While Coca-Cola grabbed headlines around the world, the business back home was stagnating. Pepsi made inroads on the valuable take-home market, scooping Coke with one-and-a-half- and two-liter plastic bottles. As a symbol of Coke's loss of direction, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, the Broadway production which had cost the company $800,000, folded after seven performances, as The New York Times critic Clive Barnes pronounced it as simply being "tedious and simplistic". Thus while Coca-Cola switched to the lackluster "Coke Adds Life" campaign in 1976, Pepsi bounced back with its new invocation to "Have a Pepsi Day." As usual, Coca-Cola undoubtedly maintained a product focus while its rival concentrated on life-styles.

Seemingly almost by accident, Pepsi launched a simultaneous strategy in direct contrast to its traditional approach. Pepsi man Dick Alven had been sent to Dallas with the almost hopeless mission of injecting life into the business there, where Pepsi claimed a miserable 4 percent of the soft drinks market. Alven convinced his boss that they needed drastic measures, so they petitioned Pepsi headquarters to allow them to use the local Stanford Agency instead of BBDO. Bob Stanford, who had discovered that Pepsi had beaten Coke in taste-tests while promoting a 7-Eleven generic cola, boldly suggested a daring assault on competitor Coca-Cola. In 1975, Dallas TV stations aired commercials urging viewers to "Take the Pepsi Challenge," showing candid shots of die-hard Coke consumers astonished to discover that they preferred Pepsi in such blind taste-tests. It seems that Pepsi...