Great Social Marketing from Pepsi

Pepsi's refresh project ( http://pep.si/cdWemz )is a great example of social marketing - specifically crowd sourcing.

Pepsico, like lots of other public and private companies, give away millions of dollars a year to charity, either directly or through organizations such as the United Way. Thousands of requests a year come in and something that starts out as a positive can grow negative fast.

"You gave money to XYZ - I will no longer support Pepsi products"
"You do you never support small organizations like XYZ"
"This organization is involved with Puppets...I hate puppets!"

Ok the last one I hope is made up, but the issues aren't. What Pepsi did is basically say...You decide. We'll make the first cut to make sure they are reasonable organizations. They then bracketed them into Tiers based on the dollar amounts.

They then supported this in traditional marketing, packaging and social media like Facebook. Holistic marketing, all on message +10points to Pepsi. This has already garnered over 1.4MM likes on Facebook and coverage in the mainstream press.

All for something they were going to do anyway.