How to Promote a New Soda Pop : Stuffing a Wild Bikini With Cola

GARDENA —  Meet Ginger. She is 18, blonde, beautiful and bikini-clad. She will soon be staring at you from the side of a soda pop can.

That, at least, is the plan of Merle Stanfield, president of Gardena-based Bikini Beverage Co., a newly formed firm intent on snaring a share of the highly competitive soft-drink market.

Stanfield, 58, says cans and bottles of Bikini Cola emblazoned with a color photograph of Ginger Miller, an aspiring actress, will pop up on supermarket shelves in Southern California, Nevada and Hawaii. The company’s promotional pitch: “Get That Bikini Feeling.”

Of course, much of that feeling--at least initially--must be elicited by Ginger or, more precisely, Ginger’s ample charms. Stanfield, a former manager with Royal Crown Beverage in Los Angeles, admits that featuring an attractive woman on the can is a gimmick to get shoppers to buy the cola, which is aimed primarily at the 15-to-25 age group.

And, he admits, the company was concerned that its product might be viewed as sexist--a fear it dispelled after test market results showed that 40% of the product’s buyers were women. “You wonder (about the issue of sexism), but apparently it didn’t have that much effect,” Stanfield said.

While pitching the female form to lure shoppers will certainly win no awards for originality, the firm’s method of getting a high-quality picture of Ginger on the can might, says Richard Sheen, one of Bikini’s five investors and its general manager. Because most of the soft drinks sold are in cans, the firm spent a year researching a way to get a high-quality photograph on its containers, he says.

Sheen says the firm finally turned to Anaheim-based American Fuji Seal Inc., which had developed a process using a shrinkable film to get labels and pictures on bottles and cans. Simply stated, the pictures and labels are printed flat, rolled into a tube and then slipped over the can. The can is then put through a heat tunnel and the label shrinks to a smooth fit. The same process is used to put safety seals on household medicines.

While several soft-drink firms now use the method for bottle labels, Sheen says, the firm is believed to be the first to use it to mass-market a canned cola. Larry Jabbonsky, editor of the New York-based trade magazine Beverage World, agrees.

Just how far a pretty face will carry the product is uncertain. Jesse Meyers, publisher of the Connecticut-based newsletter Beverage Digest, says there are 17 national and 300 private-label colas on the market. He says Bikini Cola may fizzle.

“On the long list of things the world is waiting for, the product Bikini Cola would probably be found at the end of the list, or on the page that is crossed out,” Meyers says. “Soda can’t compete with Playboy.”

But Jabbonsky says the cola could carve out a “novelty niche” in the cola market. Colas last year accounted for 60% of the $24-billion wholesale soft-drink business. And Stanfield says the company, which expects to invest $1 million in the product by next year, would be “very well off” if it sold a million cases of Bikini Cola annually. One way the company plans to accomplish such a feat, he says, is to change the models on the cans every three months or so and invest heavily in promotion. The company expects to spend $450,000 for promotion the first year.

Sheen says the soda will be canned and bottled under contract with Royal Crown Beverages and will make its way to stores through independent distributors and wholesale grocers. A diet version of the cola, which the firm expects to sell nationwide within a year, will be introduced early next year, and Bikini Root Beer, Bikini Lemon-Lime and Bikini Orange are in the future, he says.