By nickjohnson - August 21st, 2013
Coca Cola’s new PR campaign seeks to address fears from parents, communities and even Mayor Bloomberg on the fizzy drink’s damaging effect on health.
Like McDonald’s before them, the company has begun to focus on what one can do in the rest of one’s life that enables you to consume their product with no obvious side-effects.
In McDonald’s case, it was sponsoring high-profile sporting events like the Olympics. For Mars it was grass-roots football.
Coca Cola have not gone quite as far with their new campaign, and simply talk about the benefits of ‘moving’.
The advert is produced in the twee style often employed by large brands struggling with emotional engagement (see: guitar-based indie music with sweet female singers on all mobile phone adverts).
Pepsi have jumped on the ‘empower your customers’ bandwagon, by allowing drinkers of their brand of fizzy liquid to choose the next song Katy Perry will release as a single.
Perry is perfoming at the MTV Video Music Awards. In the run up, PepsiCo are asking the denizens of the social web to find out more about her performance and her upcoming album using the hashtag #KatyNow.
Using the hashtag also allows fans to vote on one of two songs from the album which are in the running to be her new single (they’re taken to a Pepsi-branded microsite to do so).
The winning song will be announced moments before her VMA performance - the telecast of which is heavily sponsored by PepsiCo. During the program, the soda company is also offering anyone that signs up to their loyalty program a free download of her last single, ‘Roar’. What’s the value of an individual’s personal details? $1.29 it seems, according to iTunes.
J Crew are following in the footsteps of many fashion brands - who appear to be far more forward-thinking when it comes to brand engagement than those in other industries (See: Topshop/Google+; Burberry/Art of the Trench; and Dianne von Furstenburg/Google Glass).
The preppy apparel retailer have debuted their September catalog on Pinterest, tweaking the layout and offering to align completely with that network’s offering.
The company hasn’t managed to take advantage of ecommerce via Pinterest, and selling directly through the site. Their somewhat fudged solution is listing a poor personal stylist’s phone number and email address, so customers can pre-order.
The stylist is going to be busy - 57,000 consumers have so far followed the brand’s catalog release.
And that’s unsurprising - 24.96% of website traffic to retailers’ sites came from Pinterest in Q1 of 2013 - though only 0.84% of J Crew’s traffic does so. It seems this program is designed to address that gap somewhat.