Advertising, Sales Promotion, and Public Relations

Advertising, Sales Promotion, and Public Relations

Watch out Coke. Pepsi-Cola’s Mountain Dew is making a splash with teenagers and sending the brand’s sales soaring.

Pepsi-Cola over the years has transformed Mountain Dew, its neon lemon-lime drink with a caffeine kick, from a soft-drink with a hillbilly theme to a cutting-edge brand that’s grown faster than any other. In 1997, Mountain Dew’s sales volume shot up 13 percent, far outpacing the overall sales growth of about 3 percent in the carbonated soft-drink segment.

Industry experts have contributed Mountain Dew’s stellar growth to its far-sighted promotional strategy and a consistent promotional message that has changed with the times without radical shifts in positioning. The image that Mountain Dew has portrayed over the years in its advertising is a tight link between thirst quenching and teens having an outrageous time with the brand outdoors. Although Pepsi has made subtle changes to contemporize the brand over the last twenty years, it has not deviated far from its core market of fun-loving, high-energy teens.

Mountain Dew’s advertising shows why the soft drink is the most popular brand among teenagers and college kids. Dedicating about $40 million a year in media advertising, Mountain Dew spots feature hip-looking youths watching or participating in daredevil stunts and extreme sports. Mountain Dew ads have been wildly popular with teen-agers and young adults, with 31 percent giving the ads high popularity marks. One such television ad shows a teenage boy and a teenage girl skysurfing off opposite mountains, meeting in mid-air to share a Mountain Dew. The girl seductively whispers in the boy’s ear, “Let’s be friends,” as she pulls the cord on his parachute while swiping his Mountain Dew. Two other popular spots feature Olympic Gold Medal track star Michael Johnson in a spoof on time travel and a boy and a girl snowboarding to a tune from the musical West Side Story. Both spots use the theme: “Do the Dew.”

Mountain Dew’s sales promotion activities are not to be overshadowed by its high-budget advertising counterpart. In one of the most innovative promotions ever, Mountain Dew gave out over 250,000 pagers to teenagers who sent in ten proofs of purchase plus $29.99. Besides the pagers, consumers received six months of free airtime. In addition to normal paging functions, the pagers were programmed to receive Extreme Network announcements once a week alerting teens to special offers and giveaways worth $50 million in merchandise from Mountain Dew and twenty-six other “Extreme” partners including MTV, ESPN, Burton Snowboards, Killer Loop sunglasses, and Sony Music. Not only did the pagers tap into a teen trend, they also enabled Mountain Dew to create and wire its own teen network directly.

Complementing Mountain Dew’s traditional media advertising and sales promotion is a savvy public relations plan designed to influence those free-spirited youths it targets. Mountain Dew’s long-standing association with extreme sports, such as its sponsorship of the ESPN’s X Games, has made it a favorite of the high-energy set. Mountain Dew also is the sponsor of an extreme mountain biking team that routinely competes in the X Games.

Although Mountain Dew now enjoys a prominent rank in the soft-drink market, it faces the enviable challenge of keeping momentum in the face of new competition from Coca-Cola’s Surge, which was rolled out to most of the country in 1997 and 1998. Although Surge is still a long way from catching up with Mountain Dew’s impressive growth and market share, the introduction of Surge has helped build the segment for caffein-ated soft drinks. See the latest promotional efforts from Mountain Dew at Pepsi’s Web site,

How do advertisers like Pepsi-Cola decide what type of message should be conveyed to promote Mountain Dew to teenagers? What types of appeals and executional styles are most effective? How does Pepsi-Cola decide which media to use for Mountain Dew to reach its target consumers? What are the benefits of sales promotion and public relations to advertisers such as Pepsi-Cola? Answers to these questions and many more will be found as you read through this chapter.

Global Perspectives

Global Challenges for Advertisers

One of the hottest debates for global advertising professionals today is whether to customize or standardize advertising. On one side of the fence are those who believe the advertisement’s appeals and execution style should be tailored to each country or region to be most effective. Because cultures perceive and react to advertising differently, this school of thought advocates that the advertiser must know something about the intended audiences’ culture in order to communicate effectively.

Kodak, for instance, favors a customized approach to advertising in China because consumer tastes and values vary between mainland China and the more progressive Taiwan and Hong Kong. In Taiwan and Hong Kong, which are quickly catching up to the United States and Europe in film sales volume, Kodak targets a young, innovative audience. In mainland China, which is comparatively far behind technologically except in a few urban centers, the approach will be more lifestyle oriented.

Some would disagree with this distinction, however, and would advocate a single advertising campaign for all countries. Following this standardized approach, an advertiser would develop one advertising campaign, appeal, and execution style and deliver this same message, translated into the language of each country, to all target markets. Supporters of this approach insist that consumers everywhere have the same basic needs and desires and can therefore be persuaded by universal advertising appeals. Furthermore, they say, standardized advertising campaigns create unified brand images worldwide and the advertiser eliminates the inefficiencies of trying to re-invent the meaning of its brand in every country. Athletic shoemaker Reebok recently embarked on a $100 million global ad campaign in an attempt to make its message more cohesive throughout the world. In the past, Reebok sent out confusing messages—it was known as a running shoe in the United Kingdom and a fashion statement in the United States. Moreover, Reebok generally was seen as a women’s fitness and aerobics sneaker, not an ideal image for winning over male consumers.

