The Shuttle

It bewilders me how marketing works today. I mean you've never seen the end of that thing! Never seen it all, never heard it all and if at one point you think there's nothing they can pull on you, you better watch your back.

I was walking the shop the other evening, looking for the usuals, among which was a bottle Pepsi Twist. (You know, that liquid that runs through my veins, slowly but surely replacing blood. Yeah, that.) I end up at the Pepsi shelf and I see there's a promotion running. Now, for those of you who don't buy fizzy drinks, you should know that in Romania there's a classic promotion where they give 2.5 liters at the (debatable) price of two. But Pepsi got smarter this summer, bundling two bottles of 2 liters at about 75% of the price. I like to call a shuttle package.

So I'm at the shelf see this promotion's running. You can tell by the lovely couples of bottles just staring at you: "Pick us, we're cheaper!" But it was just Tuesday, and I don't pick shuttles on Tuesday… because I drink them. (I'm trying to come to peace with caffeine by not drinking it. No, it doesn't work quite well.) So I'm carefully looking for a lone bottle. Carefully… Looking… Hey, these guys are robbing me! It looks like a promotion has turned into a menace… How do you like that!?

And that just in after this summer's Pepsi campaigns actually grounded the Twist product. Some of the shopkeepers actually told me: "Pepsi told us to keep Twist out of the fridge." What!? Twist Light got a chance in the cooler! I guess Pepsi just went "What the hell, Twist sells anyway, let's help the other fellows…" But Light!? Who even invented Light? What for? It doesn't have any sugar, hello!

Brands with too much equity have the weird tendency to bash around, don't you think? Anyway, I still like Pepsi Twist—It's because of that drop of lemon ju… salt.