The IMC Campaign

One of the most well-known carbonated drinks in the world, Pepsi is produced by PepsiCo. Brad's Drink was its original name when it was invented in 1893, but in 1898, that name was changed to Pepsi-Cola (Farazuddin, 2016). It was given its current name, Pepsi, in 1961. The primary commercial rival of Coca-Cola is this brand, yet this business entered the market first. Pepsi was offered in 340 ml bottles during the Great Depression, at a 5 cent per bottle pricing. Because of the Great Depression, Pepsi's sales increased by 2 times between 1936 and 1938. The slogan: “Pepsi-Cola hits the spot” - penetrated the mind of American consumers for the next 20 years (“The Pepsi Cola Story”). Over the years, the composition has changed and in 1991 this brand needed a rebranding. Since 1898 till nowadays has changed 11 logotypes and the shape of bottle. Nonetheless, in spite of the popularity of Pepsi, some innovative and fresh ideas are necessary.

Pepsi is known for being the brand for youth, so its potential customer’s age is: 16-30 years old on average. It has a high brand recognition and reputation (Bhasin, 2017). The brand valuation is $19.4 billion and it took the place number 29 in the Forbes in the list of the most valuable food and beverage brands. In most cases, this beverage is usually bought by young people as a cooling drink in the heat (accordingly, during the cold season sales decrease), or in addition to food (usually to fast food). By the ratio of drink consumers of both sexes, about 53% of consumers are women, and 47% are men. However, there is evidence that if the choice between Coca-Cola and Pepsi was given to consumers of both sexes, about half of women would choose Coca-Cola, and about half of men would prefer drinking Pepsi (Jurevicius, 2017).

To promote the drink in 2016, Pepsi launched various projects, such as creating music tracks, recognizing the melodies of advertising, as well as a photo contest “Life is a moment”. The PepsiMoji campaign included a partnership with Twitter, in which it released 50 branded stickers (“Advertising and Marketing Blog”). Users could attach them to their photos. One of the possibilities of such activity was the usage of stickers as “visual hashtag”. It means that when viewing a branded image, a user can click on it and see all the photos on Twitter with the same sticker. Thus, approximately 9% of PepsiCo’s revenue has come from products launched over the past two years that were not beverages. Nevertheless, as it became clear, due to the fact that almost everyone has a smartphone with the availability of various applications and access to the Internet 24/7. This is the prerogative of youth, since young people spend a lot of time online in social networks. Social networks imply the perfect “springboard” for determining the preferences of the target audience of Pepsi, as well as for promoting and advertising products that interest them.

Google Analytics is a proven method of analyzing the interests of each potential and existing consumer (Booth and Jansen, 2009). Searches are focused on a hook in the form of certain words. In the case of the promotion of the Pepsi brand, according to the hooks, Google determines the age, interests and occupation of a particular person, which allows you to generate online advertising and offer PepsiCo products to the users of the Internet. There are several approaches that will help promote the Pepsi brand among young people aged 16-30 years old. Advancing landing with SEO allows you to interest more potential consumers who are already interested in Pepsi products. To do this, it is necessary to compose a semantic core. That is, to select the requests of users on which the page Pepsi will be displayed in the search engines. Next, one needs to arrange text blocks with competent entry of keywords and correctly fill in the Meta tags. This way, it is will show its advantage not immediately, but after a certain time. Nevertheless, it is important to use other methods of promotion.

Contextual advertising is a great method that will help attract potential consumers to the main page of products (Chakrabarti et al., 2008). In this case, it will be necessary to have an advertising budget, but the benefit of this approach is that with the proper setup of an advertising campaign, the money spent will quickly pay off. Contextual advertising is a block of advertisements, which are placed before the search and on thematic sites. Google Adwords is the main service with which one can set up contextual advertising. How to do it? - For example, during a week a person searches for various things and content on the Internet. It might be cinemas, youth clothes, music and so on. According to those searches history, it is possible to conclude what interests a person has. For the Pepsi team it is a sign that theoretically a person may be interested in carbonated drinks, in Pepsi, in particular.

