1979
How Richard Branson tried to make private-label soda into something exciting
Five kinds of marketing stunts Virgin tried when selling Virgin Cola
- Blind taste tests that favored Virgin Cola. Taste tests are not uncommon gimmicks when it comes to cola, and Virgin invested in a lot of taste tests as it tried to get into the market. One third-party one, done by The Observer in 1994, ranked the drink above Coke, and gave the drink credit for being “not too sweet.”
- A top-heavy bottle modeled after Pamela Anderson. During a dinner with his wife and Pamela Anderson, the three discussed the idea of producing a plastic soda bottle that was curved at the top, nicknamed the “Pammy.” The next day, Anderson gave Branson the right to use her name for the idea for free, which created lots of press, both good and bad.
- Richard Branson driving through 3 tons of Coke products in Times Square, using a tank. The gimmick, as part of Virgin Cola’s brand introduction to the U.S., is still considered Virgin’s wildest stunt ever. (He also shot at a giant Coke sign.) “It was before 9/11 so you could get away with things that would be unwise to try today,” Branson told Inc. of the unusual stunt.
- A U.S. ad campaign to get the gay marriage conversation going. One 1998 U.S. ad featured two men getting married on a beach, an ad destined to get people talking, as it was also the first ad to feature a same-sex kiss. The same campaign, reports Ad Age, was said to have featured Joey Buttafucco saying, “I’m famous because some girl decided to shoot my wife in the head.” (That ad, probably for the best, appears not to have run.)
- A UK ad campaign that sold Virgin Cola’s headquarters as the “home of hedonism.” Just a few years before Tank Girl creator Jamie Hewlitt’s distinctive visual style went mainstream as a part of the band Gorillaz, he designed characters for a series of ads for Virgin Cola that hinted at much the same level of cheekiness Virgin’s own brand did.
“At present the soft drinks industry in the U.S. is worth $50 billion (with cola accounting for just under half this figure), if we secure a 1 percent share of this huge soft drinks market we have already sold 100 million cases of Virgin Cola—now that can’t be bad.”
So why aren’t we drinking Virgin Cola?
A less optimistic view of the firm’s business prospects comes from the U.K. marketing magazine Campaign, which notes that the Virgin Cola brand’s reach wasn’t what it could be in the UK, though it was careful never to imply sabotage, rather simply suggesting that Virgin’s brand was a “little more than an irritant” with a distribution reach of around 30 percent.Initially Coca-Cola head office didn’t take Virgin Cola seriously as a threat so we had no opposition from them. What I didn’t know was that based in Atlanta, in Coke’s head office, was an English lady working in a senior position for Coca-Cola. She warned the management there that Virgin had the power and the brand to rock Coke on a worldwide basis and she persuaded her directors to let her set up a SWAT team in England to try and stamp us out. Within days she and her team had moved to England. Retailers were offered unbeatable terms from Coke to take their cola over ours. Smaller retailers were threatened with removal of Coca-Cola fridges. The campaign from Coca-Cola was even more potent than the dirty tricks campaign from British Airways to stamp out Virgin Atlantic but Virgin Cola survived. Ironically this very same lady now holds a senior position at Virgin’s main clearing bank.