PEPSI yesterday painted a Concorde supersonic air plane electric blue as part of a $500 million (£318 million) project to claw back market share from archrival Coca Cola.
In a razzmatazz media launch, Pepsi Co changed the colour of its cans from red, white and blue and flew in the models Claudia Schiffer and Cindy Crawford and US tennis star Andre Agassi to publicise a series of television commercials they were hired to make.
"We think this is the most expansive transformation of a consumer product ever," Mr John Swanhouse, senior vice president of Pepsi International Marketing, told a news conference at London's Gatwick Airport.
The campaign, called "Project Blue" and given its launch in Britain, is aimed at capturing the imagination of the teenage consumer market and is seen as crucial to Pepsi sales in the next century.
"The stakes have never been bigger. Project Blue is how the cola wars will be fought and won in the next millennium," Mr Swanhouse said.
Coca Cola sells three times more soft drinks worldwide than Pepsi. Pepsi has also been hit by buoyant sales of supermarket own brand colas.
In a $190,000 marketing exercise, Pepsi unveiled a Concorde painted in Pepsi's new colours.
But it was unclear quite how Pepsi intended to use the blue Concorde because aviation experts said the plane could fly at supersonic speeds only if painted pure white.
Any other colour paint peels off when the nose of the aircraft heats up at its normal cruising height of 55,000 feet.