Advertising in social networks is probably the best approach (Odhiambo, 2012). It can be divided into 2 main groups: targeted advertising and advertising in thematic communities. Targeted advertising will show information about products to a certain circle of people. It is only necessary to set up an advertising campaign in social networks in accordance with certain parameters of the target audience, such as sex, age, interests, etc. Thus, the advertising of lending will be displayed only on the pages of people potentially interested in Pepsi products.

Using the methods mentioned above, Pepsi must procure a charity campaign to help people who have suffered from Hurricane Harvey, who overtook the inhabitants of Central America. The whole world witnessed the destruction of the lives of tens of thousands of people. Hollywood actors engaged in charity, working on the phone. Now it is Pepsi’s turn. The idea is to link Pepsi’s products with donation to charity. What is necessary? - Advertising video about the disaster and that anyone can help the victims financially, buying Pepsi products. This ad should be placed on YouTube, Facebook, and also with the help of contextual advertising.

Instagram and Snapchat should also be involved in raising funds for the victims. In the Pepsi page, as well as on the pages of bloggers that have 1,000,000+ subscribers, there will also be commercials and posts on this topic. There should be reposts in all social networks. In addition to the commercial, Pepsi should set up an action on Pepsi: when buying a liter bottle, one third of its cost would go to charity. Thus, it will be possible to achieve several goals at once. Firstly, the victims of the hurricane will be provided with financial assistance, through which they will be able to get new homes, as well as to return to their previous lives.

Secondly, these are new opportunities for the brand itself, as participation in this charity campaign will make it possible to reopen Pepsi as a brand and interest them. Thus, the number of consumers should increase significantly. Thirdly, Pepsi would not lose a lot in the proceeds due to participation in the charity campaign. Nevertheless, this innovative solution will positively affect the brand image and its further development. Also, it can contribute to the expansion of the age category of consumers of Pepsi products.

Summing it up, it is worth noting that rebranding and various collaborations and charitable campaigns will only contribute to the development and popularization of the brand, and it will also have a strong social impact on the market and among consumers. This measure is necessary to bring something new from the brand to consumers, and will also cause additional interest from new categories of consumers. The Internet as a whole is a great way to promote any kind of goods, as well as global assistance to those who need it.

References

“Advertising and Marketing Blog”. MDG Advertising. http://www.mdgadvertising.com/blog/you-wont-believe-the-new-faces-of-the-pepsimoji-ad-campaign/. Accessed on 2 November, 2017.

Bhasin, Hitesh. (2017). “SWOT Analysis of Pepsi – PepsiCo SWOT Analysis”. Marketing 91. Retrieved from https://www.marketing91.com/swot-analysis-pepsico/. Accessed on 2 November, 2017.

Booth, D. and Jansen, B. J. (2009). “A Review of Methodologies for Analyzing Websites”. IGI Global. Retrieved from https://faculty.ist.psu.edu/jjansen/academic/jansen_website_analysis.pdf. Accessed on 2 November, 2017.

Chakrabarti, D., Agarwal, D., Josifovski, V. (2008). "Contextual Advertising by Combining Relevance with Click Feedback". WWW, Beijing, China. Retrieved from https://faculty.mccombs.utexas.edu/deepayan.chakrabarti/mywww/papers/www08-interaction.pdf. Accessed on 2 November, 2017.

Farazuddin, S., Ahmed, F., Maddali, A. (2016). “Article on Pepsi’s Promotional Strategies”. Department of Management Studies, Christ University, Bengaluru. Retrieved from https://www.innovativepublication.com/admin/uploaded_files/JMRA_3(1)_56-58.pdf. Accessed on 2 November, 2017.

Jurevicius, Ovidijus. (2017). “PepsiCo SWOT analysis 2017”. Strategic Management Insight.

Odhiambo, Christine Adhiambo. (2012). “Social Media as a Tool of Marketing and Creating Brand Awareness. Case Study Research”. University of Applied Science, Thesis. Retrieved from https://www.theseus.fi/bitstream/handle/10024/44591/Christine.A.Odhiambo.pdf?sequence=1. Accessed on 2 November, 2017.

“The Pepsi Cola Story”. Retrieved from http://www.pepsi.com/PepsiLegacy_Book.pdf. Accessed on 2 November, 2017.