When People Killed Each Other For A Pepsi

The Pepsi Number Fever, was a promotional campaign that turned into a major public relations catastrophe for PepsiCo in 1992. The company launched a bottle cap contest where customers could win cash prizes if they found caps with specific winning numbers. However, due to a printing error, the number "349" was mistakenly printed on 800,000 bottle caps, leading to thousands of Filipinos believing they had won the grand prize of one million pesos. The ensuing chaos resulted in riots, lawsuits, and even deaths, as the company struggled to manage the fallout and compensate the outraged public. The incident remains a notorious example of a marketing campaign gone wrong.