Number Fever: How Pepsi Nearly Went Pop (Classic)
Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford
Pushkin Industries
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 1 August 2025
⏱️ 39 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Pepsi twice ended up in court after promotions went disastrously wrong. Other big companies have fallen into the same trap - promising customers rewards so generous that to fulfil the promise might mean corporate bankruptcy.
Businesses and customers alike are sometimes blinded by the big numbers in such PR stunts - but it's usually the customers, not the businesses, who end up losing out.
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| 0:00.0 | This is an IHeart podcast. |
| 0:04.2 | Run a business and not thinking about podcasting. |
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| 0:15.7 | Learn how podcasting can help your business. |
| 0:17.6 | Call 844-844-I-Hart. |
| 0:19.6 | Over the years that I've been doing revisionist history, |
| 0:22.2 | I've done a number of episodes about music, |
| 0:24.8 | and there's some of my favorites. |
| 0:26.0 | But there is almost nothing that brings me more joy |
| 0:28.7 | than sitting down with a musician. |
| 0:30.5 | And just the emotion that's in that song, |
| 0:32.4 | it's just powerful. |
| 0:37.4 | So this summer, I felt Wade Reprise four musical episodes from the archives. |
| 0:42.5 | Come join us for a walk down revisionist history, memory lane. |
| 0:46.6 | Listen to revisionist history wherever you get your podcasts. |
| 0:56.6 | Pushkin Hello, Tim here. |
| 1:03.6 | The Cautionary Tales team is taking a well-earned summer vacation. |
| 1:07.6 | Here is another classic episode from the archives, a tale about Pepsi's disastrous bottlecat |
| 1:14.2 | promotion, and a man who bought over a thousand chocolate puddings. Enjoy. In a tin roof chack, in a slum of Manila, the capital of the Philippines, |
| 1:33.2 | Victoria Angelo lived with her husband Juanito and their five children. |
... |
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