Practicalmadness

I’m known for my love of novelty sodas. For my birthday in December, my girlfriend gave me the Jones Soda Holiday Pack, though it could be argued that the gift wasn’t even so much the sodas but the great time we all had being disgusted by them.

When my friend James came up from St. Louis for the Oscars party weekend before last, she brought a six pack of novelty sodas. There were some old-timey regional varieties like Moxie and Cheerwine the latter of which is a childhood favorite from its tenure in certain Alabama supermarkets. There’s Cricket Cola, a green tea-infused soda I drink whenever I pick up a sandwich from Potbelly. And there’s some crazy banana and espresso sodas to round out the pack. I’m like, score, dude.

Anytime there’s a crazy new beverage on the market, I’m the first one in line to try it. When Pepsi Blue was announced in 2002, I was at 7-Eleven every day (alas, seriously, I was) so I could see what blueberry-flavored cola was like. Same thing with Dr. Pepper Red Fusion, Vanilla Coke, Coke C2, dnL, Mountain Dew MDX — the list goes on. I even actively sought out the Budweiser energy drink B^E so I could sample it.

So when I just learned today that Coca-Cola is coming out with a new coffee-flavored cola, called Coca-Cola Blak, I got a little excited. It’s not that I believe a coffee-flavored Coke is going to be successful. In fact I assume that these sodas will fail, and feel that trying them is a way of getting in on something no one else knows about — sort of like an early ticket to a new exhibit in the museum of corporate marketing blunders.

And there’s something exciting about an idea so terrifically bad as Pepsi Blue or B^E. Budweiser by itself is bland, commodified Americana, so to see Anheuser-Busch put out a ginseng- and taurine-infused beer in a Red Bull can is like the branding equivalent to heroin chic. It’s sexy because it’s been ruined.

Everything’s Going To Be Indie Rock

In my Wikipedia research into the annals of failed beverages, I stumbled onto something I hadn’t previously ever heard of: OK Soda, a failed 1994 attempt by Coca-Cola to market an “alternative” soda to slackers, hipsters and other attractively edgy folks aged 18-35. To quote Wikipedia:

International market research done by The Coca-Cola Company in the late 1980s revealed that “Coke” was the second most recognizable word across all languages in the world. The first word was “OK.” [Coca-Cola Company marketing chief Sergio Zyman] decided to take advantage of this existing brand potential and created a soda with this name. He conceived of a counter-intuitive advertising campaign that intentionally targeted people who didn’t like advertising. He predicted that the soda would be a huge success, and promised Goizueta that the soda would take at least 4% of the US beverage market.

OK (which is also pig latin for Coke — “oke-cay”) was test-marketed in about twelve cities (including Austin, Boston, Portland and Seattle) for about seven months before it became apparent that the nation was simply not ready to countenance an alternative soda marketed by a massive corporation, unless of course the soda were tasty, which by all accounts it was not.

The thing that struck me about OK was that the marketing was seriously ahead of its time. The cans (one of which is pictured at right) featured art by Daniel Clowes and Charles Burns and exactly the sort of bold graphic design that’s in style right now. The ad campaign (slogan: “Everything is going to be OK”) included an 800-number that connected to a voicemail box, and people could leave messages with the understanding that they might be included in an OK Soda commercial — which strikes me as a slightly creepier version of the photos on the Jones Soda bottles, or like Post Secret adapted to audio and made to service a brand.

One such message that was included in an ad:

Ah, this is Pam H. from Newton, Massachusetts, and I resent you saying that everything is going to be O.K. You don’t know anything about my life. You don’t know what I’ve been through in the last month. I really resent it. I’m tired of you people trying to tell me things that you don’t have any idea about. I resent it. ((Click!))

Would this product have been successful today? Well, maybe — the marketing would generate some buzz, but nothing would change the two facts that did it in in ‘94: nobody wants the Coca-Cola Company to pander to their slacker-ness, and nobody wants a soda that isn’t tasty. (Except me, but I hope it’s been well-established in these pages that I am crazy.)