Flashback Friday: When Mirinda turned orange for Blue Men

It's 1994 on a Sunday morning. You turn on the TV to watch Chandrakanta, and as usual, an advertisement breaks the show.

One particular commercial stands out among the sea of typical soap and cooking oil ads, making you squint at the TV in amusement and disbelief. You spot three bald, orangey men who are completely covered in black. They appear to be fixated on an orange soft drink and move in an unsettling, staccato manner.

If this brings back memories for you, you are recalling a phase of Mirinda's campaign in the middle of the 1990s. Members of the renowned Blue Man Group are the three bizarre orange men. The blue men are blue, but this time they're bright orange.

Blue Man Group and Mirinda

The orange soda with a Spanish origin In India today, Mirinda is well-known, but not so much thirty years ago. The PepsiCo family member, a fizzy orange beverage, debuted in Indian markets in the early 1990s alongside Pepsi, Seven-Up, and Mirinda. (Remember how all PepsiCo beverages begin with "Leher"? The Indian government made an effort to "Indianize" the brand.)

PepsiCo had to design a global campaign that could overcome linguistic and cultural barriers to make the beverage popular worldwide, including in India. As a result, Mirinda and the New York-based performance art group Blue Man Group began their illustrious partnership.

Three friends, Chris Wink, Matt Goldman, and Phil Stanton, formed the group in 1987. The group is renowned for its unconventional performances that fuse music and art while examining subjects like science and consciousness.

The troupe's mute, almost mime-like performance allowed viewers to look at daily life with a sense of wonder and novelty.

More significantly, the performances' appeal to a wider audience was increased by the lack of language, which will support Pepsi in its joint campaign for Mirinda.

What's in a colour?

Between 1994 and 1996, PepsiCo hired The Blue Man Group for its "The Taste is in Mirinda" campaign. In order to differentiate itself from its multi-flavour positioning, the goal was to promote the orange-flavored version of the beverage. (In some nations, mirinda is also offered in flavours like strawberry, apple, and grape.)

The most overt way to do that was to paint the troupe's iconic blue men in the brand's vibrant orange colour.

The Blue Man Group members were depicted in the campaign's promotional videos as they engaged in sneaky competition with one another for Mirinda. At the conclusion of each movie, one of the three men shouts, "Mirindaaa!" with his mouth open.

Along with other markets like Mexico, Papua New Guinea, and Nigeria, the advertisements were also released in India in the middle of the 1990s. Without saying a word, the brand was able to develop a memorable campaign that cut across languages and cultural barriers with just the performers' animated expressions and exaggerated movements.

In fact, Gen Xers and millennials still vividly recall the advertising campaign years later in markets like India. Over time, Mirinda, rather than the group as a whole came to be associated with the bald, orange men.