What We Sneer At…

I had often heard the expression “We become what we ridicule” over the years, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen it demonstrated as well as it is by the pile of bottle caps sitting on the corner of my desk right now. They’re taken from a number of Coke products (mostly Diet Coke) that I’ve consumed over the last few weeks, and are all worth a certain number of points (usually 3) if you enter the code printed on the inside of the cap on the My Coke Rewards site. You can find similar codes on a number of different kinds of Coke packaging, especially 12-pack boxes (10 points) and 24-pack cases (20 points), although interestingly not on any of their bottled water products. None of this is exactly news, let alone revolutionary news; loyalty-point programs of this type date back at least as far as the 1930’s, and some of them have been in operations for longer than most of their current customers have been alive. What makes the Coke rewards so interesting is that not long ago they were mocking their key competitor for trying exactly the same type of promotion…

Most students of marketing theory (assuming there are any who visit this blog) will already remember the Pepsi rewards program of the mid-1990’s, but for those who don’t, it ran on very similar lines to the Coke Rewards program currently operating, except that you had to mail your reward codes in to the company. There were websites that could have handled such an exchange in 1996, but not everyone had Internet access the way we do today, and even those who did most commonly had dial-up connections and had to pay for their online time by the minute. However, once you mailed in your points you could choose a reward item from a full-color catalog that included t-shirts, hats, barware, electronics, sporting goods, leather jackets, and a fully-functional BAC/McDonnell-Douglas A/V-8 Harrier jump jet…

Okay, that last item was just a joke – but not MY joke; Pepsi put the plane into their rewards catalog even though there was no way that the U.S. or British governments would ever have let them sell a state-of-the-art V/STOL strike fighter to a civilian owner. The one guy who actually tried to buy the thing (sending in two box-tops and a check for $750,000 – the real-money equivalent of 75 million Pepsi points) eventually lost the lawsuit he filed for false advertising, because the court ruled that anyone offering to sell a $75 million airplane for only 1% of its value was obviously joking, and he should have known better. That aside, the program was obviously working, both in the sense of selling a lot of Pepsi products, and also in the sense of raising public awareness of the company and its branded soft drinks. Coke had been caught flat-footed, and had no equivalent promotion with which to counter-attack. So instead, they developed a series of television and radio ads that ridiculed the Pepsi program…

These ads, promoting a fictional soft drink called “Jooky” featured people exchanging packaging from an absurd number of drink cans for “prizes” that no one could possibly want – such as a single horrible sock for the equivalent of 10,000 cans of soda. The spots would end with people choosing to drink Coke products because they taste good, not because of some crackpot prize you might be able to get. The ads helped to counter the Pepsi promotion long enough for Coke to develop new forms of promotional material – including, just a few years later, the Coke Rewards program and its catalog, which features (among other things) such amazing prizes as a Coke oven mitt, a set of Sprite potholders, and a little neoprene bag (about six inches long) in which to keep your Coke bottle caps until you redeem their rewards code…

I kid, of course; there are a lot of quite nice prizes on the Coke Rewards site, assuming that you’re willing to drink the thousand or so bottles of Coke products you need to get one (or get a bunch of your friends to safe their bottle caps and box tops for you). Still, the irony of setting up such a program after running the “Jooky Junk” ads seems to be lost on the company – and does seem to be helping them sell a lot of Coke products. It makes you wonder whose promotional stunts they’re going to copy next…