Number Fever: How Pepsi Nearly Went Pop
Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford
Pushkin Industries
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 9 April 2021
⏱️ 35 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.
Read more about Tim's work at http://timharford.com/
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Pushkin. |
| 0:20.9 | In a tin roofed shack, in a slum of Manila, the capital of the Philippines, Victoria |
| 0:26.9 | Angelo lived with her husband, Juanito, and their five children. |
| 0:31.9 | Juanito was a rickshaw driver. |
| 0:34.2 | He made around $4 a day. |
| 0:36.6 | Life was a daily grind. |
| 0:38.6 | Hard work alone offered no route out of poverty. |
| 0:42.0 | So when the Pepsi Cola Company started a new promotion in 1992, Victoria took notice. |
| 0:50.4 | Number fever seemed easy to understand. |
| 0:53.8 | Buy a bottle of Pepsi and under the bottle cap you'd see printed a three-digit number and |
| 1:00.0 | cash prize amount. |
| 1:03.2 | Every night, on the channel 2 TV news program, Pepsi would announce a winning number. |
| 1:09.4 | If you had a bottle cap with that number, you'd win the amount shown. |
| 1:15.0 | The prizes went up to a million pesos, some $40,000. |
| 1:19.8 | It would take Juanito 30 years to earn that. |
| 1:23.7 | Victoria started buying Pepsi. |
| 1:26.8 | Every night she watched channel 2 for the announcement of the winning number and she checked her growing |
| 1:32.2 | collection of bottle caps. |
| 1:36.0 | And every night, she was disappointed. |
| 1:39.9 | Until one night, the television announced the number 3, 4, 9. |
| 1:46.3 | Hold on, Victoria was sure she had a bottle cap marked 3, 4, 9. |
| 1:51.3 | Here it is. |
... |
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