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'Thanda matlab' Coca-Cola owes some of its success to the very verve of Pepsi as an archrival. The cola market is the archetypal example of the power of competition---to the extent that some theorists see this as the very raison d'etre of the fizz business to begin with. PepsiCo executives have always admitted that they wouldn't know what to do if Coca-Cola were to vanish. Though Coke execs never return the compliment, they'd probably get equally depressed without Pepsi. India, anyhow, has been a peculiar cola case, with Pepsi being the first entrant for all practical purposes of the youth market, and Coca-Cola the challenger. Pepsi, in fact, has been generic to 'cola' all through the 1990s, and Coca-Cola's current advertising strategy---of claiming 'Thanda' as a colloquial generic description---is an obvious attempt to reclaim something the world's original cola brand feels entitled to. It's the 'real thing', after all, isn't it? That Coca-Cola's message is getting through is, in itself, a big tribute to its 'Thanda' campaign. Yes, the one featuring Aamir Khan, the Gurkha spot for which has been found to be India's second most popular ad. And it's not just on broad strategy that Coke seems so intensely motivated by its rivalry with Pepsi. The ad shows Khan-as-Gurkha-hiking-guide very clear about demanding choice in matters of beverage consumption... and this version of 'choice' echoes the sound of Pepsi's domestic launch in the late 1980s (some five years before Coke made it in). And then, there's the play on what's fake and what's genuine... the 'lion', the 'Taj Mahal' (pronounced H-less, in Nepalese, to deliver a pun). The wilder part of this irreverence is reminiscent of Pepsi's earlier bouts of advertising wit. Pepsi, evidently, has done Coca-Cola a lot of good. Pepsi's current campaign, though, is busy zeroing in on 'pyaas' ('thirst'). Will it find a discernible echo in Coke's advertising? Or should it be the other way round?
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