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Username: Yvettep
Post Number: 3051
Registered: 01-2005
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Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, July 07, 2008 - 03:22 pm: | 
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The 1940s were a hot time in the nation's cola wars.
Coca-Cola was selling six ounces of its drink for 5 cents, a deal Pepsi tried to undercut by offering twice the beverage for the same amount. In a bid to increase market share, Pepsi CEO Walter Mack decided to reach out to a neglected consumer group — African-Americans.
Mack designed an ad campaign featuring black families and students, and cobbled together an all-black marketing team. From the company's headquarters in Queens, N.Y., Mack sent the salesmen into the Jim Crow South. They rode segregated buses and trains and slept in segregated hotels. They helped to build an enduring brand, smashing the color barrier as they went.
Now their experiences are chronicled in a new book, Stephanie Capparell's The Real Pepsi Challenge, and in an exhibit at the Queens Museum of Art. The first team of salespeople included Allen McKellar, now of St. Louis.
McKellar was finishing his college degree in South Carolina when the school president called him in and asked him to take part in an essay contest sponsored by Pepsi. "I had to write an essay on how America youth faces its future," McKellar says.
As one of 27 finalists, he was called to Pepsi headquarters and was then hired as one of two black members of the first sales team. "I didn't know at the time that we were the first blacks to enter the corporate world," McKellar says. "We learned that when we got out into the marketplace"...
Listen: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=92278334&ft=1&f=1015 |
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