O que ocorreu com essa antecipação da Pepsi frente a Coca

Na escolha entre Coca ou Pepsi, responder essa pergunta é tarefa fácil. Afinal, por muitos anos a Coca-Cola foi tida como a líder do mercado de refrigerantes. Enquanto isso, a Pepsi era renegada ao segundo lugar.

No entanto, nos últimos anos o cenário começou a mudar para as duas empresas. Pensando nisso, qual será que domina o mercado atualmente?

A guerra dos refrigerantes

Ao contrário do que muita gente pensa, a Coca-Cola não lidera em todos os aspectos o mercado de refrigerantes. A guerra das colas continua mais acirrada do que nunca.

Cada vez mais tem se falado sobre hábitos de consumo mais saudáveis, e os refrigerantes não têm vez nesse universo. Com isso, o consumo das duas marcas passaram a cair cada vez mais em países como Estados Unidos.

Assim, as duas empresas precisaram se reinventar, e principalmente a Coca, já que o seu principal lucro vem justamente dos refrigerantes.

Mas então, será que a Pepsi conseguiu passar a Coca-Cola? Para responder essa pergunta, vamos analisar as duas empresas por três tópicos diferentes.

1. Diversidade de produtos

Em meio a guinada saudável dos consumidores, a PepsiCo conseguiu se reinventar e se manter mais relevante que a Coca-Cola. Isso porque, além dos refrigerantes, a empresa também é responsável por salgadinhos como Ruffles, Doritos e Lays.

Além disso, a marca também é dona do Toddy e Quaker.

Já a Coca-Cola permanece focando apenas nas bebidas. Além dos refrigerantes, a marca também produz os sucos Del Valle e os chás da Matte Leão. No entanto, nenhum deles tem tanta força com essa parcela do público que está em busca de uma vida mais saudável.

Sendo assim, pela diversidade de produtos, a Pepsi ganha essa batalha.

2. Valor de marca

Com uma extensa quantidade de produtos, a Pepsi sai na frente em faturamento. Em 2019, a empresa lucrou 64 bilhões de dólares. Já a Coca-Cola, nesse mesmo ano, teve uma receita de quase 34 bilhões.

No entanto, na disputa entre Coca ou Pepsi, a liderança ainda é a da Coca, pelo menos em valor de marca. Isso porque a empresa está em sexto lugar no ranking das marcas mais valiosas do mundo, segundo a Forbes.

3. Popularidade

Aqui, mais uma vez a vitória é da Coca-Cola. Pelo oitavo ano consecutivo, a empresa liderou o ranking da Brand FootPrint de marca mais consumida do mundo.

Isso porque, de acordo com a pesquisa, consumidores escolheram o refrigerante mais de 6 bilhões de vezes. Por outro lado, a concorrente Pepsi teve apenas 2,15 bilhões de atos de compra.

Esse dado mostra o poder da Coca-Cola, apesar de sua falta de diversificação. Os refrigerantes da marca são os mais famosos e consumidos do mundo, apesar da nova onda saudável.

Por fim, Coca ou Pepsi, quem domina o mercado global? A resposta dessa pergunta, por enquanto, ainda é a Coca-Cola. No entanto, essa não é uma questão tão simples assim de resolver, já que a Pepsi vem inovando no mercado há anos, e está fazendo a concorrente correr atrás do prejuízo.

Bernard Annebicque/Sygma/Getty Images & Al Freni/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images

The great Cola Wars of the 1980s were a battle between Coca-Cola and PepsiCo for dominance. The disastrous introduction of “New Coke” in 1985 appeared to set Coca-Cola back. Yet by the end of the year, it was clear the “mistake” had actually helped Coca-Cola’s sales, allowing Coke to retain its spot as the largest-selling soda over Pepsi.

The two companies were both well-established by the time the Cola Wars broke out. Coca-Cola dated back to 1886 when a pharmacist in Columbus, Georgia invented the drink and began selling it to soda fountains. Six years later, the Coca-Cola Company was founded by an Atlanta pharmacist who’d secured the recipe (which contained small amounts of cocaine until 1929). Up in North Carolina, another pharmacist invented his own sugar drink in 1893. After seeing the success of Coca-Cola, he changed his soda’s name from “Brad’s Drink” to “Pepsi-Cola” in 1898 and founded the Pepsi-Cola Company in 1902.

WATCH: Full episodes of The Food That Built America online now.

Did you know? John Pemberton, the inventor of Coca-Cola, was addicted to morphine and used coca leaf as a 'safer alternative.' In the 1860s, '70s, and '80s, cocaine was widely endorsed as a cure-all. 

