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People Don’t Buy Products, They Buy Better Versions of Themselves

What Apple, Samsung, and Starbucks learned from Pepsi

Photo by John Fornander on Unsplash

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The year was 1957, and Pepsi — like many of the youth at that time — was dealing with an identity crisis. Despite efforts from marketers, Pepsi was being outsold by its biggest competitor and perpetual market leader — Coke — by a factor just shy of six to one, even as it was selling at half of Coke’s price. It wasn’t the product that was lacking, it was that Pepsi’s brand ethos — indecisive and directionless — was a fragmented shell of what it would need to become to take on Coke.

At the time, Coke was unrivaled, having succeeded in convincing the American public that they’d captured everything good and wholesome about American life within the murky confines of a glass bottle. This clear transcendence of the competition was not unlike Apple’s; like devotees react viscerally to a green speech bubble in iMessage, so too was it that, to anyone who embraced the deeply American traits of exceptionalism, community-mindedness, and of course, Santa Claus, consuming anything other than Coke would’ve been considered heresy.

Coke even affiliated itself with Santa Claus. Photo by Library of Congress/Corbis/VCG/Getty

In 1963, Pepsi hired a young advertising executive named Alan Pottasch to address the issue. Pottasch’s task was, to put it gently, difficult. He was to reinvigorate a brand competing against one of the most successful of all time, a product that not only outclassed Pepsi in every consumer-driven category, but was also — chemically — nearly identical. And so Pottasch made a decision that would later become iconic — as he put it, “…to stop talking about the product, and start talking about the user.” Here is Tim Wu in his book, The Attention Merchants,¹ on the decision:

[Pottasch] thus conceived of marketing Pepsi without reference to its…

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Zander Nethercutt
Zander Nethercutt

Written by Zander Nethercutt

mistaking correlation for causation since '94; IYI, probably | 🧓Chicago, IL | ✍️. @ zandercutt.com | GET IN TOUCH: zander [at] zandercutt [dot] com

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