This Pepsi Campaign turned out to be a disaster

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September 21, 2024

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In 1992, Pepsi launched a campaign in the Philippines that it hoped would boost sales and excite consumers about its brand.

What actually happened was one of the biggest marketing disasters in history, resulting in a tragedy that left 5 people dead.

Source: Dailymail.co.uk

Pepsi's campaign, called “Number Fever”, seemed simple. Bottle caps would feature numbers and each evening, winning numbers would be announced on local news.

The lucky winners could claim prizes, including a grand prize of 1 million pesos.

Pepsi’s promise was enticing: drink Pepsi, find a winning cap and you could become a millionaire.

Unfortunately, a computer glitch led to a catastrophic error.

Instead of 2 two bottle caps being printed with the winning number-349 over 800,000 caps carried the number.

Suddenly, Pepsi had hundreds of thousands of "winners" and the cost to honour their promise would have been $32 billion.

Naturally, Pepsi was not prepared for this.

After the contest, there was a lot of confusion. Many people believed they had won and went to Pepsi bottling plants to claim their million pesos.

However, the company only offered 500 pesos for each "winning" cap, which upset a lot of people. This led to protests across the country, and unfortunately, in the midst of the chaos, five people lost their lives due to violence.

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