In the early 1990s, most of the carbonated drinks market in the Philippines was carbonated drinks Owned by Coca Cola An “ingenious” campaign that will help increase Pepsi sales thanks to developed.

In 1992, Pepsi, unaware of what would happen to him, decided “Number fever” He ran a campaign called. In fact, the sole purpose was to take away the rival’s market share and strengthen its position in the competition, but things did not go as expected…

“You can get rich today!” The campaign announced with the slogan caught the attention of all Filipinos.

This campaign is actually It was like a lottery.. In this campaign, where prizes starting at 100 pesos would be distributed, one of the numbers printed under the Pepsi caps would be the winning number and the person holding it would win the grand prize.

The top prize was 1 million pesos, the equivalent of a Filipino’s 23 year salary!

that period 1 million pesos is approximately $40,000 was doing. The smallest reward, 100 pesos, was equivalent to 1 day’s salary for a worker.

Size of prizes Considering this, it should not be difficult to guess how much attention this campaign attracted from the Filipinos.

This campaign was so popular that in addition to buying Pepsi, Filipinos also started collecting these caps from the trash.

Even those who preferred Coca-Cola started drinking Pepsi. Those who collect Pepsi hats to win the grand prize mostly came from the poor and hoped with high hopes that the lucky number would be under one of the blankets they had collected.

When the draw day arrived, the lucky number was announced: 349!

Pepsi made a big mistake and printed exactly 800,000 units of the number that should have been 1!

When the winning song was announced, there was a shout of joy from many homes, but when the truth about the incident came to light, this joy was replaced by to great anger he would leave…

A computer error The crowd’s anger grew like an avalanche when Pepsi stated that this situation occurred because it was not possible to pay 1,000,000 pesos to 800,000 people.

Pepsi to the victims 500 pesos Although he offered to pay, some of those who had cover number 349 became even angrier about this situation.

The owners of cover number 349 then began to protest.

The dose of actions during the protests gradually increased. So that between each other “349 coalition” Protesters, who even formed an organization they called “The Protesters,” attacked Pepsi trucks and issued death threats to Pepsi executives.

Attackers set fire to a Pepsi warehouse, killing three employees inside, and threw a Molotov cocktail at a truck, killing a mother and her child. he lost his life…

Although the 349 incident was brought to trial, a controversial outcome emerged.

As a result of the incident being brought to court by approximately 22,000 people, Pepsi faced some penalties and some plaintiffs were taken to court. a compensation had to pay.

But the Supreme Court of the Philippines ruled that Pepsi could not exceed the amount stated on the caps. not responsible decided.

After this incident in the Philippines “349ing” A term like this began to be used. If it means “being deceived”…