Pepsi Number Fever
contest incident
Pepsi Number Fever, also known as the 349 incident, was a promotion held by PepsiCo in the Philippines in 1992; the promotion led to riots and the deaths of at least five people.
Promotion
In February 1992, Pepsi Philippines (PCPPI) announced they would print numbers ranging from 001 to 999 inside the caps (crowns) of Pepsi, 7 Up, Mountain Dew and Mirinda bottles. Certain numbers could be redeemed for prizes, which ranged from 100 pesos (about US$4) to 1 million pesos for a grand prize, roughly US$40,000 in 1992, at the time equivalent to 611 times the average monthly salary in the Philippines.
Pepsi allocated a total of US$2 million for prizes. Marketing specialist Pedro Vergara based Pepsi Number Fever on similar, moderately successful promotions previously held in Latin America, Vergara's geographic area of expertise. In April 1992, one month before the 349 incident, a garbled fax led to the wrong winning number being announced on television in Chile, leading to what the Philippine Senate later called a "similar fiasco". The promotion, now known as Numeromania, also later ran in Poland in 1995; however, it did not cause as much controversy.
Pepsi Number Fever was initially successful, increasing Pepsi's monthly sales from $10 million to $14 million and its market share from 19.4% to 24.9%. The winning numbers were announced on television nightly. By May, 51,000 prizes had been redeemed, including 17 grand prizes, and the campaign was extended beyond the originally planned end date of May 8 by another 5 weeks.
“Pepsi Number Fever” enters the record as contest incident. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Pepsi, Number and Fever can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Pepsi Number Fever” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.