Kola Real, a soft drink manufactured by a Peru-based firm called Industrias Ananos, was invented in the late 1980s by a couple who saw an opportunity to enter Peru’s cola market when terrorists routinely hijacked Coca-Cola trucks. Industrias Ananos differentiates Kola Real by distributing it in large bottles and advertising it as “big” and “cheap.” During the 1990s, this strategy helped Kola Real become one of the top-selling cola brands in Venezuela. After this success, Industrias Ananos decided to enter Mexico, the world’s second largest market for soft drinks after the U.S. market. By the late 1990s, a change in production methods had made it easier to enter Mexico’s soft drink market. The previously existing soft drink companies in that nation, such as Coca-Cola and Pepsi, had convinced grocery stores to stock soft drinks in plastic containers instead of glass bottles. This simplified the path to market entry for Kola Real because in other countries, Industrias Ananos already sold Kola Real in large plastic bottles that it promoted as “big” and “cheap.” Within a short time, the company’s Mexican version of Kola Real, which Industrias Ananos called “Big Cola,” emerged as one of Mexico’s top-selling soft drinks.

How might the fact that the extra-large plastic bottles cost only a fraction of a penny to make compared to other cola firms’ smaller plastic bottles have eased the entry of Industria Ananos into the Mexican soft drink market?