Over the next several decades, Coke emerged as the more popular soda. Starting in 1931, its famous Santa Claus ads marketed it as a refreshing drink you could enjoy year-round. Meanwhile, the Pepsi-Cola Company struggled financially and went through several reorganizations. (In 1965, it merged with Frito-Lay, Inc. to become PepsiCo, Inc.) But in 1975, Pepsi started a marketing campaign that gave Coke a run for its money: the “Pepsi Challenge,” a blind taste test showing more people preferred Pepsi over Coke.

READ MORE: Coca-Cola Sold In Glass Bottles For the First Time

“The Pepsi Challenge was not just a marketing gimmick—it was true,” says David Greising, author of I'd Like the World to Buy a Coke: The Life and Leadership of Roberto Goizueta, Coca-Cola's CEO. Internal studies at Coca-Cola “confirmed what the Pepsi Challenge was showing, which is that if you just look at the taste of the beverage, consumers preferred Pepsi,” which had a “sweeter, more syrupy flavor.”

Coca-Cola Company CEO Roberto Goizueta (left) and President Donald R. Keough toast each other with cans of "New Coke", which the company switched to after 99 years of the previous formula.

Bettmann Archive/Getty Images

Coke was still outselling Pepsi, but its market share was declining as Pepsi’s was rising. “Part of the problem with the success of the Pepsi Challenge was that Coke had fallen into a malaise as a brand,” he says. “People were in love with the notion of Coca-Cola, but they weren’t necessarily drinking Coca-Cola.” 

In response, Coca-Cola started doing a few things differently. In 1982, it released its first drink to share Coke’s name: Diet Coke. The next year, it released caffeine-free versions of Coke and Diet Coke. CEO Roberto Goizueta also got the company to use corn syrup instead of sugar to reduce the cost of production.

That switch to corn syrup opened the door for bigger changes to the original Coke’s recipe. On April 23, 1985, Coca-Cola announced it was changing the secret formula for the flagship drink. The “New Coke,” as it became known, would have a sweeter taste, more similar to the Pepsi that consumers favored in blind taste tests.

Did you know? Coca-Cola went to space aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger in 1985. It was able to make the journey in an experimental 'space can,' which astronauts tested out.

Yet instead of being thrilled, people were outraged that they couldn’t buy the original Coke anymore. And Pepsi happily capitalized on the backlash. In one Pepsi commercial, a young girl upset about New Coke takes shots at the company’s integrity—“First they said they were ‘The Real Thing,’ then they said they were ‘It’”—then tries her “first Pepsi” and declares she now knows why Coke changed. A voiceover declares that Pepsi is “The Choice of a New Generation.”

READ MORE: The New Coke Flop

Yet former Coke fans didn’t just abandon the drink for Pepsi like the girl in the commercial. Instead, they organized. Grassroots organizations like “Old Cola Drinkers of America” sprung up around the country to petition the company to change the recipe back. On July 11, 1985—less than three months after Coca-Cola announced the formula change—the company announced it would bring back the old formula under the brand name “Coca-Cola Classic.”

Meanwhile, the company continued to sell New Coke as regular “Coca-Cola.” Despite the negative public reaction, some people at the company still thought New Coke would eventually overtake Coca-Cola Classic, which the company could then retire.

Cans of New Coke and Coca-Cola Classic on display during a news conference in Atlanta, 1985.

Charles Kelly/AP Photo

“Obviously that never did happen, because of the way that New Coke’s image was tainted out of the gate,” Greising says. “They were never able to convince consumers of what was evident in the taste tests, which was that they preferred New Coke.” The company rebranded the new drink as “Coke II” in 1992, but it never took off and Coca-Cola discontinued it in 2002.

Overall, the New Coke debacle was a financial success for Coca-Cola. “People all of a sudden wanted to actually taste the beverage again, and not just kind of feel good about it,” Greising says. Coca-Cola continued to top Pepsi’s yearly sales going forward. In 2010, for the first time, both Coke and Diet Coke surpassed Pepsi’s sales, leading the Wall Street Journal to run a headline declaring Diet Coke the winner in the Cola Wars. But one could also argue the wars never ended.

“This is a blood feud between the two companies, the likes of which we have rarely seen in the history of business,” Greising says. “The high point of the Cola Wars in some ways was the 1980s, but the Cola Wars have continued and are still being fought today.”

Just look at the current marketing. In 2019, Coca-Cola brought back New Coke for a limited time.

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