Ep 35: Black Folk, SAVED Pepsi!

Hard Drugs & Hard Facts... A pharmacist of the 1800s like many found innovative ways to push his medical product - This time through the foods of the elite.... but, french wine had never been better for intellectuals... MINSTREL SHOWS were campaign themes but in 1940 PEPSI began demographic specific marketing for underserved markets... BLACK PEOPLE ... NICHE

B Daht explains more about this marketing fact... black excellence that saved a company’s crash.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
On today's episode. If I didn't know, maybe you didn't either.
Did you know that cocaine was in coca cola until
black folks started drinking? And then black folks turned around
and saved PEPSI I didn't know. Maybe you didn't. I
didn't know. Maybe you didn't didn't know. I didn't know.
Maybe you didn't. I didn't know. I didn't know. I didn't.

(00:22):
John Pemberton a pharmacists in Atlanta. He invented coke, but
that was actually his second drink. His first invention was
in eighteen eighty four, called French wine coca. It was
really just a copycat of a French wine that had
cocaine in it. In eighteen eighty five, right when the
product was about to start poppington Atlanta outlawed alcohol sales,

(00:43):
So that's when Pemberton went to work on a different
drink that had the same medicinal effects, introducing coca cola.
In eighteen eighty six. They started calling coca cola the
intellectual beverage among well off whites. In eighteen ninety one,
it was revealed that cocaine was in coca cola, So
that's when the drinks start getting marketed as refreshing versus medicinal.

(01:07):
Then they started the glass bottles in eighteen ninety nine,
and that changed the game because now anybody can get
Coca Cola if you got a nickel, black or white.
And then white folk did not want black folk drinking
that good Coca Cola. That was the intellectual beverage. So
because Coca Cola had cocaine in it, white newspaper started
reporting Negro cocaine fiends were raping white women and the

(01:29):
police were powerless to stop him. By three, they took
the cocaine out and added more sugar and caffeine. I
didn't know none of this. Also didn't realize that Pepsi
in nineteen forty was in the dirt trying to keep
up with Coca Cola. See, Coca Cola had the six
ounds bottles for a nickel. Pepsi went to the twelve
ounce bottles for the nickel, but that didn't help him.
Jeff made the drink look cheap. But then Pepsi got smart.

(01:52):
PEPSI said, you know what, Cocacola, don't go over there
to the hood. We should. PEPSI put together a negro
markets department, y'all. In the nineteen forties and fifties to
increased sales to blacks, and it worked like hell. The
president of Pepsi at the time was Walter mac He
put together a team of black marketers to promote sales

(02:13):
in black communities. Only, instead of making black folk look
goofy in the butt of jokes, Pepsi promoted a different
image of black folk in his advertising. Had Duke Ellington
on that joint. By the time the fifties was over,
Pepsi sales increased dramatically. That was out selling coke in
the black community by marginal three to one, and the
drink not the narcotic, because they were probably moving that narcotic.

(02:35):
The technique of selling to just black folks was so
successful that it would come to be known as niche
advertising as an approach for carving out a distinct place
in the markets. It still used that today black folk, WHOA,
he's so powerful. Now take that the school, work or
church with you, because I didn't know. Maybe you didn't either.

(02:57):
You welcome Pepsi