When Amy said the other day that she wanted a Jack-and-Coke, I rummaged around in the back of the fridge until I found the Coke bottle above, which I had bought around Christmas. I think it’s supposed to resemble a tree ornament, but the first thing it brought to mind for me was The Apprentice.
Remember Donald Trump’s show? Well, way back in Season Five, I remember he had a competition for Pepsi, in which each of his two teams had to design a bottle and marketing campaign for Pepsi Edge.
The winning team, Apex, came up with something that I still think is really cool, five years later — a bottle with a hole in the middle.
If you look closely, you’ll see that you could stick a pencil right through the D in that bottle, something they were quite proud of on the show. There must have been serious production problems, though, because as far as I know, it only made it to market in a “limited edition.”
According to the show synopsis on NBC.com, the Pepsi folks were as impressed as I was:
They showed off the bottle shaped like the word “Edge” and emphasized the hole in the letter D. They talked about both the cool factor of the hole and its practical use for holding a variety of marketing materials …. The group had praise for Apex’s design. They called it “cool” and closer to the brand image of Pepsi. David brought both teams back in and got Trump on speakerphone. David said that the Apex design was innovative, contemporary and exciting.
The opposing team was roundly thumped. What had been there design?
Uh, it was based on a globe, and featured wrap-around graphics. Sort of exactly like the Coke bottle above. But nobody at either Pepsi or Trump Headquarters was impressed:
The marketing folks had some tough criticism for Mosaic. They called the Mosaic bottle “ugly” and described it as two “blobs.” …. While the Mosaic pitch was consistent in its message, the team’s bottle design of globes wasn’t very exciting. He also said the maps on the bottle made it impossible to tell what was inside.
Later, in the boardroom, one of Trump’s assistants also commented that the design of the round bottle eliminated any possibility of using a cupholder. The team lost, and its manager was “fired.”
Now, five years later, almost the exact same design (except Christmassy, and for Coke) was flying off the shelves at Wal-Mart.
Now, I do think the evocation of a glass ball ornament makes the Coke bottle slightly better than the Pepsi globe attempted on The Apprentice. But much of the criticism leveled at the team, apparently, just didn’t enter into Coke’s calculus. It still doesn’t fit into a cup holder, for example. And I’ve never understood why “seeing what’s inside” was so important. Do these marketers think that aluminum cans are transparent? Or milk cartons?
At any rate, Amy liked her Jack-and-Coke and she didn’t really care what the bottle looked like.
Grant Hamilton
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