- Image courtesy of Pepsi’s Facebook
As far as public relations and social media campaigns go,
Pepsi may be at the start of one of the largest. In an attempt to appeal to the younger crowd,
Pepsi has revived their status as a part and supporter of popular culture and
are asking consumers to live in the “now,” with their “Live for Now”
campaign. The company has employed many
methods for this multi-year campaign, which began in April this year, including
global entertainment stars, concert events, and primarily social media.
Primarily utilizing Twitter, Pepsi Company had teamed up
with Viacom to help promote this campaign.
This summer partnership had Viacom products MTV, VH1, CMT, and Comedy
Central using hashtags to get consumers involved. Each of the Viacom stations had a twitter
hashtag to correspond to their station, for example #ComedyNow for Comedy
Central, which the audience would then use to tell the world how they live in
the “now,” for a chance to win admission to events of the stations. Consumers were encouraged to share photos of
how they involved Pepsi in their “now” and their summer.
The Pepsi Company also utilized a revamped website with
Pepsi “Pulse,” a constantly self-updating hub of popular culture pieces and
social media updates, perfect for being “in the moment.” Such updates include tweets involving Pepsi
and Pepsi hashtags, as well as tweets mentioning major popular culture figures
including Katy Perry, Lil’ Wayne, and Nicki Minaj.
Pepsi has also aimed to recruit these popular figures, highlighting
Pepsi’s support with the growth of popular culture, through commercials,
special edition pop cans, and film endeavors.
Pepsi helped with Katy Perry’s summer film Part of Me emphasizing on life in the now, receiving product
placement as well as getting Katy Perry to do commercials. Nicki Minaj also did a commercial with Pepsi
for this campaign, which highlights things that happen every minute, and the
crack of a pair of Pepsi cans puts them all in motion. Pepsi used their relationship with music to
recreate their relation with Michael Jackson and the Bad album through limited edition soda pop cans. MJ, “The King of Pop” was endorsed by the
soda product and was arguably the most popular global figure at the time.
The “Live for Now” campaign has great investment by the Pepsi
Company, which hopes to see improvement in their place in the soft drink
rankings. In 2011 Time shared a report from the Wall
Street Journal stating that Diet Coke surpassed Pepsi, giving Coca-Cola
Company the #1 and #2 soft drinks according to sales. In the “Now” campaign.
Pepsi has increased their media spending by 40% in the second quarter of this
year, but revenue actually fell by 2%.
As this is a multi-year campaign, there is still time for things to turn
around.
http://www.pepsico.com/PressRelease/Pepsi-Launches-First-Global-Campaign-Live-For-Now04302012.html
http://mashable.com/2012/06/06/pepsi-viacom-live-for-now-partnership/
http://www.pepsico.com/PressRelease/PepsiCo-Reports-Second-Quarter-2012-Results07252012.html
http://newsfeed.time.com/2011/03/17/cola-competition-diet-coke-overtakes-pepsi-as-americas-2-soda/