No one craves caffeinated beverages like Guns N’ Roses fans.
Dr. Pepper teamed up with Guns N’ Roses to offer a free Dr. Pepper soft drink for every American fan in honor of the release of the first GN’R album in 17 years. In the first 24 hours after the release of Chinese Democracy, fans inundated the Dr. Pepper web site.
Then the Dr. Pepper site crashed and fans got ticked off.
Not only did they get mad at Dr. Pepper for the site crash, they got mad at GN’R. Talk about a sales promotion gone wrong.
According to CNN, Dr. Pepper says that they had “extended the window for the giveaway from 24 to 42 hours, added a toll-free line to handle consumer requests for the coupons and set up an interactive voice recorder to accept coupon requests.” (See the CNN article here.)
And while there’s no use crying about spilled soda, now Guns N’ Roses is threatening to sue Dr. Pepper.
Maybe it’s just me, but not all publicity is good publicity. Especially when it makes both the band and the soft drink company look petty.
Colleen Jaycox Mann 
Your sarc and humor is great. you should be a writer indeed.
The only problem with your post is the fact that Dr.Pepper didn’t team up with GnR. Dr.Pepper came out on their own and offered the free can to everybody if the album would be released this year. Axl has stated that Dr.Pepper was acting on their own and had nothing to do with it.
While Dr. Pepper initiated the offer, it appears that Axl released a response to soft drink company shortly thereafter stating his pleasure with the offer.
The following was posted on the GN’R site:
“March 26, 2008
Press Release from Axl Regarding Dr Pepper
We are surprised and very happy to have the support of Dr Pepper with our album “Chinese Democracy,” as for us, this came totally out of the blue. If there is any involvement with this promotion by our record company or others, we are unaware of such at this time. And as some of Buckethead’s performances are on our album, I’ll share my Dr Pepper with him.
Axl Rose”
See the release here: http://www.gunsnroses.com/news/article.jsp?ymd=20080326&content_id=a1&vkey=news&fext=.jsp
And some other mentions of mutual delight: http://www.nme.com/news/guns-n-roses/35464, http://www.rollingstone.com/rockdaily/index.php/2008/03/27/axl-rose-thanks-dr-pepper-for-supporting-chinese-democracy/, and http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/11/28/axl_rose_dr_pepper/
So while it wasn’t a formal cross promotion, it does leave a bad taste in my mouth that GN’R is threatening a lawsuit because the site crashed.
Now that’s really funny! Ha Ha