With an enormous hit of tie-up movie, PEPSI goes quite well with "STAR WARS Campaign" all over the world this summer. In Japan as well, PEPSI had launched big campaign since last July and it was very successful. But recently PEPSI declared the end of "Bottle Cap Collection", the 1st stage of STAR WARS campaign. Reason is "All sold out".

Bottle Cap is the plastic attachment for PET bottle with figure on top. PEPSI first adopted this unique item as giveaway coming with 500ml PET bottle last year(at that time, figure was that of PEPSI-MAN's)and since then it has been one of the most popular PEPSI collectibles. At this campaign, 23 characters of "STAR WARS EPISODE 1" were chosen for bottlecap figure. PEPSI also prepared head-type figure for 12 popular characters such as Anakin Skywaiker and Darth Maul. These figure, especially head-types are remarkably good in quality. Bottle cap is in opaque plastic pouch attached to the "neck" of PET bottle.

This campaign rapidly gained great popularity mainly among teenagers. Many stores put special counter only for PEPSI near the entrance and you could see many people seriously pinching pouches, straggling to find out which figure is in it. In about 1 and half months most of this PEPSI are out of stock, which is unusual for giveaway campaign. This enthusiasm also led quite a few number of shopliftings(pouch was loosely attached to the bottle, so it must be a piece-of-cake situation for shoplifters). Some grocialy market put video cameras to deal with this problem.

PEPSI continues the campaign with 2nd stage "Special Bottle Cap", which you can win special edition bottle cap with mobile parts. PEPSI's prize is famous for it's difficulty of winning. It would be quite a pain for eager collectors to complete his collection.

References

• PEPSI '99 Spring Campaign review (Topics!)
• PEPSI Japan began STAR WARS campagin (Topics!)
• Free Pepsiman bottle-cap with 500ml PET bottle in Japan (Topics!, in Japanese)
• PEPSI COLA(Japan) (Database, in Japanese)