The Pepsi Challenge
Stephanie Capparell (COM’77) charts the personal challenges
of corporate America’s first black sales team in her new book
By Vicky Waltz
In 1940, the Pepsi-Cola Company took a bold step: it hired a black administrator and then two black interns, initiating a campaign to increase sales in black communities. Suspended by the war, the effort was revived and strengthened beginning in 1947 with the creation of a specialized African-American sales team.
That may not seem remarkable in the decade that saw the integration of Major League Baseball.
But “integrating business was a far more sweeping — and for some, threatening — proposition,” writes Stephanie Capparell in The Real Pepsi Challenge: The Inspirational Story of Breaking the Color Barrier in American Business (Free Press).
Even advertising in black newspapers drew wrath. “You say now, what could possibly be the problem here?” Capparell (COM’77) says. “But race was a political issue, and every American took a side.”
A distant number two to Coca-Cola, Pepsi was trying harder. Its best sales were already among the less affluent, since five cents bought twelve ounces of Pepsi against six ounces of Coke. And while contributions to African-American colleges by Coke president Robert Woodruff were considered segregationist, Pepsi president Walter Mack was respected for having hired the company’s first African-American workers, forcing unions to accept them, and awarding scholarships and internships to young blacks.
The team never doubted that Mack’s eye was on the large African-American market, but they knew, too, that they were breaking barriers and modeling success. Dressed in suits and ties, they traveled the country, visiting bottlers and outlets, as other salesmen did, but also churches, lodges, colleges, conventions, and prominent community members: preachers, doctors, undertakers, numbers men.
Travel was difficult and humiliating in both the Jim Crow South and the North, where a man arriving at a hotel might find the reservation made by phone had somehow been lost and no rooms were available. Although the Supreme Court had banned segregation in inter-state transportation, not all companies com-plied, and even when they were seated, the salesmen could be badly treated. Despite generous expense ac-counts, they often drove, ate in simple black-owned restaurants, and stayed in private homes.
Advertising’s Changing Face
"...race was a political issue, and every American took a side." -Stephanie Capparell
Like a few other national companies, Pepsi created targeted ads, with black families and college groups as idealized (and as segregated) as their white counterparts. More creative was Pepsi’s Leaders in Their Fields series, profiling neither athletes nor jazz musicians, but business, political, and intellectual leaders, starting with 1950 Nobel Peace Prize winner Ralph Bunche. Beyond price and taste, the campaign was selling brand loyalty, Capparell writes, and quotes one: ‘Pepsi-Cola and I were buddies.’”
But organizations are incapable of human feelings. In 1950, Pepsi replaced Mack with a new president, who instituted regional organization, eliminating niche marketing and reassigning team members individually. Missing the mutual support and mission, and sometimes feeling shut out by their new colleagues, seven left over the next two years. Of the five remaining, one eventually became vice president for special markets, the first black American vice president of a large international company.
Over a half century later, brand loyalty lingers. “The book’s only been out a month,” Capparell says, “and I’ve heard from several black readers who say, ‘You know, we’ve always been Pepsi drinkers and I never knew why.’ One man said, ‘My mother must’ve met some of those guys. Now I don’t even like cola, and yet I order Pepsi.’”