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Why Crystal Pepsi and Others Failed Essay

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Why Crystal Pepsi and Others Failed

We live in a day and age where marketing and advertising is stronger then ever. It is essentially in our face every where we turn, from the clothes we wear to the music we listen to and even the device we use to listen to our music. Marketing and advertising touches our lives everyday without our really ever even noticing it. Marketing professionals have a difficult challenge before them in figuring out a way to create a public interest, and a want for their products if they are to become adopted. Various marketing communications tools provide the means to which they will best reach the public. In the early 1990's marketing professionals for PepsiCo choose to heavily promote and advertise a new …show more content…

Crystal Pepsi sailed through the approval process. Focus groups loved the stuff, and test marketing was excellent. Crystal Pepsi went national in 1993 with a full scale media campaign featuring Van Halen's 'Right Now.' In the ad blitz that followed, sales were impressive... and then it flopped. Perhaps the American culture wasn't too easily fooled when it came to taking a familiar product and putting a new spin on it. Maybe the flavor difference was just too distracting. However the massive ad campaign was impressive. The soda's splash on the market was highlighted by being the focus of a Saturday Night Live parody for ‘Crystal Gravy' featuring Kevin Nealon & Julia Sweeney dipping turkey drumsticks into a clear, gel-like replacement for everyday gravy (CaptainMike). The last phase of Crystal Pepsi's life was when it was re-solicited to the masses as a citrus flavor drink. It was quickly drowned in a sea of other flavored, non-cola beverages. Today, a web search for the term ‘Crystal Pepsi' turns up over 160,000 web sites usually discussing in passing as in ‘It will fail quicker than Crystal Pepsi' or ‘Remember Crystal Pepsi? Me neither.' It is a true urban legend among the last wave of Generation X-errs and the subsequent children of the 1980s. According to an article published by CNN Money, "Pepsi Blue was one of more than 100 concepts Pepsi tested. Two-thirds of teen-agers the company

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