LogFAQs > #969903177

Let me tell you about Julmust.
You know how Coca Cola pretty much owns Christmas and how everybody drinks Coca Cola then?
Thats not how it works in Sweden...
To really understand, we have to go back in time, long before 1900...
Swedes back then were mostly alcoholics. They worked hard and just got enough food to not starve to death. To prevent riots, a part of the salary was paid as alcohol, which the workers drank to forget their hard life. Around Christmas, they got some more, and better food, as a bonus. But the most important thing was the Christmas Beer. It was a dark porter that tasted so much better than the cheap alcohol they were used to, and they looked forward to it the whole year. And if you served them something of lower quality... well, you had to be lucky to get away alive.
Forward in time to the 1920s. People got better paid, they were not paid in alcohol, but instead they bought their own alcohol. And dark Christmas Beer was something you just had to have.
At this time, a Swede named Harry Roberts owned a brewery, and the Christmas Beer was the best selling product. He had heard of a alcoholfree beer called Must in Germany and decided to investigate it. He liked it and bought it, started to produce it. It didnt sell that well.
Then suddenly the Swedish Government had a big vote about prohibition. It was pretty close, but in the end the No-side barely won. It did however result in stricter alcohol laws, like forbidden high alcoholic beer. The sales of Must raised, and it was advertised as an alcoholfree alternative. It started to replace Christmas Beer and got called JulMust (Christmas Must).
Roberts couldnt handle the demand, so he started to produce a concentrate that he sold to other companies, so they could sell their own Julmust.
Forward in time. Pripps was a major brewery at the time and they got the license to produce and sell Coca Cola in Sweden. Just like Roberts, Coca Cola sells the license to produce Coca Cola and the secret concentrate to local breweries, because it is costly to build new ones in different countries.
In the 90s, they started to look at the sales figures and saw a strange pattern. Sales in December always dropped 50% or more, when it was supposed to raise.
So they contacted Pripps and asked what the heck was going on.
People are drinking Julmust in December, all other soda sales are dropped 50% or more.
This made Coca Cola really worried, and they started to demand Pripps to start big advertisement campaigns.
Are you drunk? We earn more on Julmust sales in December than what we do on Coca Cola sales the whole year, there is no way in hell that we are giving up on that!
So Coca Cola decided to cancel the contract they had with Pripps and built their own factories in Sweden, and started massive advertisement campaigns to make Swedes drink more Coca Cola in December.
They failed.
They even tried to launch their own Julmust, but that failed as well.