Jones Soda And Coca-Cola Wars

Our American market when it comes to snack foods and soda have ballooned into a billion dollar business with more choices than there are consumers. The problem is it is only a few different manufacturers who are making all of these different brands and flavors. Throughout the 80’s we had a very entertaining marketing ploy where Pepsi and Coke slugged it out in what was called the cola wars. Although these two soft drink giants have claimed most of this market there are other smaller companies who pop up every now and then with new products and unique marketing strategies. New drinks such as Fanta, Gatorade, and Snapple showed promise only to have them scooped up by Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, and Dr. Pepper respectively which pretty much speaks for itself. Its either be

Jones Soda started out with a strong cult following with American youth, especially alternative driven teens who liked specific activates like music and skating. The company sold its product bottle by bottle and offered unique bottles with sent in photos of its customers which targeted a popular marketing strategy which I like to call the “ME” market. By getting its unique flavors out into a more alternative market like Seattle and offering free bottle and other prizes, Jones was able to slowly pick up sales by finding its niche in a specialty soda market. With success comes ambition to grow and I feel like Jones wanted to be more than a specialty item so the company decided it was going to go national and try to compete with the big boys. By doing this the company had to redesign its marketing as well as its products to offer price breaks in bulk sales. To make product placement more common with big box stores Jones had to go from glass bottles to cans and pray on the fact that a lot of consumers had heard of them. It didn’t go well as indeed consumers had heard of the product but that didn’t mean they tried or liked the product. The reasoning behind this marketing and production change