Few companies have a rivalry as fierce and
longstanding as PepsiCo and Coca-Cola and in their never ending battle for soda market
dominance each company has gone to some spectacular lengths to screw over the other. Arguably the most fiendishly genius move of
all was one made by Coca-Cola in the early 1990s- a move that basically involved intentionally
releasing a terrible product purely to try to screw over by association a similar product
released by Pepsi. The genesis for this tale began in the early
1990s during what is referred to in the marketing world as the “Clear Craze”. In a nutshell, for whatever reason, many companies
began releasing clear versions of their products, using marketing buzzwords like “pure”
and “clean” to advertise them to the public. A company recognised as the industry leader
in this regard was the soap giant, Ivory, who, among other things, released a clear
version of their dish soap in the early 1990s. Ivory Clear was advertised with rather questionably
accurate slogans like “Ivory attacks the grease, not the natural oils in your skin”. The idea of clear products was quickly used
in diverse and eclectic range of products including Zima Clearmalt (a clear citrus beer),
Mennen Crystal Clean deodorant, and, perhaps most bizarre of all, Amoco Crystal Clear gasoline. As you might have guessed given the lack of
ubiquitous see-through products on your local super market shelves, most of these products
either failed miserably or quietly faded into obscurity when the Clear Craze went full meta
and disappeared. This brings us to Crystal Pepsi, which was
devised by then COO of PepsiCo, David Novak, in 1992. The soda was virtually identical in composition
to their flagship product, sans the caramel coloring used to give so many sodas their
distinctive brown hue. Novak’s idea was to market the soda like
other products released during the Clear Craze and hope consumers would equate it being clear
with “purity” and, thus, assume that it was a healthier alternative to regular Pepsi. Of course, as sodas are wont to be, Crystal
Pepsi was still terrible for you. For example, a single 20 oz bottle of Crystal
Pepsi still contained around 69 grams of sugar, or about 16 teaspoons worth- the same as normal
Pepsi. Taste wise, Crystal Pepsi is extremely similar
to regular Pepsi, however, fans of the product claimed they could still tell the difference,
though how much of this was just in their heads isn’t clear. Nevertheless, the slight taste difference
was brought up during the product’s design phase, with one bottler at a Pepsi plant telling
Novak: “David, it’s a great idea, and we think we can make it great, but it needs
to taste more like Pepsi. If you call it Pepsi, people will expect it
to taste like Pepsi.” Novak decided to ignore these concerns, and
presumably also ignored the fact that by saying Crystal Pepsi was better because it wasn’t
brown they were literally advertising that all their brown drinks weren’t good for
you. Despite all this, Crystal Pepsi was rushed
into production. Initially it seemed that Novak’s gut feeling
was correct and trials in cities like Denver and Dallas in early 1992 garnered positive
feedback from customers. Encouraged by this, PepsiCo eventually rolling
out the product nationwide in early 1993. In their initial advertising blitz for Crystal
Pepsi, Pepsi paid millions for a minute long Super Bowl ad to celebrate it’s launch. The ad, which can be viewed here in all its
glory touts Crystal Pepsi as the drink for “Right now” and is full of pseudo-intellectual
quotes like, “Right now nature’s inventing better stuff than science” and “Right
now only wildlife needs preservatives”. Also, because subtlety apparently died in
the early 90’s, the entire ad is set in time to the Van Halen song, ‘Right Now’. They followed this up by spending a total
of around $40 million, about $70 million in today’s dollars, pushing the product in
broader advertising. Initial response was very positive, including
Cystal Pepsi quickly capturing almost 1% of the soda market (good for sales of almost
a half a billion dollars right out of the gate, or close to a billion dollars today
if adjusted for inflation). Nevertheless, in just over a year the product
was dead, with the last batch in the initial run being shipped in early 1994. (It should be noted that since this time,
Pepsi has periodically re-released the product for limited runs as something of a marketing
stunt, most recently in August of 2018.) As to why the product flopped so spectacularly,
this seems to all center around basic human psychology. To begin with, it was noted that because the
only other mainstream sodas out there that were clear were citrus based, like 7-Up and
Sprite, many consumers initially thought Crystal Pepsi must be the same type of drink. When they noted it tasted almost exactly like
Pepsi, most simply went back to drinking the original brown version of the product. In essence here, Pepsi were going against
a literal century old association that cola should be brown. This is a real problem, as noted by marketing
professor Kyle Murray at the University of Alberta. In his study, The Role of Arousal in Congruity-Based
Product Evaluation, it was demonstrated that when people are presented with products that
are otherwise exactly as expected except just changing one very apparent thing, like the
color, they actually show genuine physiological signs of anxiety. Thus, things like a drink that tastes exactly
as people expect a brown cola to taste, but is clear, literally makes people’s pulses
rise and increases perspiration. Nevertheless, as noted, thanks to a rather
massive marketing push, while Crystal Pepsi was falling short of Pepsi’s hope that it
would be a billion dollar brand (needing to capture at least 2% of the market to achieve
that figure in 1990s dollars) it was still doing reasonably well out of the gate. Enter a little more psychology and PepsiCo’s
chief rival, Coca-Cola. Thanks to the successful launch of Diet Coke,
Coca-Cola had a diet drink on their hands that had more or less faded into obscurity-
Tab. Significant to Coca-Cola’s plans here was
the fact that diet drinks in general at this time were not terribly popular and were otherwise
generally considered something only women drank. In fact, this association was so strong that
Tab cans themselves were made pink and advertisements eventually solely targeted women, with such
statements as “Be a shape he won’t forget… Tab can help you stay on his mind.” This negative association with diet drinks
among half the population and a brand that Coca-Cola didn’t really care about got the
wheels turning among executives at Coca-Cola, with the result being a rather ingenious idea
to hurt sales of the upstart, Crystal Pepsi. Launched as a direct competitor to Crystal
Pepsi in December of 1993, Tab Clear was later described by former Pepsi executive and, at
the time, head of marketing for Coca-Cola Sergio Zyman as a product the company intentionally
sent to die, almost purely to spite Pepsi. In a nutshell, this was just the exact same
drink as Tab, sans caramel coloring. The company also removed the caffeine from
the product- another move that isn’t terribly popular with consumers. They then very prominently featured the fact
that the product was caffeine and sugar free right on the can. Naturally, both being clear colas, most stores
stocked Crystal Pepsi and Tab Clear very close to one another. This all combined had Coca-Cola’s executives
hoping consumers would similarly assume that Crystal Pepsi was a diet drink and caffeine
free. If accepted by the public, these two factors
would virtually guarantee that Crystal Pepsi would never be a mainstream drink, no matter
how hard Pepsi tried to make it a thing. In the end, Zyman called the launch of Tab
Clear, “a suicidal mission from day one” and in an interview for the book, Killing
Giants: 10 Strategies To Topple The Goliath In Your Industry gleefully noted,
