In August of 2012, the fine people at PepsiCo held an online contest to decide the name of their new apple flavoured Mountain Dew. They held it in high hopes of receiving mature and sensible answers that could help them sell a decent product to the public, but this is the internet we are talking about and it wasn’t before long the last group of people PepsiCo would want to enter their contest found their new website: the /b/ board of 4chan
Gushing Granny was first to take the lead but a fair chunk of the board thought that was not hard-hitting enough of a name and decided to take it a step further.
It didn’t help that while all this was going on, PepsiCo had very exploitable flaws in their voting system, lack of input validation, and shit online security, causing this to happen:
Also Rick Roll played as you opened the page:
So as 4chan hackers tore open every last backdoor of the Dub the Dew’s site security, the battle between…
and…
commenced onwards. But those weren’t the only names being voted for, in fact here is a full list of names further down the poll not listed above for your enjoyment:
Eventually the voting closed and they had a winner that soon proved to be very popular and became Mountain Dew’s highest selling beverage.
Yeah, just kidding. PepsiCo had enough and surrendered to the hordes of trolls not taking their contest seriously, and so the day was lost to those who wished to enjoy a refreshing glass of Hitler Did Nothing Wrong (or Gushing Granny if that’s your thing, you pervert).
But alas, the day was not lost! The internet had one more trick up it’s sleeve, which was making a change.org petition which did fuck all.
With that, the Dub the Dew contest came to a close with no winners and no thrills, only an unnamed product which became simply “Mountain Dew Apple”. It remained that way until July 9th 2014 when it got renamed Electric Apple which it still is to this day.
From all this, PepsiCo learnt the valuable lesson of not asking random internet strangers to name a commercial product you plan on selling, something anyone not as out-of-touch as a mega corporation should know as basic knowledge.
Originally posted by Khastle on the Mariana Bay on 15/7/2023 (https://forum.marianabay.com/threads/dub-the-dew-or-why-to-never-let-the-internet-name-your-products.169/)
