A Thirst for Change
1. Should the Pepsi brand team continue to fund Pepsi Refresh Project in 2011?
Pepsi brand team should keep this Refresh project for maintaining and strengthen Pepsi’s brand position in soda market. The Pepsi Refresh Project is a first-of-its-kind initiative, positioning as a consumer brand, and directly respond to the evolving needs of consumers and their preferred methods of communication such as facebook, twitter, blog, and etc. The program effectively changed the way brands talk to consumers, leveraging the power of digital and marketing platforms, moving away from traditional marketing methods. Rather than spending hundreds, thousands of dollars advertising ‘Pepsi’ on media, we believe that Pepsi ought to relegate that money to create more valuable contents with refresh project, which can lead to deeper engagement and strong relationship between Pepsi and customers.
The Refresh project could be evaluated by the level of engagement between the brand and consumers, social ROI and brand-equity results. By these evaluations and study, Pepsi Refresh Project program showed that consumers felt Pepsi was a brand that cares about the community. And also the program was a strong fit with their perception of Pepsi as a frontier of idea bank about social issues, and innovative brand. It did not generate the result as an ‘increasing of sales revenue’, but still it is valuable because consumers that may be able to remind about the Pepsi Refresh Project when choosing a cola ‘Pepsi’. Social network that Pepsi developed includes the largest engaged fan base of any beverage company active in US. And these fans are not only potential customers for purchasing Pepsi’s product, but also could be friendly allied customers when Pepsi shrinks. In addition, these evaluations and study showed both how Refresh project could be enormously successful and not successful. When Pepsi launched it and