Substantial Films .: Books

The Real Pepsi Challenge:
The Inspiring Story of Breaking the Color Barrier in American Business

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The Color of Cola
- Warren Goldstein, NYT Book Review, 2/4/2007

History-making heroism, Stephanie Capparell means to demonstrate in this admiring account of the Pepsi-Cola Company’s pioneering — but largely unsung — “special-markets sales staff,” ought not to be measured solely by the fame it attracts. She’s right. Inconceivable without the giants of the ballpark and the ring, demonstrations and courtrooms, the movement for African-American civil rights depended even more on the mostly unknowable actions of millions, black and white, who created new ways of thinking and working and acting within and across racial lines.

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Pepsi's challenge in 1940s: Color barrier
- Michelle Archer, USA Today, 1/22/2007

"Though some passages of the book seem like relics of a bygone era, there's no question, as Capparell writes, that many of the issues faced by the Pepsi team have yet to be resolved in business.

Managers today aren't so much thinking about how to keep minorities out, she writes, as not thinking about minorities at all.

The Real Pepsi Challenge certainly serves Corporate America ample food for thought as well as impetus for a renewed push for equality in the workplace and beyond."

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This Team of Black Men Fought & Won
- Stanley Crouch, NY Daily News, 1/15/2007

"To listen to Capparell, Boyd and the other surviving members of the team that led the corporate revolution was enthralling and would have made [Dr. Martin Luther] King himself quite proud."

Line Multicultural Marketing? How PepsiCo Got It Started
- Yoji Cole, Diversity Inc. 2007

It was before Rosa Parks. It was before Brown Vs. Board of Education. It was before Jackie Robinson broke the color line in Major League Baseball. It was the 1940s and the Pepsi-Cola Co. was fighting the cola wars against rival Coca-Cola. Pepsi was based in the North. Coke was in the South. Pepsi offered a 12-ounce bottle for the same price as Coke's 6-ounce bottle - which attracted black consumers. Coke's leadership was linked to segregationist views. To put Pepsi ahead of Coke, Pepsi president Walter S. Mack decided to hire a team of black salesman and utilize multicultural marketing before there was such a term.