Pepsi’s Raffle Turned into a Big Fail Story

In the early 90s, the majority of the carbonated beverage market in the Philippines was In the hands of Coca-Cola An “ingenious” campaign that will help increase Pepsi sales due to developed.

In 1992, Pepsi, unaware of what would happen to him, “Number Fever” He implemented a campaign called. In fact, its sole purpose was to take away its rival’s market share and strengthen its hand in the competition, but things did not go as expected…

“You can get rich today!” The campaign announced with the slogan attracted the attention of all Filipinos.

This campaign is actually It was some kind of raffle.. In this campaign, where prizes starting from 100 pesos would be distributed, one of the numbers printed under the Pepsi caps would be the winning number and the person holding it would win the grand prize.

The grand prize was 1 million pesos, the equivalent of 23 years’ salary of a Filipino!

that period 1 million pesos is about $40,000 was doing. The smallest reward, 100 pesos, was equivalent to 1 day’s salary of a worker.

Size of prizes Considering this, it should not be difficult to guess how much attention this campaign attracted from Filipinos.

This campaign was so popular that Filipinos started collecting these caps from garbage in addition to buying Pepsi.

Even those who preferred Coca-Cola started drinking Pepsi. Those who collect Pepsi caps to win the grand prize were mostly from the poor and hoped with high hopes that the lucky number would be under one of the covers they had accumulated.

When the draw day came, the lucky number was announced: 349!

Pepsi made a huge mistake and printed exactly 800,000 units of the number that was supposed to be 1!

When the winning number was announced, screams of joy rose from many homes, but when the truth of the incident was revealed, this joy was replaced by to great anger he would leave…

One computer error The anger of the crowd grew like an avalanche as Pepsi stated that this situation occurred because of the reason that it was not possible to pay 1,000,000 pesos to 800,000 people.

Pepsi to the victims 500 pesos Even though he offered to pay, some of those who had cover number 349 got even more angry about this situation.

Thereupon, the owners of cover number 349 started to protest.

The dose of actions during the protests gradually increased. So that among themselves “349 coalition” Protesters, who even formed an organization they called ‘The Protesters’, attacked Pepsi trucks and issued death threats to Pepsi executives.

Attackers set fire to a Pepsi warehouse, killing three employees inside, and throwing a Molotov cocktail at a truck, killing a mother and her child. he lost his life…

Even though the 349 incident was taken to court, a controversial result emerged.

As a result of the incident being brought to court by approximately 22,000 people, Pepsi faced some penalties and some plaintiffs were sued. compensation had to pay.

But the Supreme Court of the Philippines ruled that Pepsi could not exceed the amount written on the caps. not responsible decided.

After this incident, in the Philippines “349ing” A term like this started to be used. If it means “to be deceived”…