The Real Pepsi Challenge: The Inspirational Story of Breaking the Color Barrier in American Business.* The Real Pepsi Challenge The Pepsi Challenge has been an ongoing marketing promotion run by PepsiCo since 1975. It is also the name of a cross country ski race at Giant's Ridge Ski Area in Biwabik, MN, an event sponsored by Pepsi. : The Inspirational Story of Breaking the Color Barrier in American Business By Stephanie Capparell Wall Street Journal Books/Free Press, January 2007 $25, ISBN ISBN abbr. International Standard Book Number ISBN International Standard Book Number ISBN n abbr (= International Standard Book Number) → ISBN m 0-743-26571-3 Getting black folks to drink soda water was the easy part. Proving that African American African American Multiculture A person having origins in any of the black racial groups of Africa. See Race. executives could succeed as executives in big business was another matter. Stephanie Capparell does an exemplary job of portraying that test in The Real Pepsi Challenge, the largely unknown story of the black salesmen that Pepsi-Cola hired in the 1940s and '50s to market to black Americans. Their accomplishments--cracking the ranks of Corporate America and thus ushering generations of African Americans into corporate comforts--took brains, guts and the ability to ignore racial slights. Oh, and yes, they had to sell their tails off. Capparell, an Italian American An Italian American is an American of Italian descent. The phrase may refer to someone born in the United States of Italian heritage or to someone who has immigrated to the United States from Italy. editor at the Wall Street Journal, recounts this tale with veneration, as well as scope. She plaits facts and figures about the segregation of that era around interviews of the six surviving members in the special-marketing group. Capparell also chronicles how other corporations inched towards Negro consumers. Even though African American spending power The power of legislatures to tax and spend. Spending power is conferred to state and federal legislatures through their constitution. Judicial Review of legislative spending varies from state to state, but the law of federal spending informs courts in all states. was equal to Canada's in 1948, major advertisers cautiously curried blacks so as not to offend white customers. In 1947, Pepsi's president, WAter Mack, courageously hired Urban League official Ed Boyd, to start a Negro market group. The salesmen--never more than a dozen--were natty, well-spoken ambassadors who blanketed the country and endured all of Jim Crow's affronts to visit white bottlers as well as black colleges, grocery stores and Elks' Lodges. The Real Pepsi Challenge departs from the larger corpus of black business books in that it doesn't deal with entrepreneurs such as Bob Johnson Bob Johnson may refer to:
This story has a concomitant quality with another major crusade of the mid-20th century. Rosa Parks was not the first black citizen to challenge segregated public accommodations, just as the Pepsi salesmen were not the first African Americans to quietly storm the corporate bastion. Yet Parks tipped the modern Civil Rights Movement merely by refusing to relinquish a bus seat. In similar fashion, Corporate America finally accepted black executives in an effort to sell a product as unremarkable as sugared water. Some who sold it, however, changed business history. Indeed, last year, PepsiCo Inc. named a woman of color born in India as its chief executive. Tony Chapelle is a business magazine reporter in New York New York, state, United States New York, Middle Atlantic state of the United States. It is bordered by Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and the Atlantic Ocean (E), New Jersey and Pennsylvania (S), Lakes Erie and Ontario and the Canadian province of . He formerly published Securities Pro Newsletter, which covered African Americans on Wall Street. |
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