The Pepsi Ultimate Taste Challenge 2012: Social Enough - Assignment Example

The Pepsi Ultimate Taste Challenge 2012: Social Enough? Using the 3Cs, Pepsi Beverages Canada (PBC) is the company that is designing a way of marketing its products to the millennials, its target customers in Canada. Coca Cola is Pepsi Beverages Canada’s strongest competitor in Canada’s beverage market. In terms of STP, the company has segmented its market and it is using this campaign to target the segment of millennials in different streets of Canada using street teams. In relation to the 4Ps of the company, PBC’s products include Pepsi, Diet Pepsi, Pepsi Max, Tropicana, Gatorade, 7up, Mountain Dew, Lipton Brisk, Aquafina, Amp, SoBe, and Starbucks bottled beverages.

The Ultimate Taste Challenge (UTC) integrated with social media is PBC’s mode of promotion. The promotion targets the urban and lower-share markets in Toronto and Vancouver but the price is not identified (Khurshid et al 1). Using this campaign, Pepsi Beverages Canada is seeking to popularize it products among the millenials throughout summer. The Ultimate Taste Challenge is aimed at portraying Pepsi as the preferred brand over its rival brands. Even so, Hadley is contemplating assessing whether the social medial element of this promotion can become Pepsi’s permanent way of connecting with its consumers even after the summer.

According to Pepsi Beverages Canada, millenials are individuals between age 16 and 25. Social media is the best way for companies to reach this segment of customers because it is at the centre of their daily interaction. As such, marketers have to capture the features of a product in a clear but informal way. Social media users cherish marketing that appeal to their habits, interests, and connections. These users need a product that is marketed in a trendy way and not in the traditional way that is flat and cannot raise conversation (Khurshid et al 2).

Such marketing needs to use video and picture content especially about the use of the said products. A successful social media promotion should allow users to create online profiles that are customizable. It allows interaction through which the targeted users can share their experiences and thoughts with ease. Social media marketing assessment can be done by observing the changes in the self-professed preferences of their targeted social media users. Product reviews and recommendations by consumers are also possible ways of assessing the impact of social media marketing.

Social media marketers can use the real-time feedback of the social media target users to assess the impact of their marketing. Cross-media comparisons are an important assessment tool for the impact of social media on consumers’ preference for a product (Khurshid et al 3). BBDO has done fairly well in its proposal and this campaign is going to achieve its targets to a great extent. Some of the things it could have strongly recommended in this proposal is, firstly, for PBC’s facebook page to be designed in such a way that allows users to customize their profiles.

This would help users to share and converse about the details of their experience with PBC’s products with ease. The page should also allow millenials to upload videos of their experience with PBC’s street teams because millenials like visual communication. Hadley should first wait for the marketing team to table their findings on social media marketing before approving the proposal. His idea of establishing a permanent social media platform for Pepsi brand is workable (Khurshid et al 4).

Works CitedKhurshid, Jawwad, Campbell, Jill, Huller, Miguel, Strachan, Paul & Baldwin, Zoe. The Pepsi Ultimate Taste Challenge 2012: Social Enough? Richard Ivey School of Busines; The University of Western Ontario. 2012. Print.