Massive buying of Pepsi bottles puts Hartwall in a spin

Flourishing online market for 150cl campaign bottles of cola drink, unopened but without labels

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By Riku Jokinen and Santtu Parkkonen
     
      "It doesn't matter how you slice it, this way I get a computer about 50% cheaper", says data processing student Risto Malin from Loppi, a small community some 75 kilometres north-west of Helsinki.
      To be perfectly honest, at first glance what Malin is doing doesn't seem to make a whole lot of sense. The man is lugging hundreds (yes, hundreds) of large bottles of Pepsi Max out of the supermarket on a trolley and then selling them on via the Internet at half the price he paid for them.
      And there is no shortage of buyers. After a few online ads, he shifted 1,000 large (150cl) bottles of the cola drink in a day. Customers have come from as far afield as Vantaa and Helsinki.
     
Hartwall are the Pepsi bottlers in Finland. At the beginning of November, the company launched a year-end marketing campaign for the drink that has caused a buying spree and a booming secondary market.
      Unopened one and a half litre bottles of Pepsi Max are being sold over the Net for around EUR 0.70 to EUR 0.80. They are identical to the shop product, except that they do not have the labels, which have been soaked or steamed off. In the stores, a similar bottle would cost between EUR 1.20 and EUR 1.50 when sold at a discount, or possibly even less as part of a four-pack.
      The cola-trading netizens have gone to buy their bottles from the retailers with vans. A normal car would not suffice. In some supermarkets in the Greater Helsinki area, the demand has been so huge that Pepsi Max bottles have temporarily run out.
     
The reason for the hoarding and the resale market is that marketing campaign and competition referred to above. Hartwall offered as its main prize a Sony Vaio notebook computer worth EUR 2,000.
      Campaign bottles and cups of Pepsi Max come with a code written into the label, which can be exchanged for points on an online bourse. One bottle is worth one point. Anyone collecting a thousand points can claim a notebook computer, and for instance 300 points will get you a 20Gb Sony MP3 player.
      The Internet trade is not in individual bottles, but the minimum purchase could for instance be set at 50 bottles, or seventy-five litres. Some cola-traders have the added sales edge of offering home delivery.
      Other people are in the market to buy labels. These are valued at 50-70 cents each.
     
The Pepsi feeding frenzy apparently started from the MuroBBS message board on the Muropaketti net portal, which is frequented by a large number of computer enthusiasts. Things have spilled out from there, and you can now find at least one dedicated discussion forum for Pepsi sales and purchases, and a personal blog relating to the points-collecting competition.
      The phenomenon is by no means limited to the Helsinki area, either - ad hoc cola-dealerships have sprung up across the country.
      "This promotion has surprised us in no uncertain terms. We had no idea beforehand that individuals would be buying such large consignments in this way", admits Product Manager Janne Kujala from Hartwall.
      Some stores have had to order in larger deliveries of the drink.
      "It hasn't got totally crazy yet, but we have had phone enquiries from some students and even from the university. If someone has announced that they will be coming in tomorrow to collect a load, then our buyer has made sure that there is a good supply in the stockroom", reports Marjo Levonen, the store manager at the K-Citymarket in Helsinki's Ruoholahti district.
     
At least for the time being, Hartwall does not plan to intervene in the phenomenon that its advertising campaign has spawned.
      "One problem is that if there are no labels on the packaging, we can no longer know what it is they are selling, and Hartwall can no longer take responsibility for it", says Janne Kujala.
      This is actually not the first hurdle that the drinks manufacturer has faced as a result of the campaign: they were also hit by hackers who sought to collect points by illict means. As a result, the rules of the competition had to be hastily amended after the campaign started.
      Kujala reports that some have already managed to collect the necessary points to claim the Sony laptop, in less than two weeks. However, no machines have been handed over as yet. When the campaign was drawn up, there was no thought that the main prize would go to individual cola-drinkers.
      "For one person to amass this sort of amount is pretty unlikely. What we had had in mind was something more like school classes, sports teams, or other groups, for whom a common computer would be a valuable asset", says Kujala.
     
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 17.11.2005


Links:
  Muropaketti MuroBBS (in Finnish)
  Pepsi Finland (in Finnish, click on the picture at left for the competition)
  A dedicated Pepsi Max sales message board (in Finnish)
  A Pepsi Competition blog (in Finnish. Already by Monday 14th November, the writer was approaching the magic 1,000 labels)

RIKU JOKINEN AND SANTTU PARKKONEN / Helsingin Sanomat
riku.jokinen@hs.fi, santtu.parkkonen@hs.fi