The Pepsi Follies

An anonymous blog but worth repeating here!

For over three years we have been documenting the marketing follies at PepsiCo.

On July 29, 2009, we said...

"It seems like the brand babblers have taken over at Pepsi, and they are screwing it up royally....It will take a while (like it does in all big organizations) for someone with a brain to realize what's been going on. "

Pepsi has been the world's leader in advocating and implementing new-age marketing nonsense, and is now paying the price for its foolish belief in the three-headed marketing monsters: "branding," "engagement," and "conversation." (Here's a tip for anyone left alive in the Pespi marketing department. There is one thing, and one thing only, that advertising is about -- persuasion. All the rest is word games and chit chat. Got it?)

Last week it was reported that after years of fighting Coke for first place in the soft drink category, Pepsi-Cola had fallen to third place.

The L.A. Times called it...

"...a stunning fall from grace."

According the The Wall Street Journal...

Pepsi-Cola and Diet Pepsi saw their U.S. sales volumes in 2010 fall sharply, by 4.8% and 5.2%, respectively...

The U.S. soft drink market is about 74 billion dollars. If my maths are correct, a 5% drop in Pepsi's US market share (which is about 10%) cost them well over $350 million on the Pepsi-Cola brand alone.

While Coke has been wisely sponsoring American Idol for years (yeah, on that useless old dinosaur, the television) Pepsi has been suffering from the marketing version of Attention Deficit Disorder exemplified by chasing dubious social media rainbows and comical "re-branding" exercises.

In Monday's post about the Pepsi Refresh Project (called Social Media's Massive Failure) I included this quote:

"We took the divergent path," explained Frank Cooper, chief consumer engagement officer for Pepsi. "We wanted to explore how a brand could be integrated into the digital space."

The alarming aspect of the above quote is not the vapidity of the clichés, it's the fact that Pepsi has someone called a "chief consumer engagement officer." You have to be seriously confused to pay someone to run around your building with a title like that.

The most unsettling part of this episode is that Pepsi has been fawned over as "forward thinking" among the brand babblers and social media hustlers who have seized control of the marketing world. When Pepsi launched its Pepsi Refresh social media project last year, Time magazine had this to say:

To Pepsi, and to companies around the world, the days when mass-market media is the sole vehicle to reach an audience are officially over.

These days, viral marketing seems like a smart strategy. "This is exactly where Pepsi needs to be," says Sophie Ann Terrisse, founder and CEO of STC Associates, a brand-consulting firm. "These days, brands need to become a movement..."

To set an example of maturity and restraint, I am not going to make any "movement" jokes.

Shopper's Voice is the only way to achieve multi media interactive success, contact Paul Ashby on (0044) 01934 620047 or visit http://interactivetelevisionorinteractivetv.blogspot.com or email: paulashby40@yahoo.com