by Bob Hoffman (@adcontrarian) There was a piece in Ad Age last week featuring the astoundingly clueless opinions of marketing and business professors on the subject of the Pepsi Refresh project.
The amazing thing is that these people weren’t from Southwest Arkansas State. These guys were from Harvard, Columbia, Dartmouth, Penn and Notre Dame.
It makes it clear why so many young people in advertising are confused about what they’re supposed to be doing. And just how out of touch these experts are.
Before we take a look at the comments, let’s review the facts:
In 2010, Pepsi diverted scores of millions of dollars from traditional advertising (including their Super Bowl sponsorship and their traditional TV advertising) into a massive social media project.
After one year of this, they had lost 5% of their business.
Their sales dropped by an estimated half a billion dollars.
They fell from their traditional 2nd place in the soft drink category to 3rd place.
Their sales erosion increased widely compared to the previous year
Their beverage ceo was so upset he said he was going to “blow up the place.”
To this day, they are still suffering from this debacle
Many of the key players are now gone from Pepsi
After burning astronomical amounts of money on this, Pepsi finally killed it in March.
If that doesn’t describe a complete marketing disaster, I don’t know what does. So what do the academics have to say about Refresh?