Why crystal pepsi failed

Only a few execs at the firm knew the coveted trade secret, which made it harder to replicate. To Kumar, it felt like guarding a castle in a blindfold. It was made with high fructose corn syrup and had roughly the same amount of calories.

In April , the drink launched in Boulder, Colorado, and was soon flying off the shelves. Everybody wanted to try it. He wanted the soft drink to launch nationally in time for the Super Bowl on Jan.

The problem is nobody is going to retry it. And they were right. The company launched Tab Clear in what chief marketing officer Sergio Zyma described as a mutual destruction effort to fail -- and take Crystal Pepsi down with it.

He hoped to kill it off by confusing shoppers into thinking it was a diet drink. Whether or not the scheme actually worked, not many people tried Crystal Pepsi twice. It's really gross! More serious dilemmas soon began to bubble up. As he predicted, ultraviolet rays caused the soda to spoil. Reports began pouring into Pepsi headquarters from customers saying the stuff tasted strange, according to Kumar. Is it a healthier option than Pepsi, or just a gimmick?

No one knew. Long before the s, clear sodas were associated with something else: dictatorships. Rumors circulated that White Coke was being made by the special request of Russian Marshal Georgy Zhukov, and bottled with a special red-star cap.

Author and historian Mark Pendergrast via LiveScience says the Russian elite wanted cola taste without the imperialist vibe that came from the color, and that helped make the idea of clear colas feel a little uncomfortable. Then, there's Fanta. It has an even shadier history, and this once-clear fizzy beverage was made by Coca-Cola's German branch during the reign of the Third Reich via Atlas Obscura.

After Pearl Harbor, US-based Coca-Cola stopped exporting secret syrup to Germany, and Coke's German subsidiary responded by creating a lighter-colored fizzy drink made mostly from fruit and bread processing leftovers. They called it Fanta, and it became beloved by Germans — including Nazis. Fanta became orange in and was imported to the States in , but never entirely shook its Nazi roots.

When Pepsi came out with Crystal Pepsi, they sunk a huge amount of money into rolling out a new product. According to the book Killing Giants , Coca-Cola saw that as an opportunity.

It was Coke's chance to hit Pepsi where it hurt by releasing their own clear cola It was insanely risky, and it was the brainchild of marketing guru Sergio Zyman. Zyman realized, "a way to ambush Crystal Pepsi is to do a kamikaze on them — commit suicide and kill them in the process. So I went to the company [Coca-Cola] and sold them on the idea. They released Tab Clear, their version of a clear cola. It was never supposed to be good, it was only supposed to confuse consumers more than they already were.

Tab Clear was officially marketed as a diet drink much like the original Tab , and it wasn't great by any stretch of the imagination. It was only on the market for a few months before it sank, and the failure helped drag Crystal Pepsi down, too. When Crystal Pepsi first appeared on shelves alongside regular Pepsi, it sold pretty well. According to Business Insider, it took. He called it "the best idea I may have ever had in my career.

If you really want an epic walk down memory lane, check out this advertisement for Crystal Pepsi. There's the Van Halen song, the old-school fonts and computer graphics, and — for whatever reason — a rhino and a rat in a wheel. It's the entire decade summed up in 60 seconds, and it's also a great visualization that shows just what went wrong with Crystal Pepsi. Watch the video, then ask yourself if you have the foggiest idea what they're actually advertising.

It's the all-natural stuff of the future, but And there you have Crystal Pepsi's problem. In , Crystal Pepsi made a very brief return to stores as a result of online pleading from fans needing a Crystal Pepsi fix. And, for what it's worth, Crystal Pepsi has been embraced by a generation nostalgic for the '90s. It's coming back for a limited time , starting this month in Canada and in August in the US.

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