First Dawn, now Pepsi. Something interesting is happening with brands out to do good and brands like BP who are (especially now) labelled with doing harm. Never before has one brand come to rescue a situation created by another brand. Rebellious brands like Apple and Virgin have always snubbed their noses at the establishment and found new and better ways to champion customers. But this is different and it’s worth noting.
For those of you who have spent the last six months under a log, ‘Refresh’ is the new big social campaign from Pepsi whereby they diverted their leviathan Super Bowl ad budget to crowd-source CSR funding initiatives. Now, Pepsi is spending a month of their campaign and $1.3m of their ‘Refresh’ budget to fund projects that help the disaster in the Gulf.
So why is this campaign different? Instead of championing a customer issue, or even taking on a social issue to do with the beverage market, Pepsi have come to the rescue of a disaster caused by another company/brand. The Gulf disaster is different than other disasters as it is so closely associated with BP similar to the Exxon Valdez spill or Union Carbide’s Bhopal. Therefore, there is no avoiding the brand-association.
There are many ways to set a civil strategy for a brand. One way is to analyse the issues within your own industry. Dove’s insight was that the beauty industry does harm to women’s self-esteem. Citi focused on the financial industry’s harmful prioritisation on money above all else with their ‘Live Richly’ campaign.
The Pepsi campaign is the first that I have seen where a brand looks outside its own industry to help solve problems associated with another industry. This strategy not only helps draw attention to brand, it reduces any risk of hypocrisy that can result from an activist approach (see previous Dove post). Pepsi can nicely sidestep any such charge by staying out of the issues that surround their industry (like water usage, obesity and worker rights) and give responsibility to their customers by crowd-sourcing the projects that will make the campaign work.
Amnesty International adopts a similar risk reduction strategy with causes and countries: ensuring that local chapters are not harassed by requiring them to only campaign about issues in other countries. Pepsi skilfully demonstrates how brands can enter into more social and civil discussions by concentrating on issues outside their own industry. Of course, this strategy cannot divert attention from the harm present in any native industry, but it appears to be a less risky approach for raising civil issues in this particular case.
Lay’s have launched a new campaign called ‘The Happiness Exhibition’ aimed at sharing bliss and encouraging happiness across America. Anyone can log onto the dedicated Flickr site and enter their photos. Selected photos will be promoted in ads in major publications.
The campaign supports the overall ‘Happiness is simple’ positioning reminding us to appreciate simple pleasures (like potato chips).
Caught this video promoting the Pepsi Refresh Project with Demi Moore and Kevin Bacon. Nothing like a little celebrity endorsement to boost the campaign. It’s nice to see these two battling it out for funding their charities, creating a little publicity in the effort.
A refreshing move from Pepsi for the start of the new decade: asking people in the US what they’d like Pepsi to spend its philanthropy budget on, rather than the Pepsi corporate responsibility department allocating it as they see fit. This approach is being labelled ‘crowdsourcing CSR’ or ‘crowdsourcing philanthrophy’. Fast Company has referenced it in a piece called ‘Is Philanthropy the New Marketing?‘.
Pepsi says it wants this to be a participatory exercise (getting people to participate with the Pepsi brand more), and it seems like a great idea to achieve this. At the same time, it will increase awareness that Pepsi does contribute to society and so prime Pepsi’s civil branding status.
The campaign to promote the initiative will probably meet the 3Is Civil Branding criteria: Important – yes community projects are important; Inclusive – yes community projects bring people together; Influential – yes Pepsi is an influential brand. Read more on engaging people with issues they find important and the significance of this in social media campaigns in an earlier post The secret ingredient for successful social media campaigns.
The feedback that Pepsi gets from people about where they think money should be spent will be a useful indicator of what people in the US think are the most important issues in civil society, as well as telling Pepsi how they should spend their money of course.
Coca-Cola and Pepsi exchanging tweets caused a stir yesterday. Arch-rivals talking to each other, albeit just one very short exchange. One colleague here at Brandinstinct thinks this is a classic example of social age hype, but Uri’s a social media veteran so he would think that.
Prompted by Amnesia’s Iain MacDonald, this seed exchange could be the start of a new way of rival brands communicating with each other that is civil (talking to your opponent leads to a civil form of competition), rather than the classic baiting and one-upmanship favoured by airlines in particular. If you accept that Twitter is a brand communication channel, then what we have here could develop into more discussions taking place in this civil dimension.
We’ll keep an eye on if/how this Coke-Pepsi civil dialogue progresses. Read the full article on AdAge.
Civil Branding is about harnessing the power of brands to create social influence,
change the wider social agenda and increase brand difference. We're on a mission
to encourage marketing professionals to consider their brands' impact on society
to help us progress and to help create ever more worthy brands.
