense, Coke and Pepsi now market themselves.

Coca-Cola and Its Reign

So omnipresent in American mythos and iconography is Coca-Cola that even its earliest history is to some extent known to the mass public. It did indeed begin life in the late 19^th century as a soda fountain concoction in Atlanta, Georgia. It was, as were many similar beverages of the day, promoted as a panacea of sorts, effective in curing everything from morphine addiction to impotence. Most inaccurate, however, of all the early legends is the belief that cocaine figured largely in its production, and well into the first few decades of the 20^th century. The minimal cocaine actually brewed within the drink, however, was discarded in 1903.

Coke enjoyed an advantage in American consumerism few products have; quite simply, it took off early and never left the market. It accompanied the change in the nation from an agrarian one to an urban culture, and took advantage of what was the ‘cutting-edge’ advertising of the time: the billboard, the drug store sign, and street poster or paint displays. Yet a remarkable degree of foresight in advertising was evident from the first, as the company launched a competition in 1915 to select a distinctive bottle design. The company’s perception of consumer draw was uncanny for the time, if not outright prescient; in what today would have called for intense levels of marketing analysis, they simply demanded that the bottle be so unique in shape, a customer would be able to distinguish it in the dark. The contoured, ‘hobble skirt’ bottle shape is of course yet another instance of the Coke emblem as imprinted on the national, if not global, consciousness.

Double Impact

The longevity of the company cannot be overstated when considering the power of its appeal. It served as a steady and often barely perceptible tool in the marketing of the Coke product, particularly so as the world of advertising expanded. People began associating product placement with a subsequent product decline, and the very transient nature of shifting consumer tastes led to the cycles within advertising present everywhere. Coca-Cola had been around forever, in the minds of consumers. This in turn promoted a sense of quality of the product, and of a trustworthy quality within its purveyors.

This effect, however, would be long in yielding tangible results, as stated. In the meanwhile, Coke lost very few opportunities to promote itself and set a standard in expending funds for marketing’s sake. Most noteworthy in the company’s history of advertising is a consistent and successful identifying of the product with all things American, and therefore wholesome and good. Patriotism was a selling point, and a huge one when ‘Coke went to war’ in the 1940’s. The World War II era was in fact one of the company’s most successful periods, and the war actually provided Coke with vast opportunities to open plants overseas while supplying the troops. “It appears that technicians who installed Coca-Cola plants behind the front lines were deemed as vital as those who fixed tanks or airplanes. Coke representatives wore uniforms with a ‘T.O.’ as a shoulder patch…” (Pendergrast, 2000, p.198).

This was the object of the company, all along. What America did, Coke did. By rendering itself inextricable from perceptions of how life should be lived, and by being so subconsciously reinforced as an American sine qua non, the product could only grow with the country. As radio, film and television entered the scene and became bold new stages for commercial exploitation, Coke lost no time in further cementing its image. Advertisements never failed in presenting images of Coke, not as a sensational product the customer must try, but as an old friend and a trusted source of refreshment. By the 1960’s Coca-Cola maintained an unassailable hold on its market, large enough to tolerate new entries in the field. Only one would actually seek to challenge its position, and fight that battle for a very long time.

Enter the Pepsi (First) Generation

That Pepsi-Cola was first bottled and sold in the days of Coke’s debut is not generally known, and this ties into the second-class status the company has seemingly engendered for itself. From the start, in fact, Pepsi set itself up as a rival to Coke. Jingles and slogans abounded which compared the relative sizes of each soft drink for the same price, with Coke inevitably suffering in the comparison. That Coca-Cola never demonstrably argued the point, or indeed deigned to take on Pepsi at all, was a winning strategy for the former. Psychologically, it enhanced the Coke reputation as too grand to be threatened.

In terms of marketing technique and ambition, Pepsi continually lagged behind. The product enjoyed great success; nonetheless, it perpetually set forth an image of second-best through extensive and self-damaging comparisons. The corporate aim was as well not as keen as that of Coca-Cola; while Coke was riding off to World War II and establishing a massive global presence, Pepsi took this opportunity to target the largely-ignored African-American demographic of the time. In a maneuver simultaneously suspect and laudable, the company developed all African-American sales teams and deployed them around the country. They then launched campaigns radically unusual for the 1940’s, in which African-Americans were depicted as the typical, if not ideal, consumer. While this marketing was instrumental in breaking ground in volatile race relations, it was nevertheless a strictly commercial venture on Pepsi’s part, and one abandoned in the 1950’s. Fear of alienating the white market quickly and drastically lessened the company’s efforts to secure that of the African-American.

Pepsi’s Generation Next

The changing social atmospheres of the 1960’s and 1970’s was, as Pepsi perceived it, it’s chance. It had for some time attempted to promote itself as the drink of choice for younger people, and the upheavals and unrest of American youth in this era was pounced upon by Pepsi. The ‘Pepsi Generation’ was born and the greatest challenge they would ever make to the Coke supremacy was in full force. Using Coke’s own iconography as an American standard, Pepsi exaggerated the images to portray the Coca-Cola lover as, effectively, the ‘older generation’ and ultimately an undesirable thing to be. “…The new Pepsi strategy was to focus on age. Coke had been around for awhile, and it was familiar. Pepsi tried to make it look old…” (Marconi, 2000, p. 187). This campaign, proclaiming, ‘You’re in the Pepsi Generation’, actually commenced in 1963.

It was effective. Coke still maintained the lion’s share of the soft drink market, but Pepsi was clearly no renegade upstart. For the first time in the histories of the rival corporations, a distinct set of factions was evident. This was in fact an extraordinary and largely unintentional result of the marketing; Pepsi’s goal was to convert Coke drinkers. What in fact happened was simply that both Coke and Pepsi adherents became more vocal about their preferences. An awareness of which supplier stocked what soft drink in restaurants was, for the first time, known to consumers who dined out regularly. There were establishments that served only Coke products, and there were the Pepsi retailers. Americans were educated indirectly in the parameters of corporate war, as they came to know that business contracts, and not necessarily their own preferences, dictated what would be sold.

