Roger A. Enrico was born in Chisholm, Minnesota in 1944, served as a naval officer in Vietnam, and joined General Mills before moving to Frito-Lay and then to Pepsi-Cola, where he became one of the defining marketing executives of the late twentieth century.
He ran Pepsi-Cola USA during the period known as the cola wars, when Pepsi went from a distant second to a genuine competitor to Coca-Cola. He oversaw the Pepsi Challenge, the blind taste tests that put a market leader on the defensive for the first time in decades, and he signed Michael Jackson to what was then the largest endorsement deal in advertising history.
The campaigns of that era turned a soft drink into a generational marker, which is a marketing achievement of a different order from selling more units.
In April 1985 Coca-Cola reformulated its ninety-nine-year-old product and reversed itself within three months after a public reaction nobody at the company had anticipated. Enrico declared victory publicly and quickly, and wrote a book about it.
The Other Guy Blinked: How Pepsi Won the Cola Wars was published by Bantam in November 1986, in collaboration with the journalist Jesse Kornbluth. Its speed is its defining feature. Written before anybody knew that Coca-Cola would be entirely fine and that New Coke would turn into one of the luckiest accidents in marketing history, it preserves a moment that a later account would have edited away.
He went on to become chief executive of PepsiCo from 1996 to 2001 and chairman until 2001, oversaw the spin-off of the restaurant division that became Yum Brands, and later served as chairman of DreamWorks Animation and on the board of the National Geographic Society. He died in 2016.
Roger Enrico
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