Recently Pepsi, a long time Superbowl advertiser (Cyndi Crawford anyone?) announced a switch in their advertising strategy. Rather than spend an estimated $20M in ads for America’s largest sporting event, they would be driving a social media campaign called the Pepsi Refresh Project. AdAge sums up the core tenant of the project:
“Consumers, businesses and nonprofits could then submit their ideas for how to have a positive effect on their community. Pepsi has said it plans to pledge at least $20 million in grants to the effort.”
In short, this campaign is a crowdsourcing effort – not unlike Dell’s IdeaStorm, Best Buy’s IdeaX, and My Starbucks Idea – that channels funds that would have been applied to SuperBowl advertising, into a user identified community giving program.
The difference? Execution. Pepsi’s effort was fraught with privacy and security issues that tarnished the first step of what could be a very good campaign. There is upside however. I think that many people will respect what Pepsi is attempting to do. Rather than spending millions of dollars on less than a minute’s worth of shameless self promotion during the world’s largest sporting event – they are putting those powerful dollars towards programs that will have a positive impact within the community – a generous foray into Cause Marketing. Kudos to them for that.
David Veneski Cause Marketing, Community Crowdsource, Pepsi
I’ve commented before at how adept Vitamin Water is with regard to creating social interactions with their customers. Today they turned to their Facebook community to decide the next flavor with the help of a new app called the “Flavor Creator” (image below). The name is a bit misleading in that the app won’t actually let the community ‘create’ the flavor but will let the active Vitamin Water ‘fans’ participate in the rise of flavors for consideration through their social media activities – such as tweets/searches/image posts, etc. Extending the social interaction, they are also allowing their Facebook fans to connect and collaborate on the design of the bottle for the new flavor – right down to the catch phrase describing that flavor.
Clearly Vitamin Water and their parent company, Glaceau, understand their customer and their tendencies extremely well – as noted here:
“We’re basically handing over the control and the lab coat to our fans,” said Eric Berniker, a senior vice president of marketing for Vitaminwater. “It’s one of the hottest brands with youth, and of course, Facebook is a great way to connect with them.” (credit WSJ for this quote).
So let’s recap. Understand who your customer is, give them a modest amount of control over a product they love, and provide an environment where they can connect with others to evangelize your brand. Other companies should take notice of this community connection – it’s working for Vitamin Water.
David Veneski Advertising, Community, Social Media Crowdsource, Vitamin Water