What should Coca-Cola do to overcome the confusion between its brand identity and PEPSI?

Once I had an interesting debate with a friend about mixing brands with products they represent, whether if it’s healthy or not, I believe it could be an advantage if the brand knew how to benefit out of it, I mean to go smart and heavy in advertising and PR.

I grew-up in Saudi Arabia, there was a well-known tissues brand called “Kleenex”, all of the sudden the word Kleenex replaced the word tissues, and then we had more adaptation for this word, like kleenexeh for a single tissue, kleenextain for two, and so, in Jordan, the dominating brand is “Fine”, again fine is the alternative for tissues, fineh for one tissue, finetain for two, and so on.

I remember that Jeep from Chrysler tried to benefit of a confusion between Jeep the brand and Jeep the term that people use to call SUVs and 4X4, they used to say: no jeep but Jeep, I don’t think it really worked.

Seems like Coca-Cola is facing the same situation with its competitor, PEPSI, many people believe that this carbonated black drink is PEPSI not cola, it is tattooed in their brains, and I think I’m not an exception most of the time. The other day I saw a Coca-Cola refrigerator full of their new Zero product, so I thought to myself: Oh PEPSI I’m gonna grab one!

I laughed as I remembered an old joke about Coca-Cola trying to go aggressive to make it clear to Jordanians that they are a different brand that produces cola, drink just like PEPSI does, they went to a city and branded everything; buildings, streets, shops even people, lots of giveaways were given, celebrations and carnivals, and of course free Cokes all day long.

But what was the result of that, they interviewed a person on TV and he said that they painted everything red, they gave us cool gifts and they distributed free PEPSI all day long!

I think Coca-Cola needs an intensive educational campaign to get more consumers to use the term Coca-Cola instead of PEPSI whenever they point or think of Coca-Cola.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 9th, 2008 at 9:24 am and is filed under Arabia, Controversial, Interesting, Jordan, Marketing, PR, Saudi Arabia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.