The Final Gauntlets

Interestingly, throughout all of these advertising assaults and counter-moves, large percentages of polled Americans were surprisingly blasé about which soft drink they preferred. Coke and Pepsi had in their separate yet co-dependent marketing created a consumer mindset that had very little to do with the product itself. People identified more with the images presented and held to, or abandoned, beverage loyalties based on conceptual notions of how they themselves would be perceived with either choice. This was and remains a startling evidence of the residual powers within the advertising media.

The war, however, was not quite done. Two further challenges remained, one literally so and both on a very grand scale indeed. In 1975 Pepsi unveiled its great ‘Pepsi Challenge’, an enormously expensive campaign involving blind taste-testings conducted throughout the country, to determine which soft drink tasted better to most people. This was the most overt and massive offensive ever launched against Coca-Cola. As with its less ambitious predecessors, it enjoyed only minimal success in terms of noticeably increased sales.

Far more surprising was the ‘New Coke’ campaign, set forth in 1985. This was unprecedented in the history of the soft drink giant’s life, and was heralded by a media campaign of great duration and daring tactics. ‘New Coke is coming’, advertisements teased, and they did so in a glut of the most expensive advertising spaces to be had. Immensely popular celebrities such as Bill Cosby were recruited, and for months they promised a stunning new product.

It was virtually inevitable that Coke would suffer a backlash when ‘New Coke’ was eventually available. Public opinion and consumer reviews were not favorable, and only a distinctly more pronounced cherry flavoring was the verdict. It was a revolution stopped dead in its tracks, and it opened the door for various levels of corporate derision from the media at large. To its credit, Coke managed to rapidly and effectively make it all better. The company sensibly and immediately acknowledged that the original product was the public’s favorite, and softened the impact of their own blunder by keeping ‘New Coke’ on the market, ostensibly for a customer base which already had a preference for it. No such base existed but that was of minimal import. It was an operation to save face, and it succeeded rather well.

What this ploy did, however, was of a novelty on a par with the ‘Pepsi Challenge’. By creating and widely promoting the ‘New Coke’, the company was for the first time in its history tacitly acknowledging that a change was required.  After nearly a hundred years of proudly maintaining the value and integrity of the original recipe, Coke was in essence responding to the Pepsi threats at last. No sloganeering or saturation campaign could alter the fact in the public mind; if Coke was reinventing itself, it must be because it has to, and this was a sign of weakness. What is most surprising in this scenario, and to a lesser extent in the ‘Pepsi Challenge’ of the previous decade, is that both giants had positioned themselves in such a way as to render further marketing unimportant.

The Monolith Syndrome

As has been stated, few products on the market have enjoyed the longevity and consistent levels of success of Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola. More than several generations of Americans have grown up with the images, tastes, banners and cultural associations of each firmly entrenched in their consciousnesses, both collectively and individually. None of this has come easy, nor has any of it come without a few spectacular errors in direction and strategy.

Most of all, each soft drink giant has evolved to its monolithic position from many decades of a consistently advertised presence. Employing the media and technologies of every era, Coke and Pepsi have adapted to changes in societal temperament and expectations. When demographic research reveals that women are purchasing more product, Coke loses no time in tailoring its marketing to appeal to the female consumer. When focus groups reflect a public preoccupation with a celebrity, Pepsi goes to great expense and considerable trouble to enlist Michael Jackson in an ad campaign. These are industry giants so accustomed to leading the pack, they cannot do business any other way.

This is the single most extraordinary result of what has been called the ‘Great Cola War’: the participants have battled each other for so long, they have lost the sense of the original object, that of attracting the consumer. In-fighting has become everything and a major casualty of it is that these warring forces do not fully realize that, in a very real sense, their marketing days are done. They do not need to appeal to the consumer because histories of consumption and media immersion have imprinted them indelibly in the consumer mind.

For example, a long-running Coke slogan of the 1970’s was, ‘The Real Thing’. This was followed by a succession of other catchphrases, most notably 1979’s ‘Have a Coke and a smile’. These phrases were, within several years, dropped altogether from the Coke portfolio. Yet the effect remains: “Even though Coke deep-sixed ‘the Real Thing’ years ago, they can’t kill the idea. Mention ‘the Real Thing’ and most people will say, ‘Coca-Cola’…” (Ries, Trout, 2005, p.125). The reasoning is basic: as these phrases were employed to embellish an already established product, they were and are recalled more as affectionate accoutrements to the icon. Mere advertising terminologies do not as a rule enjoy such a status.

Conclusion

If there is a single lesson to be gleaned from the century’s worth of soft drink battles and the jockeying for preeminent status in the industry, it is both simple and stunningly radical. The marketing is virtually done, for there are no consumers to reach who are unaware of the product and whose minds have not been made up some time ago. The products on the shelf, now, are all that is necessary to maintain the market. By expending money, time and energy as they have, both Pepsi and Coke have rendered the soft drink as identifiable, as omnipresent, and as necessary a product as the potato in the grocery store. They have at last built the product which can sell itself.

References

Marconi, J. The Brand Marketing Book: Creating, Managing and Extending the Value of Your Brand (2000). New York, NY: McGraw-Hill Professional.

Pendergrast, M.  For God, Country, and Coca-Cola: A Definitive History of the Great American Soft Drink and the Company That Makes It (2000). New York, NY: Basic Books.

Ries, A., Trout, J. Marketing Warfare (2005). New York, NY: McGraw-Hill Professional.