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Editor’s note: Trevor Williams is traveling in Quebec for research on a special report looking at the province’s economic and trade ties with Georgia in advance of the SEUS/Canadian Provinces Alliance Conference and its return to Savannah 15 years after its founding. This is the first of his planned daily blog posts. The reporting trip is sponsored by the Consulate General of Canada in Atlanta.
I hail from Columbus, Ga. — which some call the “real home of Coca-Cola” — and live in Atlanta, where it was commercialized. So, I’m naturally predisposed to assume Coke’s preeminence everywhere in the world. In my mind, the outcome of the cola wars is long settled, as if there were no other combatants on the battlefield. I live off Coke Zero while on the road.
But there are some places where the big red brand’s dominance is not a fait accompli, and indeed, where it occupies the role of not-so-scrappy underdog.
Quebec, apparently, is one of those places. Maybe they’ve been indoctrinated by the blue and white of their national flag, but Pepsi reigns supreme in La Belle Province, as it’s known.
How this happened is well-documented and can be uncovered with a quick Google search. Case studies, news articles blog posts have been written, to which I can’t hope to add much of substance. From a few clicks, what I can surmise is that Pepsi deployed a strategy that wittily played on the province’s unique linguistic and cultural identity. Ironically, this is one of Coke’s strong suits elsewhere in the world, where some are surprised to hear that Coke is not a local brand.
In 1984, Pepsi created a series of targeted ad campaigns employing comedian Claude Meunier, who portrayed a series of stereotypical Quebecers with a maniacal passion for Pepsi.
The campaign, a tongue-in-cheek way of poking fun at their own idiosyncrasies, was a hit, and Pepsi catapulted to the market-leading position, despite Coke continuing to pour money into its own advertising campaigns. By 2009, Pepsi was outselling Coke more than 2 to 1, according to the New York Times. As the newspaper points out, Pepsi’s rise starting in the 1970s corresponded with the ascent of the Parti Québécois, a separatist party that led two referenda on Quebec’s separation from Canada in 1980 and 1995. (Both obviously failed, but the second one by a razor-thin margin).
In a later ad that aired in 2012, Pepsi went back to the cultural playbook. The campaign pokes fun at an out-of-town visitor, a naive, Coke-drinking hick (this one hits a bit too close to home) who has to be schooled upon arrival that, Ici, c’est Pepsi — Here, it’s Pepsi. It might be considered a retort to a slur that had developed among anglophone Quebecois, who derided their French-speaking brethren as “pepsis.”
At the risk of praising big blue, Pepsi’s strategy holds lessons for Georgia companies that would try to crack the Quebec market. Many Americans consider Canada as “the 51st state,” and indeed, cultural similarities often make it an appropriate first market for export or global expansion. But as the head of Georgia’s office in Montreal and others told me, those who would do business in the French-speaking region of 8 million, which accounts for 20 percent of Canadian GDP, should recognize that while they’re not dealing technically with a separate nation, they might be advised to calibrate their messaging and market-entry strategies as if they were.