Monday, March 22, 2010

Think out of the box !

This incident relates back to the Wills (Cricket) World Cup of 1996.
Both Pepsi and Coke were struggling hard to increase their market share in the Indian sub-continent.

The ICC approached them with an offer that one of them would get a chance to be the 'Official Drinks Partner' of the World Cup.

Both Coke and Pepsi started bidding hard to acquire the title of the 'Official Drinks Partner'. The bidding initially started with low amounts but slowly reached alarmingly high levels. Coke and Pepsi were aggressively bidding to oust each other and get the title of the 'Official Drinks Partner'

However, during a certain point of the bidding, Pepsi suddenly backed out and coke got the contract after paying a hefty amount.

The coke team was jubilant and started advertising themselves as the "Official drinks partner"

Pepsi, on the other hand, came up with a revolutionary advertising campaign. Whatever money they had saved by backing out of the auction, they pumped in behind promoting their new slogan "Pepsi - Nothing official about it ! Aha !!'

In the advertisement Pepsi showed "office" as something very boring, habitual and routine. Whatever was "official" was very cliche. On the other hand, not being official meant being very cool and trendy !

Pepsi's jingle went very well with the urban youngsters.

By making clever use of a differentiated approach, Pepsi took clear advantage of a lost contract !

Sometimes, thinking out of the box really helps !

1 comment:

Ajay Ohri said...

you r realy a gem Sir, once my father bought the book on vedic mathematics and i read it accidently but i was surprised by the power of ancient indian mathematicians and ofcourse vedic mathematics I have also implemented those tricks in programming of C & C++ and now i teach those tricks to various students of programming in my college moreover i have also submitted them as a project to IIT bombay