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In 1989, The Coca-Cola Company was the dominant player in the soft drink industry.
In order to compete PepsiCo gambled with a new product—Pepsi A.M.
Billed as the first morning cola, Pepsi A.M. was formulated with 25% more caffeine than regular Pepsi. It was the shot heard around the beverage world, a brazen attempt by Pepsi to expand into the sacred AM hours traditionally ruled by coffee, tea and orange juice.
Backed by a sizable marketing budget, glossy ads depicting happy morning people promised Pepsi A.M. would be the perfect eye-opening, thirst quenching start to seize the day. But alas, the product was not to be.
Pepsi had overestimated the public's appetite for a carbonated wakeup call.
By 1990, Pepsi A.M. was discontinued, relegated to the footnotes of odd failed experiments.
Though it astonished early on, Pepsi A.M. 's brief but dazzling arc evokes Icarus and his wax wings.
Pepsi flew too close to the sun in trying to take on the morning majesty of coffee. And like Icarus, the product came crashing swiftly down to earth without making a lasting impact.
Pepsi positioned Pepsi A.M. with slick marketing to make it look like an exciting new "breakfast beverage.”
However, the public was unimpressed.
Most consumers simply did not take to the notion of a carbonated, sugar-loaded soda as part of a traditional morning meal.
Pepsi A.M. attempted to storm the castle gates and insert itself as a brave new choice for the breakfast table. But the gates did not budge.
The public didn’t really find a morning carbonated soft drink as appetizing, finding the combination strange compared to a nice cup of Joe.
Pepsi A.M. failed to change the morning behavior of its target audience.
While Pepsi ambitiously attempted to promote Pepsi A.M. as the superior way to start the day—consumers weren’t buying it.
For the majority of the drinking public, their morning rituals were deeply ingrained, even sacred.
Most people continued turning to coffee and tea as their caffeine sources to kickstart mornings, just as generations had done before them.
Coffeehouses and tea salons had long rooted themselves as beloved community establishments.
Pepsi A.M. strived mightily to disrupt this tradition, yet it proved no match. Consumer habits are hard to break—and the preferred morning ritual for caffeination had been set in stone for decades.
Though Pepsi A.M. afforded itself brazenly and loudly as a new day-opening choice, the bark was bigger than the bite.
The people would not be moved—coffee and tea's dominance as the trusted morning eye-openers persisted easily, dooming Pepsi A.M.'s chances to ever climb out of obscurity.
Pepsi A.M. had a short tenure before being pulled by PepsiCo—lasting only a year until 1990!
Its rapid disappearance suggests glaring strategic failures on PepsiCo's part.
The company likely did not allocate sufficient long-term marketing resources or robust enough distribution pipelines to give Pepsi A.M. a fighting chance at survival.
PepsiCo has been known for its aggressive, saturated advertising blitzes and leveraging vast supplier networks.
However, such might was not deployed for Pepsi A.M. beyond the initial launch fanfare.
PepsiCo appeared to bank wholly on an immediate blockbuster reception to Pepsi A.M. without a contingency plan.
Once interest failed to materialize in line with the company's lofty projections, PepsiCo hastily retreated.
In many ways, PepsiCo seemed to set up Pepsi A.M. to fail—treating it as a fleeting passion project rather than nurturing it as one would an enduring flagship product.
Pepsi A.M.'s crash-and-burn arc reflected poor strategy by its creators more than issues with the product itself.
While Pepsi A.M. soon fizzled out ignominiously, the product did lay some important groundwork for PepsiCo's future ventures into caffeinated sodas.
Its brief existence served as an inaugural experiment probing public appetite for soda and caffeine together. And though Pepsi A.M. itself floundered tremendously, PepsiCo extracted key learnings that later informed successors carrying the caffeinated cola torch.
Bolstered by valuable consumer research insights gained during Pepsi A.M.'s short tenure, PepsiCo doubled down on the concept—rolling out Pepsi Max in 1993 and Pepsi Bolt in 2020 to significantly more success than their predecessor.
These descendants avoided Pepsi A.M.'s pitfalls by way more narrowly targeting key demographics amenable to caffeine-packed soda.
Additionally, PepsiCo backed up later iterations with far more robust distribution and advertising efforts compared to Pepsi A.M.'s paltry support.
While the Pepsi A.M. the product itself sank, its underlying idea laid the seeds for future similar beverages that resonated more soundly with the marketplace.
In that sense, Pepsi A.M.'s flop was not in vain—it provided an instructive failure fertilizing later wins.
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