Cafe coincidence

Coca-Cola won't launch Blak anytime soon, and Pepsi claims to be the coffee cola pioneer.

Cola watchers have always quipped that if Coca-Cola didn't exist, Pepsi would go out of business (... stricken by boredom). Indeed, if Pepsi has an enduring contribution to marketing, it is the art of offering we're-comin'-after-ya competition.

So when it launches a cola variant all of a sudden, it is assumed to be another move in its quest to overthrow Coca-Cola as the fizzy-drinks leader.

Accordingly, Pepsi CafeChino is seen as a drink to pre-empt Coca-Cola's own coffee cola, Blak, announced recently as part of Atlanta's strategy to get back to the share-of-throat game with full attention (operational issues having been dealt with).

If Blak's blended fizz makes headway in strategic markets, it could signal a return to peak marketing form for a company that has recently seen its rival Pepsi overtake it on market capitalisation.

But guess what: Coca-Cola has no plans of launching Blak in India anytime soon, France and the US being the only two markets where it is available. Is India on the sub-brand's launch map? "We can't comment on this right now," is all Coca-Cola India's spokesperson is willing to say.

Pepsi, meanwhile, flatly denies the notion that CafeChino is here to upstage Blak. The idea is simply to make the most of the coffee culture that has taken hold of the youth in India over the past few years.

"You have to understand that if we launched CafeChino in January, then we started the work on it around July," says Vipul Prakash, executive vice-president marketing, PepsiCo India, "when there was no such news from our competition."

It is a mere coincidence, he adds. But he can't deny that Coca-Cola's entry would give the new coffee cola segment what it needs: the effervescence of competition.