Coca cola has ruled the softdrink market throughout the 1950s, 1960s and early parts of the

1970s. Pepsi was its only

competition. Coca cola out sold pepsi by two to one, But all of that change and it became a war.

By the mid and late 70s the growth rate of coca cola begin to drop from 13% to 2%.

So to pepsi it was a chance for them to take over the soft drink market.

Pepsi started running an advertising campaigns. The first one was “Pepsi Generation”.

Then pepsi had the “pepsi challenge” campaign it allowed consumers to actually taste test the product. The result was
people like pepsi and That campaign led to a rapid increase in Pepsi’s market share from 6 to 14percent of U.S. soft-
drink sales.

But in defense Coca-Cola conducted its own taste tests, and people like the taste of Pepsi better, and that had a big
effect on coca-cola market share.

so the question came about …why was coca-cola loosing market share?????because they was outspending pepsi in
advertising by $100million and they had twice as many vending machines and had more shelf space.

Coca cola advertising was not effective as Pepsi despite all the money the money they spent…..so another question
came along ..how can we measure the effectiveness of advertising??

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With the market share decline in the late 70’s and early 80’s and the advertisings not being effective ….coca cola began
to take a look at the soft-drink product itself …they did a little marketing research and they believe the reason for
everything was the TASTE….. So in 1984 they developed a sweeter flavor. Then they did one of the biggest taste test
ever costing $4 and majority of the people approved it over both Pepsi and the original COKE. Then top executives
agree to change the taste and take the old coke off the market.

So after they took it off the market they start getting criticize ..and people start getting made because they looked at
coke as a American symbol and a long time friend that betrayed them. Anger was just spreaded around the country.
Then the company begin to worry about a consumer boycott against the product…..so later that year they apologized to
the public and brought back the original taste of the COKe and they kept the new flavor and it help bring sales up more
than they expected.

1999 the first quarter… coke witness a sharp slowdown in North America partly due to price increase….

Then coke had problems in Europe with the contamination scares .

on june 8th of 1999 about 24 Belgian school children began throwing up after drinking Cokes. That was a result to a
serious crises in Coca cola 113 year history…

so Coca Cola officials met with Belgium’s health minister trying to placate him and while in the meeting they got the new
that another 15 students at another school had gotten sick from drinking cokes.

So they begin to think that the contamination came from one of their bottling plants, and one of their plants that
produce cans. Then they got the news that coke cans where contaminated with rat poison.

Then hundreds of sick people in France, where blaming their illnesses on Coke …….and then France banned the product.
This setback left coke out the market in parts of Europe.
A lot of cases of coke was being recall in different countries, and a estimate of 3.4million a day was been lose in
revenues.

So coca cola lunched a advertisiting campaign to defend the quality of their products.

Problems continued to spread.