When Diet Coke surpassed Pepsi to become the No.2 soda in America, it was as if the Cola Wars had finally declared a winner: Coca-Cola.
Some may argue that the Cola Wars were over long ago. Fortune Magazine thought that Coke won the war back in 1996. And in some respects it was right.
PepsiCo may have brought in 38 percent more revenue in 2011 than Coca Cola. But its archrival sold $28 billion worth of soda while PepsiCo only sold $12 billion.
This is the result of PepsiCo diversifying its business and increasingly relying on the other brands it owns -- Frito Lay, Quaker, Tropicana -- to keep the company's revenue up.
Unfortunately, it also has to do with the astronomical number of gaffes Pepsi has made in the past few years, particularly in its brand management and the way it has branded its flagship product.
The Cola Wars heated up in 1975 with the Pepsi Challenge, a blind taste test.
Even though Pepsi and Coca-Cola had been competing for market share since the birth of Pepsi-Cola in 1899, the Pepsi Challenge marked a turning point in the Cola War. The blind taste test found that more people liked the taste of Pepsi than Coke.
In response to the test, Coca Cola would reformulate its cola and launch New Coke, which was an utter disaster. Pepsi sales would benefit from the New Coke mishap for some time, But then Pepsi started making mistakes of its own.
Starting in the 1980s, Pepsi had a number of controversies surrounding their pop star endorsers.
- The first international pop star to become a spokesperson for Pepsi was Michael Jackson. While filming an ad in 1984, a pyrotechnics stunt went wrong and badly burnt Jackson. The accident would leave Jackson addicted to painkillers for the rest of his life.
- In 1987, David Bowie and Tina Turner sang a duet of "Modern Love" for a Pepsi ad. The same year, Bowie was accused of sexual assault and the company dropped the ad immediately.
- Madonna was named the new Pepsi spokeswoman in 1989. However, her video for "Like a Prayer," a song that was used in a Pepsi commercial, was deemed blasphemous and brought accusations of anti-Catholicism against the company.
- In August 2002, Pepsi pulled a national 30-second ad featuring Ludacris from the air after Fox's Bill O'Reilly called for a boycott of the soft drink company for using an "immoral rapper" as a spokesperson. When Pepsi began running ads with the Osbournes instead, Russell Simmons said it was racially insensitive. In the end, Pepsi was asked to make an annual contribution of $1 million to the Ludacris Foundation for three years as amends.
In the 1990s, people found syringes in cans in more than 20 states.
Pepsi and Diet Pepsi had a scare in 1993 when consumers in more than 20 states found syringes in the brand's soda cans. The reports, which quickly hit national news, created a panic among consumers.
But it wasn't Pepsi's fault. Authorities eventually found video of a woman in Colorado who had been inserting syringes into cans.
Yet even after her arrest, reports of syringes continued to roll in. In the end, there were more than 50 tampering claims filed and more than a dozen arrests made for filing false reports.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider
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