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Pepsi

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File:Pepsi logo.png
Pepsi logo (2004)

Pepsi (Pepsi-Cola) is a carbonated soft drink, and principal rival of Coca-Cola.

History

Pepsi was first made in 1898, by Caleb Bradham and was originally called "Brad's drink". It was made of carbonated water, sugar, vanilla, rare oils, pepsin and cola nuts. It was renamed Pepsi Cola after the pepsin and cola nuts used in the recipe. The name was trademarked on June 16, 1903.

Caleb Bradham, a pharmacist, like many pharmacists at the turn of the century had a soda fountain in his drugstore, where he served his customers refreshing drinks, that he created himself. This is where pepsi was first served.

After seventeen years of suceess, Caleb Bradham lost Pepsi Cola after he had gambled on the stock market, he believed sugar prices would raise but they fell instead. Pepsi Cola went bankrupt in 1923.

In 1931, Pepsi Cola was bought by the Loft Candy Company Loft president, Charles G. Guth reformulated the popular soft drink.

In 1940, history was made when the first advertising jingle was broadcast nationally. The jingle was "Nickel Nickel" an advertisement for Pepsi Cola that referred to the pepsi price and the quantity for the price. "Nickel Nickel" became a hit record and was recorded into 55 languages.

It first achieved success by selling its drink in recycled beer bottles, which allowed it to sell larger bottles for lower cost than Coke. Pepsi thus became viewed as the soft drink of the lower classes. In the United States, Pepsi was viewed as the drink of blacks and in Canada it was viewed as the drink for francophones.

In the 1950s Pepsi poured great resources into trying to improve its image. It bought many televison ads and began its long tradition of employing celebrities to sell its product. It grew and became a serious rival of the Coca-Cola corporation, but was still firmly in second place.

In the 1960s, Pepsi originated the marketing strategy known as "The Pepsi Generation". This strategy was a constant repetitious advertising of Pepsi aimed at young people. It worked under the assumption that there are new consumers coming of age every day and if one stops marketing to the newest consumers, one will have a shrinking base of established consumers of one's product. With the aging of the baby boomer generation, the advertising of Pepsi changed into the drink that keeps your youth.

In 1964, Diet Pepsi was introduced.

In the 1980s, Pepsi began a series of advertisements called the "Pepsi Challenge", in which it directly compared its product to that of Coca-Cola, showing that people preferred their product over the competitor's (and Coca-Cola's own research showed similar results). Coca-Cola, at that time, was suffering reduced sales, and made a mistake of its own in changing the formula for its product - the new formula to be called New Coke - possibly in response to the Pepsi Challenge. This period of fierce competition between the two companies became known as the cola wars.

1998 became a year of introduction for the GenerationNEXT campaign which pitched a futuristic view of the company to youth. Racer Jeff Gordon was used as a symbol for fast, young, and powerful. Then, during the fall of 1998, Pepsi introduced Pepsi ONE, followed by an ambitious advertising campaign with the main slogan of "just one calorie". The cola introduced the use of Sunett (Acesulfame potassium) and aspartame to attain one calorie.

The company teamed up with George Lucas's reintroduction of Star Wars to the big screen during the summer of 1999. Twenty-four characters from the Star Wars series were introduced as artwork on the cans over the summer, creating an emphasis for a collectible set. This created a huge market saturation for awareness of the movie as momentum built up.

Pepsi may have derived its name from pepsin, an enzyme produced in the mucosal lining of the stomach that acts to degrade protein. (Similar inspiration may have led to the naming of Pepsin Gum, first produced by Dr. Edward E. Beeman, whose bookkeeper, Nellie Horton, suggested that he put pepsin into gum "since so many people buy pepsin for digestion and gum for no reason at all".)

Company Information

Run by PepsiCo, the company also owns and operates 7Up International (but not 7UP in the United States), Quaker Oats, Gatorade, Frito-Lay and Tropicana. PepsiCo is a much larger corporation than The Coca-Cola Company, even if Coke still outsells Pepsi in almost all areas of the world. It is traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol PEP. The company it formed for its distribution and bottling business is the Pepsi Bottling Group, trading on the NYSE under the symbol PBG. They are both SIC 2080 (Beverage) companies.

Until 1997, it also owned Kentucky Fried Chicken, Pizza Hut, and Taco Bell, but these fast-food restaurants were spun off into Tricon Global Restaurants, now Yum! Brands, Inc.

As with many soft drinks, Pepsi has had various celebrity spokespersons throughout its existence. Among them:

One of the only areas of the world where Pepsi outsells Coke is the Canadian province of Quebec. Pepsi had long been the drink of Francophones and it continues to hold its dominance by relying on local Québécois celebrities (essentially Claude Meunier, of La Petite Vie fame) to sell its product. Pepsi eventually became an offensive term, nickname, for Francophones viewed as a lower class by Anglophones in the middle of the 20th century. The term is now used as historical reference to French-English animosity. Another region where Pepsi outsells Coke is in central Appalachia in the USA.

Accusations made against Pepsi

Coca-Cola was banned from import in India in 1970 for having refused to release the list of its ingredients. In 1993, the ban was lifted, with Pepsi arriving on the market shortly afterwards. One study led by the Center for Science and the Environment (CSE), an independent laboratory in New Delhi, found that the sodas contained residues of dangerous pesticides, with one dose 36 times greater than the European standard for Pepsi, and 30 times greater for Coca-Cola. The presence of these products could provoke cancers, negatively affect the nervous and immune systems, and cause birth defects. No law bans the presence of pesticides in drinks in India.

In response to the news, numerous Indians burned bottles of these two brands of soda in the streets. The Indian government asked for a comparable study of soda bottles destined for markets in the United States.

Former CEOs of Pepsi

Soft drinks produced by Pepsi include:

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