OK Soda

There are many similarities of Jones Soda and Coca-Cola's OK Soda...

OK Soda was a soft drink created by The Coca-Cola Company in 1994 that aggressively courted the Generation X demographic with unusual advertising tactics, including endorsements and even outright negative publicity. It did not sell well in select test markets and was officially declared out of production in 1995 before reaching nation-wide distribution. Their slogan was "Things are going to be OK."

In 1993, Coca-Cola CEO Roberto Goizueta rehired Sergio Zyman to be the chief of marketing for all Coca-Cola beverage brands, a surprising choice given that Zyman had worked closely with the New Coke campaign, the largest advertising failure in Coke's history. However, after revamping the can design and print advertising campaigns for Diet Coke and Coca-Cola Classic with great success, Zyman was given free rein to design new products with aggressive, offbeat marketing campaigns.

International market research done by The Coca-Cola Company in the late 1980s revealed that "Coke" was the second most recognizable word across all languages in the world. The first word was "OK." Zyman (who also conceived Fruitopia) decided to take advantage of this existing brand potential and created a soda with this name. He conceived of a counter-intuitive advertising campaign that intentionally targeted people who didn't like advertising. He predicted that the soda would be a huge success, and promised Goizueta that the soda would take at least 4% of the US beverage market.

Despite a nationwide advertising campaign and intense media attention, OK Soda was only marketed in select areas, representing different demographic areas during the summer of 1994. Some of the testing locations were: Austin, Texas, Boston, Massachusetts, Denver, Colorado, Portland, Oregon, Providence, Rhode Island, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota, Sacramento, California, Seattle, Washington, Atlantic Canada.

Most soda drinkers found the taste blandly unappealing, and OK Soda never captured more than 3% of the beverage market in any of the target locations, failing to match Zyman's hype. The project was cancelled by Coca-Cola just seven months after its kickoff, and the soda was never widely released to the public.

After its failure, OK Soda enjoyed a brief cult following on the internet, including the use of a newsgroup at alt.fan.ok-soda, which was fairly active for several years. Fans would reminisce about the offbeat advertising materials, sell merchandise and intact cans, and trade recipes for home-brewed OK Soda facsimiles. It is still referenced in hipster crowds as an example of large corporations attempting to connect with youth markets and failing; online editorial magazines such as The Baffler and suck.com would reference the drink and marketing campaign well after its demise. The merchandise, cans and advertising material can still be found readily on eBay.
Minneapolis punk band Dillinger Four performed a song called Smells like OK Soda, criticizing the marketing techniques of large corporations in courting the "counterculture" demographic.

OK Soda has been remembered more for its unique advertising campaign than for its fruity flavor. The name and advertising campaign attempted to poke fun at the "I'm OK, You're OK" pop-psychology of the early-90s. OK Soda was intentionally marketed at the difficult Generation X and Generation Y markets, and attempted to cash in on the group's existing disillusionment and disaffection with standard advertising campaigns; the concept was that the youth market was already aware that they were being manipulated by mass-media marketing, so this advertising campaign would just be more transparent about it. Its indirect advertising was a form of rebel advertising similar to the McDonalds commercials for the Arch Deluxe. The campaign was designed by Portland based advertising powerhouse Wieden & Kennedy. Spokespeople for the company and their advertisers were very frank about the fact that they were marketing the drink entirely on the "feeling" rather than the taste.
The general public did not respond to the offbeat campaign, and most critics point out that the campaigning was too overt in its courting of the youth and teen market. Most teenagers surveyed found the campaign "confusing".

In addition to regular video and print advertisements, OK Soda had several 800 numbers (1–800–I–FEEL–OK and 1–800–4–OK–SODA) that you could call and leave messages with the disclaimer "your comments may be used in advertising or exploited in some other way we haven't figured out yet". They also had TV advertisements with messages ostensibly left on this answering machine, with mildly enthusiastic responses, off-topic messages and even angry tirades against the advertising campaign. One of the more famous television ads featured the message: "Ah, this is Pam H. from Newton, Massachusetts, and I resent you saying that everything is going to be O.K. You don't know anything about my life. You don't know what I've been through in the last month. I really resent it. I'm tired of you people trying to tell me things that you don't have any idea about. I resent it. ((Click!))". The hotline received millions of calls from curious teenagers, but ultimately did little to actually promote the sale of the soda. The voice over actor from the television and radio ads was also the automated voice on the hotline. One of the options from the automated phone menu was to hear "Real Artificial Bird Calls". If you selected this option you would hear the actor twirp, chirp, warble and otherwise imitate birds in his chipper yet deadpan, smarmy voice.

Both the cans and the print advertisements for the soda featured work by popular Fantagraphics cartoonists Daniel Clowes and Charles Burns, known for their low-key and blandly realistic style. Unlike the brightly colored Coca-Cola cans, they were decorated in drab shades of grey, with occasions of red text. In addition to the primarily two-tone illustrations, the cans would feature a special code that could be entered at the given 800 number as well as a "Coincidence", which was usually some odd bit of trivia about some town in the United States. They would also sometimes contain messages from the OK Manifesto, which was a series of platitudes about OK-Ness, pithy thought reform sayings with no real meaning, much in the style of doublespeak in Nineteen Eighty-Four, mocking traditional advertisement slogans or catch-phrases. Some cans had similar messages printed on their inside.

OK Soda had a more "citric" taste than traditional colas, almost like a Fruit Punch version of Coke's Fresca. Some reviewers described it as "slightly spicy". Others likened it to a combination of orange soda and flat Coca-Cola. In contrast to earlier beverages from the 1980s also noted for their marketing campaigns, such as Jolt and Red Bull, OK Soda's caffeine content was not emphasized. A 12-ounce serving of OK Soda had only 40.5 milligrams of caffeine, slightly less than Coca-Cola itself (45.6 mg).

Taken from Wikipedia, also see this page and here.