Why Crystal Pepsi and Others Failed

Why Crystal Pepsi and Others Failed

We live in a day and age where marketing and advertising is stronger then ever. It is essentially in our face every where we turn, from the clothes we wear to the music we listen to and even the device we use to listen to our music. Marketing and advertising touches our lives everyday without our really ever even noticing it. Marketing professionals have a difficult challenge before them in figuring out a way to create a public interest, and a want for their products if they are to become adopted. Various marketing communications tools provide the means to which they will best reach the public. In the early 1990’s marketing professionals for PepsiCo choose to heavily promote and advertise a new variation of their popular original Pepsi formula creating one of the largest craze’s for a soda variation in the last two decades.

April 13th 1992, PepsiCo introduced an exciting change to its popular Pepsi product in the test cities of Providence, Denver, and Dallas and called it Crystal Pepsi. This is believed by many to have been one of the best ideas that PepsiCo had ever came out with, as they simply removed any and all coloring from Pepsi, creating a healthier and visually stimulating product. During the 1980's, Madison Avenue advertisers created one of our society’s most aberrant spectacles yet, the pinnacle of decades of pop culture and advertising prowess, The Cola Wars. In our technological, media-driven, consumer-happy, and product-driven culture, selling and consuming soda has certainly become one of our biggest American pastimes. Coca-Cola and PepsiCo squared off for decades in various advertising coups trying to sell more soda to the already overly indulgent American public. A seemingly easy goal, but these companies have tried everything from using pop-stars, bold and daring challenges and most recently the chance to win a billion dollars on national television just for drinking their products. Throughout the 1990s, this trend continued. Among many new advertising campaigns, many soda companies tried introducing flashy new products that would catch as much media attention as possible. Crystal Pepsi sailed through the approval process. Focus groups loved the stuff, and test marketing was excellent. Crystal Pepsi went national in 1993 with a full scale media...

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...urprising to see Crystal Pepsi come back for a short while just so PepsiCo could watch the public reaction and practically let the variation sell itself just from all the hype.

Americans are influential, cogent beings that seem to love hype and drama more than most cultures. There will always be someone out there who will fight to no end to say a product stunk and failed miserably and there will always be the other guy who will defend the product, even 11 plus years after it was pulled off the shelves. The secret to marketing is to never stop changing, go after your target and create a want the public didn’t even know about. One the more popular reasons for why these variations seem to fail is the most obvious, taste. If the majority of consumers agree that the new variation tastes bad, then they will not try it again and be sure to tell all there friends and family how bad it tastes. The tools of influence have a huge role in determining whether a product will have any success in the now and the long run. Although Crystal Pepsi was written off as a huge failure, with millions spent in advertising, its legend lives on for many hard core Pepsi lovers.