Cola Wars
replaced with the old formula. This mistake helped Coke to understand that people appreciate consistency and they’ve been consistent ever since.
Pepsi also has a distinctive package with the bright red, white, and blue logo it carries. Pepsi’s brand symbol represents the companies’ country of origin in a prideful way. No matter what type of Pepsi product it is (diet, wild cherry, or Pepsi one) the logo has also been constant with the product’s package. Pepsi also made a mistake a few years back of trying to create the clear Pepsi. This was a huge failure for Pepsi; they soon resorted back to the classic caramel cola for fear of greater devastation to the brand identity.
One strong difference with the Pepsi brand and Coke brand is that Coke has managed to stretch their brand into markets beyond foods and beverages. Coke has planned to launch their own fashion and sports apparel line (Peppal & Richards, 2002). This is a great effort by Coke to extend their name across lines that no beverage company has yet to cross.
Marketing Strategies
Pepsi and Coke have developed strong relationships with their customers and developed themselves into a global market to become accepted as “aspirational holy grails by marketers and brand managers in other product sectors (Sparks, 1997, pg153)”. There is a vast array of different businesses that try to target their market the way that Pepsi and Coke have done. I even found an article trying to help cities market themselves as successfully as Pepsi and Coke (Matson, 1994, pg 35).
Through there crazy antagonistic advertising approaches and other marketing efforts Coke and Pepsi do an incredible job of reaching their markets. Coke can reach all generations both young and old with almost all of it’s marketing efforts. Coke has always used a sense of tradition in their means of marketing. Even today, incorporated into their new hip hop ads they continue on with their traditional feel. For example their new “Real” campaign; they powerfully use the traditional Coca-Cola red in every medium (Atlanta Business Chronicle, 2003).
On the flip side, Pepsi has prided itself on being the new and exciting soft drink. Thus there major market is the young teen to college crowd. They did a great job with this campaign when they brought in Michael Jackson to be one of their spokespeople. Another example of Pepsi’s dynamic advertising efforts is the Generation Next campaign where they were on top of the teen and college crowd with use of hot celebrities.
Celebrity Spokespeople
Pepsi and Coke do great jobs of finding influential celebrities to be their spokespeople. The latest trend involving celebrities is using music stars. Pepsi signed Brittney Spears to be there spokesperson [next page]