The War We Never Hear About

Coke vs Pepsi

Since time immemorial conflict has been a part of the human experience. Capitalists and Communists, Allies and Axis, and more recently Coke vs Pepsi. This dark period of human existence came to be known as The Cola Wars. An era characterized by corporate espionage, advertising warfare, and taste testing showdowns.

Let us rewind to the outbreak of The Cola Wars to the mid 1970's, a time of social change and teetering world politics. The first stone was thrown by Pepsi in 1975. A series of blind taste tests were organised by Pepsi pitting Coca Cola against Pepsi. In a crushing blow participants consistently said that Pepsi tasted better than Coca Cola, offering a sweeter taste.

Public Taste Tests consistently rated Pepsi as the superior Cola

This revelation resulted in losses for Coca Cola with Pepsi gaining a considerable share of the Soft drinks market. In response Coca Cola developed a new product creatively called "New Coke". This drink was a commercial failure with Coca Cola receiving over 400,000 written complaints from their customers in the first year. The product was duly scrapped with Coca Cola releasing Coke again under a new name, " Coke Classic". A new advertising strategy was released to accompany the product focusing on family orientated visuals in order to capitalize on nostalgia for the old Coke flavor.

Coca Cola's iconic Christmas truck

Coke Classic was a resounding success regaining Coca Cola's lost market share and securing its place as the most sold soft drink selling 1.8 billion cans per day. Coca Cola has continued its family oriented advertisements to this day, famous ones being the Coca Cola Christmas adverts featuring the iconic red truck. Pepsi's advertising has instead marketed towards the younger generation with hip and flashy advertisements

The war reached a detente in 2009 following a brief twitter exchange mediated by an independent twitter user of the handle @eunmac. The world, however, is holding its breath in fear that the current peace is not to last.