Hello everyone! You may be a bit curious as to why I am suggesting we elect a beverage to be our next president. Well, I'm not. But they might have won this last election! In January this year, Pepsi launched their Pepsi Refresh Project. Bonin Bough, global director of digital and social media at PepsiCo announced at the Social Good Summit that their campaign has had overwhelming success and has even received more votes than the last US Presidential election!
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Many of you may be familiar with the social campaign called the "Pepsi Refresh Project." The purpose of this campaign is for everyday people, such as us, to submit ideas that will help improve our communities. After submitting our ideas all of those everyday people, whether they submit an idea or not, vote on which projects they think are the best ideas and in return Pepsi awards the top ranking ideas with anywhere from $5,000-$250,000. Currently, the majority of this round's winning finalist's ideas are related to helping those affected by the oil spill in the Gulf. Pepsi even stepped it up and donated an extra $1.3 million to help with projects in the Gulf. Way to go Pepsi!
In order to start this campaign, Pepsi decided for the first time to forego advertising in the Super Bowl. Instead they used $20 million to start funding the Pepsi Refresh project (which seems to have been a great idea).
Pepsi has been able to establish a great sense of Social Responsibility in it's company by giving back through this project. However, it has also benefited from it substantially through the marketing aspects of it. It even incorporates facebook and other social media tools to promote itself. After voting for an idea, the user can promote the idea they voted for on facebook. I did!
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As you can see from the graph, Pepsi's stock price has increased roughly $10 per share since first launching this project January 13, 2010. They used social media marketing to it's fullest potential by creating, launching, and funding this campaign. It shows its customers that it cares about them and their communities and wants to be involved. Not only are they satisfying their customers with a tasty beverage, they are improving their quality of life. How much more can a company care?!
Other companies should take notice of this new way of marketing through social media. Not only through the traditional facebook and twitter, but through other unique and beneficial social programs such as Pepsi has done. Genius!
I think this campaign was a great way to get people involved in the Pepsi brand. I can honestly say I voted for one of the Refresh Projects and they had a lot of great ones. I think by not having an ad in the super bowl got people talking, and then when they used social media to get the word out it worked really well.
ReplyDeleteThis campaign for the Pepsi Refresh Project has become very successful and earned them a lot of publicity. Overall, the ideas was very successful for Pepsico.
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