The thread about hipsters and PBR got me thinking…I’ve always wondered about Mr. Pibb, the Coca-Cola version of Dr. Pepper, and why you don’t see any advertisements for it. I think it’s actually the best drink of the Coke family besides Coke itself, and yet, it exists basically in a vacuum. If a vending machine has it, then you can buy it, and I guess you can purchase it at a supermarket too. But you never see ads for it on TV, in magazines, on the radio, or anywhere else. There’s no cachet associated with it whatsoever; you never even hear people talk about it. In fact, off the top of my head, I can’t even really recall what the Mr. Pibb can actually looks like.
Has anyone else noticed this phenomenon about the dark horse of sodas?
I think I saw ads for it a few years ago on TV but that was in Atlanta (major Coke area).
However, I have to disagree with your premise that it actually tastes good. Compared to Dr. Pepper, Mr. Pibb tastes like they took water a monkey shit in that they then ran through the ass of a cow and let the pigs drink and then bottled their steaming diarrhea (IMHO).
There definitely were Mr. Pibb commercials. The first 30 seconds of this youtube link has one that I vaguely remember. I have no idea why Coke doesn’t market the stuff, given Dr. Pepper’s popularity.
I don’t think Coke needs to advertise Mr. Pibb. If they have a lock on a restaurants soda business, it will be an option at the fountain. Why bother to try to knock off Dr Pepper when they don’t stand a chance? Just make the alternative available and save your advertising dollars.
(Disclaimer: I work in advertising, and used to have Dr Pepper’s parent company as a client.)
In a fair number of markets, the local Coca-Cola bottler also bottles Dr Pepper, and the other brands from that company (including 7Up, A&W, Canada Dry, etc.) I would imagine that, in those markets, they don’t make much, if any, Mr. Pibb.
For that matter, the beverage companies do very little advertising behind their smaller brands, especially the brands in the traditional soft-drink segments, like Mr. Pibb. They put the lion’s share of their marketing support behind (a) “new age beverages”, such as sports drinks and teas, and (b) diet sodas.
That must be why I never see it in the Chicago area. I never knew what it was until I went to college and partook of an occasional Mr. Pibb. That was like, 30 years ago and I haven’t had one since.
I’m a fan of the “Mr.” and “Dr.” beverages, even enjoyinig the generics. From a brand-loyalty standpoint, “Pepper” is my favorite, and I even have a pair of Dr. Pepper pajamas (D.P.PJ.'s). When I go to a restaurant, I order as follows: “Dr. Pepper…or Mr. Pibb”. Most of the time, the server comes back with “Is root beer okay?” Root beer, really? Sometimes they try to foist a cherry Coke on me. NOT THE SAME THING!!! Ugh.
As far as advertising, Mr. Pibb’s lack of advertising sure beats Dr. Pepper’s lame ad campaigns… l love the beverage, but loathe the marketing. I am sort of embarrassed for them. Bring David Naughton back…
I recall that Mr. Pibb and Sprite were created specifically to kill off the programs that 7-UP and Royal-Crown Cola and Dr. Pepper had to place their own brands of vending machines with national gas stations. By offering to stock all the flavors with one supplier, they had the upper hand. So Coke never wanted it to succeed, only that competitors to Coke should fail.
I’ve always been a fan of Pibb. As a kid I saw it a lot more often. Now it’s not in most gas stations I visit. Last night I went to a random gas station on the way home from campus and they had it so I bought one. Tastes better out of a can though, as does Dr. Pepper, Mountain Dew and 7up.
It’s been a good while since I had a Dr. Pepper that really gave that plum-and-vanilla taste. I usually drink the diet, but even when I do get the regular stuff, it doesn’t seem to really get it “right”. I can distinctly remember getting that taste from the last squirt-in-a-cup vending machine I’ve used, in about 2001. Is it using different sugars? Aeration? Aliens?
I remember a Mr. Pibb radio campaign from roughly ten years ago. It used the unfortunate slogan, “Put it in your head.” The commercial I remember was a bunch of disjoint snips of songs and voices, as if you were channel surfing. My favorite part of the spot was the over-the-top radio announcer voice plugging, “The great taste of Mr. Pibb! Now in the convenient five hundred thousand gallon drum!” That’s still the first thing I think anytime I see Mr. Pibb for sale.
I’ve heard that they added more caffeine when they changed it to “Pibb Xtra”, though I don’t know for sure if that’s true. It was just a moronic move, if you ask me. EVERYONE still calls it Mr. Pibb, and no one seems to know what, if anything, they changed. Or why.
Bob Hope (no not THAT Bob Hope but a PR man) wrote a book about his stint with the Atlanta Braves called “We Could’ve Finished Last Without You”. In that book, he also mentioned he tried to market Mr. Pibb. The problem was that Dr. Pepper-like beverages don’t have a generic flavor like cola, root beer, and orange sodas. He remembered struggling to mention Mr. Pibb without saying it tasted like Dr. Pepper, and he concluded this is why you don’t see much Mr. Pibb marketing.
Then again, Mr. Pibb has a suprisingly high profile due to being the only Pepper like option at Coke fountains. Remember Ramblin’ root beer? Unlike Mr. Pibb, you never saw that soda outside of restaurants. Yet since my college was Coke only, I had Ramblin’ tons of times. Coke phased Ramblin’ out in favor of Barq’s when it bought that brand. That’s a shame because I legitimately liked Ramblin’.
This is a very good point. What is the name for that Dr. Pepper/Mr. Pibb drink? As a kid, I was always told that it was supposed to be prune-flavored (and that Dr. Pepper used artificial prune flavoring whereas Mr. Pibb used the real thing.) But that doesn’t seem to make much sense and the guy who told me was (and still is) a big bullshitter who makes up a lot of nonsense.
Fun fact: Wikipedia says that “In the 1990s, the marketers of Mr. Pibb distributed a video game. It featured a cartoon man similar to the cartoon used on the original Mr. Pibb can, whose mission was to escape from a school inhabited by zombies. He defeated the zombies by burping at them and he could increase his burp capacity by drinking Mr. Pibb. This video game was played through MS-DOS on a PC, and was distributed in floppy disk format (3.5” diskette) and (less common) PC CD-ROM."
The manufacturers have almost certainly switched from cane sugar to high fructose corn syrup (HFCS). HFCS is cheaper than cane sugar, but it does give a different taste to the food it’s in.
I, personally, can’t stand Sierra Mist, which is Pepsi’s version of Sprite and 7 Up. Any restaurant that contracts with Pepsico isn’t going to carry 7 Up or Sprite, it’ll only carry Sierra Mist, and that means that I can’t get a soda from that restaurant. Sierra Mist is NASTY.
I haven’t had a Mr. Pibb in years so I don’t if this is still true but the difference between it and Dr. Pepper used to be that Mr. Pibb had chocolate in it whereas Dr. Pepper had the aforementioned prune juice. Does Mr. Pibb still have chocolate as part of its formula?
