Was the Pepsi Refresh Project (PRP) successful? Why or why not?
What’s Pepsi Refresh Project (PRP)?
For 23 years, every year, Pepsi used to participate in SuperBowl. But in 2010, it walked away from spending $20 million on television spots for Pepsi and planned to spend the money for the social cause. To do this, it created a website refresheverything.com, in which anyone in the world could submit ideas in a contest where people can submit their ideas for the social project such as sending care packages to soldiers overseas or building a new playground for children.
Ideas can be submitted in six categories:
1. Health and fitness
2. Arts and culture
3. Neighborhoods
4. The Planet
5. Education
6. Food and Shelter
These proposals were voted on by visitors to the website, and based on these votes, Pepsi picked winning submissions every month.
During the first month, website received lots of traffic, 1,000 submissions, and in total, by the time this promotion ended, the website had over 18 million unique visitors, 80 million votes, and generated nearly 150,000 Tweets.
As Pepsi had hoped, Pepsi’s competitors turned to their personal networks on Facebook and Twitter to gain support on their ideas. 19% of the 77 million votes have been cast through Facebook. On Twitter, participants used hashtag #PepsiRefresh
Was the Pepsi Refresh successful?
As per me, Pepsi Refresh project wasn’t successful because of the following:
- At Pepsi, they were using many methods to assess the impact of the campaign but they didn’t consider Sales as a success metric. Along with measuring campaign engagement rate, they should have measured how these engagement rates are contributing to sales. As per me, they were only focusing on micro goals, which is correct but along with micro goals such as engagement rate, audience interaction, idea submission, etc., they should have considered macro goals such as sales, market share etc. That’s the main reason they failed.
- Because of their metrics, Pepsi sales declined by 6% after 1 year of the campaign, which is higher than 4.3 percent decline overall in carbonated sales beverages. I feel that’s not good for the company. Brand health and long-term relationship are interlinked with sales. If the brand awareness and customer relationship increases, usually sales go higher. But in this case, it was reversed.
- As per the journal The Review of Marketing Research which was published in 2015 by a group of marketing scholars at Western University in Canada, there are two key factors that make brands seem inauthentic. Those are imitation and mismatch. When we look at Pepsi Refresh project, “Refresh the world campaign” with the social cause wasn’t directly correlated with the product. That means there was a mismatch. As a result, this shows they were lacking authenticity. If people realize a brand is inauthentic, this reflects in sales too.
- Misuse of voting system: Nonprofits who went to their donor bases repeatedly asking for “votes.”
But they had the following positives:
- They had a great engagement rate for their campaign. They received 120,000 ideas,1000 submissions,18 million unique visitors,80 million votes, which is good.
- They benefited from First-mover advantage. No one had done a promotional campaign on this scale before. Also, walking away from Super Bowl was a big thing and everyone was talking about it.
Though this project allowed company to understand their consumers and attract them to websites, they had a declining market share and falling to third place behind Coke and Diet Coke.
As a brand, this campaign didn’t help Pepsi.
What should Pepsi do about this project?
- They should focus on micro and macro goals clearly. They should re-define and be clear with success metrics.
- They should be authentic. Their campaigns should align with the product. Example: Once they launch a campaign, they can conduct a survey to measure the authenticity of their campaign.
- In order to avoid misuse of the voting system, they should allow only individuals to vote or they should have a community to vote the ideas.
- Pepsi has to track ads to assess the effectiveness of the campaign and decide when to develop a new plan.
- I feel, Pepsi would have used Pepsirefresh project idea in its next campaign. Example: Refresh the Pepsirefresh and ask people for ideas for social cause where they should use their product
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