Ok Go
You
may have heard that Campbell’s has introduced special soups for millennials.
Go! Soup, which comes in flavors like pulled chicken with black beans instead
of chicken noodle and makes use of edgy ingredients only young people can
appreciate like chorizo. These $2.99 pouches, which are more costly than
Campbell’s core offering, are the result of studying 20-somethings in the wild,
i.e. "hipster hubs" of Portland,
Austin and San Francisco.
Sound
familiar? Probably not if you are under 35. OK Soda, Coca-Cola's attempt to
capture Gen X dollars, was also test-marketed in Portland and Austin, oh jeez,
19 years ago.
I
never tasted it, but at the time, using graphic novelists (when I asked for the comic books section at Powell's when I was in high school, I was passive-aggressively scolded Portland-style "We have graphic novels.") like Daniel Clowes
and Charles Burns was pretty cool. Then again, I am a sucker for packaging. (I
associate design firm Charles S. Anderson with that era and they’re still going
strong—they also now apparently own the rights to the image I used for a tattoo
in the early ‘90s). There was also a pre-internet social media-esque
ad campaign. It was a flop, obviously.
And
though capitalizing on youth demographics often has a way of backfiring, I
would certainly take the slack, disaffected tone over the XXtreme branding
that pervaded much of the ‘90s.
OK Soda via Wikipedia
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It tasted pretty much like a “graveyard” where you mix all the flavors at the self-serve soda machine. Like orangey root beer cola. Not good. But it did have a fun phone number you could call.