Pepsi launched a promotional campaign earlier this month through which it will donate $20 million to good causes identified and voted upon by consumers via the program’s website. "A big brand is letting what used to be called the audience take part in what can become a movement," explained a guru from the firm that designed refresheverything.com.
When noting the campaign's connection to selling soda pop, reviewers make glib mentions of "social currency" and "engagement," and are happy to point out that Pepsi broke its 23-year addiction to advertising on the Super Bowl so it could focus on this massive social media experiment.
Is it possible that doing something good is an utter waste of marketing money?
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for big business giving away billions. As anybody who has a kid going to college or works at a non-profit will tell you, the scholarship/grant racket is, well, a racket that can always use more funding. The world will be an objectively better place if Pepsi helps clean up a single inner-city park or funds one website devoted to protecting women or children.
But it won't be that much better off.
Pepsi's 2009 revenues were $43 billion, so the Refresh Project represents a percentage pretty far to the right of the decimal point. It will also likely spend a good chunk of money to promote it during the year. Now imagine if instead Pepsi had launched a public campaign to make itself a mechanism for doing good across the planet? Its website lists all the perfunctory awards it wins from various special interest pressure groups, but there's no overarching theme or purpose to the press releases. Think of how it could apply the socially-responsible areas of Project Refresh to its own operations:
- Send every employee to college (or help them get advanced degrees)
- Make sure they all have top-line health insurance
- Fund retirements (gasp, even revive a pension scheme)
- Ensure that all manufacturing and distribution are carbon-neutral
- Link facilities with local communities via job training programs
It's certainly not terribly "social," per se: there's nothing organic or genuine about who participates, or what they talk about. Pepsi has effectively told consumers to virtually line up to ask for money vs. giving them real, substantive things to warrant their involvement (again, imagine how engaging it could have been to allow people to participate in how the company made itself the mechanism for real change in the world). It's a glorified contest that is not a lot different from the contests the candy makers used to run when I was in high school...I remember collecting wrappers so we could get Styx to play at our prom, though we lost miserably.
And, ultimately, I'd argue that it's not marketing:
- Trying to grab the mantle of a cause is a poor substitute for telling consumers things about a product or service that will matter to them.
- There's almost something disingenuous about claiming to do good when we all know that the company exists to sell stuff, and it raises red flags when they do so. I know that many marketers are scared to death about how poorly our commercial messages are performing via media both old and new, but blithely deciding to change the rules so we don’t have to worry about it anymore is at best a distraction.
- There's also the issue of cognitive dissonance, as the very Internet that Pepsi hopes to use to promote its good works is the tool that lets consumers connect its other not-so-charitable efforts, like the lobbying it (and its competitors) are doing to fight regulatory and health challenges to bubbly sugar-water.
Brand "engagement" has to mean something more than getting consumers to click on an icon, and brands need to deliver something more than a nod or grin. It's no surprise that inventive marketers can find ways to make people jump on one leg or say a funny word three times fast, but to what purpose?
- Funny will never be a brand attribute.
- There's no proof that hoping to attach funding to a good works project means anything to anyone, and
- The final measure of every commerical activity is inevitably tied to selling stuff.
I'm all for Pepsi giving away money, and I'm thrilled it chose to pay some regular folks instead of enriching NBC. But I think the campaign is more evidence of the unresolved crisis facing advertising than it is indicative of the opportunities for using social media.
There needs to be more thoughtful analysis of marketing stunts like this and, so far, is the fact that so few marketers are asking the question of whether it'll sell any soda pop a good indication that nobody will be surprised when it doesn't?
