When was surge soda invented

The drink also advertised its wide-mouthed cans and bottles, which the ads claimed were for greater "drinkability. When asked about why, exactly, the company was being so experimental with their use of language, Coca-Cola's former VP of Marketing Frank Bifulco told Ad Age , "That's what Surge is all about: making ordinary times extraordinary. Mountain Dew had already captured the national zeitgeist when it came to the youth culture's late-'90s and early-'00s love for the X-games, action sports, and fun, so the grunge-punk-on-speed advertising Coca-Cola rolled out didn't have a real impact on brand loyalty among teenage soda drinkers.

Instead, Coke decided to try to appeal to the pre-teen demographic so they could make the next generation of teen soda drinkers loyal to Surge instead of Mountain Dew. There's just one major problem with that plan: Teens and young adults often have some sort of disposable income which they can use at their discretion, whether it's from a job or an allowance, whereas pre-teens typically do not. Pre-teens, on average, aren't going out to a local corner store or market and putting money on the counter for the drink of their choice; they're drinking whatever their parents bring home from the grocery store.

And parents, largely, weren't bringing home Surge. Coke began to learn the hard way that if you want to make a parent terrified of a beverage product, tell them it will make their kids have more energy than they already have.

The commercials showing amped-up teenagers stampeding over one another and acting like lunatics may have gotten Coke's intended message across that Surge was the soda brand that made Mountain Dew look tame. The problem was this rubbed a lot of parents the wrong way. Parents became wary that this scary new drink and its "carbos" would turn their kids into uncontrollable lunatics, which kneecapped Coke's efforts to hook this younger demographic before they became Dew devotees.

Ironically, Surge actually contained less caffeine and sugar than Mountain Dew already did; Mountain Dew and Diet Mountain Dew contain 55 mg of caffeine per oz can, while Surge only had 51, and a oz Mountain Dew has 62 grams of sugar as compared to the same size Surge, which had The parental backlash against Surge was almost entirely based on its intense branding - the exact brand image Coke was specifically trying to cultivate.

It wasn't long before the negative attention generated by Surge's over-the-top commercials alarmed adults, who took arbitrary action and began banning the soda from several schools across the nation, even at schools that still allowed Mountain Dew.

The manic ads, paired with the soda's electrified-sounding name, led to some high schools forbidding their students from consuming the beverage on school grounds.

More campuses removed Surge from their vending machines, and an increasing number of parents refused to purchase the drink for their kids. While Surge didn't necessarily connect with customers over the long term, it had a strong initial push and was part of Coca-Cola's overall attempt to revitalize its brand with younger customers.

The mastermind behind the surprisingly successful attempt at relevancy was Coke's Chief Marketing Officer Sergio Zyman , who entirely restructured Coke's advertising initiatives and upped the marketing budget. He was considered by many in the industry to be the kind of mercurial maverick the company desperately needed - despite being the man behind the notorious New Coke debacle a decade earlier, which was the single most disastrous marketing misstep in the company's history.

The new Surge campaign fit in perfectly with the risky, bold campaigns Zyman was known for championing. He even greenlit the very first ad for the high-energy beverage.

Then, in , Zyman resigned. Advertising agencies that had worked with Zyman had reportedly been quietly pushing for Coke to pressure him out, questioning Zyman's vision for the company and his practice of working with multiple advertising firms instead of the industry standard of building a deeper relationship with just one.

According to Zyman, he was just ready to hang up his spurs and write a book on advertising. Either way, he was replaced by a longtime company man named Charles S. Frenette , whose advertising ethos was far more in line with Coke's pre-Zyman status quo. Surge sales soon hit their apex, then began declining steeply. In its first year, Surge sold 69 million cases.

By comparison, Diet Mountain Dew sold 78 million in the same time frame, and regular Dew sold These early numbers were semi-encouraging from Surge's point of view, because it was a new brand trying to gain a foothold in a space long-dominated by its competitor, but Surge never grew after its first year. A spokesman for Coca-Cola told Ad Age in June that the company wasn't worried about supermarket sales dropping, because the place where most people were buying their Surge was convenience stores, not grocery stores.

After a year-to-year decrease in sales of more than 17 million cases over their second month window, Surge's numbers only got worse from there. In , sales plummeted from Frenette, Coke's chief marketing officer, tried to normalize the brand a bit to ward off the negative view parents had of the drink, but it didn't work. By , Coca-Cola decided to discontinue the drink altogether, casting it into the pantheon of discontinued sodas that have small but dedicated fan bases alongside Josta, Crystal Pepsi, and the energy drink precursor, Jolt!

My friends and I would divvy it up, throw back a couple of the neon-tinged drinks and pretend we were out of control. It may have been the excessive amounts of carbohydrates and sugar, it may have just been play. It was probably some combination of the two.

Surge was loud and full of abandon — like that friend who never said no to a dare, despite the number of hospital visits. It was also an affront to the transparent drinks movement of the time. Drinks for all ages, like Zima and Crystal Clear Pepsi, mimicked water in their clarity.

Not Surge. When I made the mistake of pouring it into a glass one time, I was horrified to see just how bright and syrupy the stuff was.

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