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Coca-Cola Co offered to buy Rajesh Yadav a refrigerator for his New Delhi
store if he would sell only the company’s drinks.
He kept his part of the bargain and lines of coke and diet coke cans
glisten behind the glass screens of the fridge. A red and white banner with
Bollywood film star Aishwarya Rai chugging a bottle of the cola, adorns his
store front. Yet Yadav doesn’t mention his partner when he describes his
shop.
“I sell Pepsi and cigarettes”, said Yadav in Hindi elongating the first
syllable to pronounce the word “pay-psee”.
Catch-all term
“Pepsi got here sooner, and got to India just as it was starting to engage
with the west, and with western products”, said Lalita Desia, a linguist at
Kolkata’s jadavpur university who studies how English words enter Indian
languages. “And with no real international competition, ‘Pepsi’ became
this catch-all for anything that was bottled, fizzy and from abroad”.
In much of the Hindi-speaking belt of north India, home to three of the five
most populous states, children begging at street corners will point to
bottled juices inside cars and pled for “Pepsi”. Mahipal Singh, a 42 year
old truck driver who flies a route between Delhi and Bihar terms his rest
stops “Pepsi-wepsi” breaks, regardless of what he is drinking.
Evangelical task
“Cola in India is still an evangelical task, because it’s not a lifestyle habit
yet”, said Bijoor.
India’s economy expanded 8.8% in the 3 months through June the fastest
place in 2 ½ years. Growth in the US the biggest market for both Coke-
Cola and Pepsi Co, slowed to 1.6%.
Sales Growth
Still, sales by volume in India surged 31% in 2009, Coca-Cola CEO, Muhtar
Kent said in Feb without providing specific numbers. Indian sales of Coca-
Cola, Diet Coke and Coke Zero grew 25% according to the company’s
annual report. Coca-Cola last year turned a profit in India for the first time
since re-entering the country in 1993 after a 16 year absence, according
to Kamelsh Sharma, a New Delhi – based Spokesman.
While Coca-Cola used the cola brand to drive the market share in other
countries, the company’s top 3 products in India by sales volume are
Kinley bottled water, Thumps-Up cola and Sprite, according Euromoniter.
Thumps-Up, a Lemon during called Limca and an orange drink called Gold
Spot were acquired by Coca-Cola in 1993.
Coke’s Strategy
That’s Coca-Cola’s strategy, said Atul Singh the company’s president for
India and South-West Asia.
“We want every part of our portfolio to grow so that any consumer, at any
occasion, anywhere in India makes a choice to drink a Coca-Cola product”,
he said. He said he was not aware that Hindi-speaking consumers often
use ‘Pepsi’ as a generic term for colas.
Big Positive
“The Pepsi brand becoming the default name for the cola category is
certainly a big positive”, Sandep Arora a company’s spokesman, said by
E-mail. “It can also be double-edged sword if the marketer is not able to
differentiate the brnad from the rest of the category.”
“It was definitely a good idea”, said Bhushi, the anthropologist. “If pepsi
means Cola then emphasizing that a ‘thanda’ means Coke is perhaps the
best way to gain control of the vocabulary.”