Pepsi’s epic Philippines marketing fail campaign which costed 10- million USD
During the never-ceasing rivalry between Coke and Pepsi, each company has made some spectacularly bad marketing decisions. In 1992 Pepsi promised to give away 1 million pesos the equivalent to the US $40 000, to one lucky person with the right number on the bottle cap, trouble is that they accidentally printed the wining number 349 on 800,000 bottle caps due to an oversight in the manufacturing process, consequential they promised to give away a total of 55 billion in today dollars.
The Philippines was a country struggling with a modest economy and widespread poverty, and this grand prize was perceived as a life-changing amount of money. So when 349, that night’s winning number, flashed on the screen, tens of thousands of Filipinos couldn’t believe their luck. The number was associated with the largest prize in the sweepstakes. The next morning, Pepsi plants in Manila were overrun by people toting their 349-emblazoned bottle caps and looking for the promised reward. When they came to know that they will not be getting the money, Thousands of Filipinos began rioting on the streets demanding that Pepsi pay them their rightful prize which now totalled in the Billions.
People even filed 689 civil suits and more than 5200 fraud and deception cases. However, Pepsi wasn’t entirely at fault it is believed that this marketing fail is caused by DG consulters, a Mexican consulting firm that Pepsi had hired to randomly preselect the winning numbers and they were clearly instructed not to make the number 349 the winner, but they clearly didn’t get it, and obviously, with such a costly mistake Pepsi couldn’t afford to pay everyone the money they promised and ended up just giving $2000 to each winner instead of the promised $40,000 regardless Pepsi ended up paying 10-million dollars for the whole campaign than their original budget of 2-million dollars.
This goof-up campaign happened in a time when PepsiCo was struggling to gain a foothold in the Philippines. The Philippines was considered to be the 12th biggest market for soft drink consumption at the time, coca-cola controlled about 75% of that market while Pepsi only had 17%.
Consumer awareness for both the environment and their own health and wellness are two important factors dictating the future of the beverage industry in 2019, However, Pepsi and coke still hold the largest market share, but there a lot of fitness and health-based beverage companies that are going at a high-rate.
The global functional drinks market size is expected to reach USD 93.68 billion by 2019, according to a new study by Grand View Research, Inc., progressing at a CAGR of 6.1% during the forecast period.
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