It’s Tea Time For Two Big Soda Makers Low-Priced Iced-Tea Products Share Shelf Space With Soft Drinks

The cola kings are fanning the flames under the fast-growing iced tea business.

Coca-Cola Co. and Pepsi-Cola Co., the top two names in carbonated soft drinks, each launched first-ever advertising campaigns recently for their entries in the low-priced end of the $1.8 billion iced tea market.

Coca-Cola has two quirky ads aimed mainly at teens and young adults for its Cool from Nestea line. One shows a spurned bride using a voodoo doll to set her betrothed on fire. The second shows a diver plunging into a volcano filled with fiery lava. Both men survive by gulping a can of the tea.

The ads, created by Minneapolis-based Fallon McElligott, carry the theme “Made Cold to Cool You to the Core.”

Pepsi’s low-priced entry is Lipton Brisk, which it markets in an alliance with Unilever’s Thomas J. Lipton Co.

The commercial created by J. Walter Thompson in New York features an animated clay Frank Sinatra who crankily calls for his car as he leaves a concert stage and a screaming horde of fans. After swigging a can of Lipton Brisk backstage, the refreshed Sinatra decides to return for an encore.

The aging crooner was recruited for the campaign because Sinatra “is still the most potent figure in popular culture” as evidenced by strong sales of his recent duet albums on which he sings with other artists, said Jennifer Galichon, general manager of the Pepsi Lipton Tea Partnership.

She said it was hoped Sinatra would help impart a timeless, classic and cool image to the brand.

“Beyond Cool. Brisk,” is the theme of the campaign.

The iced tea business has been a star performer since Coca-Cola and Pepsi threw their distribution and marketing muscle into it in the early 1990s.

Although growth slowed to 15 percent in 1995 from 64 percent a year earlier, industry consultant Beverage Marketing Corp. said iced tea remains one of the fastest-growing beverage categories in the United States.

John Sicher, editor of the trade publication Beverage Digest, said both Lipton Brisk and Cool from Nestea continue to grow significantly this year while higherpriced premium brands are losing share in the tea market.

Brisk is the best-selling low-priced iced tea while Cool is second trailed by a number of regional brands. Iced tea innovator Snapple is the leader in the premium segment.

In supermarkets alone, Sicher said iced tea sales volume was up 12 percent through mid-May with low-priced tea up 32 percent and premium tea off 8 percent. Carbonated soft drinks, meanwhile, are up 5 to 6 percent, he said, Sicher said the reason for the success of low-priced iced tea is that they “are good products” and are now being made available more widely.

Tom Pirko, who heads the beverage consulting firm Bevmark Inc., said Pepsi and Coca-Cola “have turned iced tea into a soft drink” by securing shelf space for tea in the soft drink aisles, pricing it comparably with colas and other sodas and offering more palatable versions.

The soft drink companies have also made the iced teas available in a wider choice of packages including six-packs of cans and individual 20- and 32-ounce bottles.