See how Pepsi plays Word-of-mouth marketing

Like all popular consumer brands, Pepsi has always been willing to invest heavily in television and print publications to make exquisite ads. Pepsi recently launched a new Tava in the US market, but began experimenting with a non-traditional approach that focused on Word-of-mouth marketing.

This shows that the new media as the core of innovative marketing began gradually for the consumer brand in product promotion to try to use. We have seen this trend in the media purchases of mass-consumer goods companies such as Pepsi, Coca-Cola, Procter and Gamble and Unilever. Companies are spending more and more on web-based advertising and other forms of communication, and their progress may be faster than we can imagine.

Tava is a non calorie, caffeine-free carbonated beverage with a variety of fruit flavours. In the process of promoting this new product, PepsiCo has not used television and print media advertising at all, but has mainly used the following combinations:

1, the establishment of content-rich tava.com official website; wandering around the site, it found that it did not have the heavy sales flavor, but included the downloadable new band songs, painters, photographers and cartoonists of the latest works, many of the latest art activities of information, such as the Chicago Jazz Festival, The Shakespeare Festival in Central Park, New York.

2, purchase banner ads on some important portals and life-class websites, including AOL, Chow.com, CitySearch, dailycandy.com, discovery.com, Evite, MSN, oprah.com, Arranges and weather.com;

3, retail outlets and some social activities for free promotional, such as the Sundance Film Festival, Manhattan's fashion food venues, theatres and grand festivals. The above advertisement is the advertisement poster in the retail store;

4, to well-known large companies such as Apple Computer, Google, MTV and other white-collar workers recommend a free trial.

This is a typical Word-of-mouth marketing program. Pepsi believes that it is hoped to establish an emotional link with the target consumer and to develop a brand of ambassadors, "our goal is to let a small group of people know and try, and then spread to the majority." "It's not a big deal if the product is aimed at the younger generation who now sees the web as a life." But Tava is targeting adults between the ages of 35 and 49, which is somewhat odd. The Pepsi thinks that adults spend little time on the web, but unlike young people, they rarely use instant messaging software to chat with each other or play games dramtically, but to write emails, watch travel, music and food online, and browse the news. Tava appeal to adults with taste and life experience, they prefer healthy and imaginative beverages, such as Tava Brazilian samba flavor, Mediterranean holiday flavor.

However, this kind of turn around the large-scale television commercial advertisement new product promotion Way although has the fashionable meaning, but carries the quite adventurous nature. Television advertising no matter how disgusted people, the industry how to attack, after all, is a rapid establishment of brand awareness of the mature way, and advertising inserts advertising can be sent to millions of discount coupons to encourage consumers to try products. 2005 Pepsi North America has also launched a promotional campaign that does not include television commercials to relaunch the health-Cola Pepsi One, which is rarely seen today. We can wait for a half year to see if this kind of word-of-mouth transmission is really as effective as Pepsi predicted.

                                                                                                                                                                                               (written in 2008-03-16)