Are You A Pepper, Too?

by Mark Aaron Murnahan (blog)

Following extensive promotions by Dr. Pepper offering a free can of their Dr. Pepper drink if Axl Rose released the album "Chinese Democracy" in 2008, the company intent was questioned. The likely truth is that their Website was too busy to answer the call, but this did not stop the bad press the company received.

The Dr. Pepper's Website crash is an example of how errors in traffic forecasting and insufficient server and bandwidth resources can come between a company and their customers. Although in some cases, this is very expensive to avoid, requiring additional server and bandwidth cost, it makes this author wonder how the guy in the hot seat is dealing with his stress.

Who is in the Dr. Pepper Hot Seat?

Who is in the Dr. Pepper hot seat? It could be the marketing people, the server administrators, or the accounting department going cheap, but that does not really matter. The part that matters now is how the company spins this off and makes up for the damage that has already happened.

Dr. Pepper Scam or Accident?

Perhaps Dr. Pepper just planned for the Website to be too slow or unavailable, but I doubt it. It is very unlikely that they intended to scam anybody. What Dr. Pepper saved in free Dr. Pepper is likely very small compared to the bad press and IT overtime.

Dr. Pepper is another example of the importance in planning the needs of your Web presence in advance. The cost of proper load-balancing and bandwidth resources would have surely been less costly than the bad press and other costs yet to be seen.

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