Possibly the best answer to this dilemma is to use a mixture of standardization and customization—that is, standardizing the message while paying attention to local differences in the execution of the message. For example, Unilever uses a standardized appeal when promoting its Dove soap but it uses models from Australia, France, Germany, and Italy to appeal to women in those places. Although this mixture of standardization and customization seems to be successful for many global marketers, it only works as long as the message truly plays to a worldwide audience. For example, because parents around the world are deeply concerned about the welfare of their children, advertising for childrens’ products generally represents an area of universal concern or agreement. Fisher-Price, therefore, is effective using a standardized approach because no matter where they live, parents want the best for their kids. Similarly, IBM was successful with its “Solutions for a Small Planet” campaign because people all over the world have similar information and computing needs. The global imagery of the campaign is achieved through the use of the same footage in each country. The difference is the use of local subtitles to translate the “foreign” language of the commercial.

Although efficiencies can be achieved by producing a single advertising campaign and message for worldwide use, the approach only makes sense if it does not run counter to social mores, ethnic issues, or religious taboos. For example, a food commercial showing hungry kids licking their lips would be taboo in a country where exposing the tongue is considered obscene. Similarly, an ad portraying a young couple running barefoot, hand-in-hand down a beautiful, sandy beach would be offensive in a country in which naked feet are never to be seen by the public.25

Some of the marketers discussed here have been successful using a global approach to advertising, but not every product or service is suited for a unified advertising message. What types of products do you think would benefit from a standardized approach to advertising? What types would fare better using a tailored approach?

Entrepreneurial Insights

Web Ad Broker Start-up Helps Marketers Reach the College Crowd

Marketers who want to hit the college crowd in their on-line media buys but don’t know where to start have an ally. Their link to the college market lies with Future Pages College Network, the Internet’s leading collegiate advertising broker. Future Pages provides custom advertising solutions for marketers wanting to reach the 12.5 million college students age eighteen to twenty-four who access the Internet on a regular basis.

Future Pages’ core business is brokering ads for over 110 on-line college publications across the country reaching a potential student body of about two million. The St. Paul, Minnesota-based start-up partners with on-line college publications to reach students at schools such as Boston University, Duke University, Harvard University, and Stanford University. Banner ads brokered through Future Pages cost marketers $35 per thousand impressions.

Since its launch in 1996, Future Pages College Network has attracted some heavy-duty marketers. Internet music site SonicNet, for instance, recently launched an end-of-school-year on-line effort to gain recognition among college students in its quest to top MTV’s on-linemusic site. Computer software giant Microsoft recently advertised through the Future Pages College Network offering free copies of its Internet Explorer browser to students, as well as an introductory campaign for its new Windows 98 operating system. Future Pages has also completed successful campaigns for Paramount Pictures’ Star Trek and Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Advertising through on-line college newspapers is complemented by Future Pages’ partnerships with Internet sites frequented by college students and educators. Advertising placed on sites where students like to hang out helps marketers carry their message even further than on-line college newspapers alone. Some important sites in Future Pages’ network include theglobe.com, a virtual community of 960,000 subscribers mostly in the eighteen to twenty-four age group; TWEN, The West Education Network, an on-line learning center for law students; Collegebeat.com; an on-line community of colleges and universities; and Virtual Stock Exchange, a destination site for college students participating in the Virtual Stock Exchange game.

Cross-promotional opportunities are also available to Future Pages’ advertisers. With its off-line network, Future Pages provides advertisers access to alternative campus media such as campus billboards, inserts, and custom publishing, campus posters, and ads on newspaper distribution stands.

Future Pages got its start by helping small business owners create their own mini-Web sites in a small business directory. Feeling that they were not focused enough, founders and former fraternity brothers Lance Stendal, 28, and Tom Borgerding, 24, turned to Alan Fine, president of Strategic Management Solutions and professor at the Carlson School of Business, University of Minnesota. Fine encouraged Stendal and Borgerding to find a niche on the Internet in which they could excel. Knowing that almost all college students were on-line and that most college newspapers had an on-line presence, Stendal and Borgerding narrowed their focus by becoming the middleman between the advertiser and the college newspaper. Now the company brings together major marketers such as Microsoft and Sprint with on-line college newspapers such as Arizona State University’s State Press, the Harvard Crimson, and the University of Texas’s Daily Texan.

Borgerding, vice president of marketing and sales for Future Pages, feels that the benefit of their network partnership extends beyond advertisers alone. “Our mission focuses not only on providing advertisers with the best Internet tool to reach this market, but also helping to foster education to the partners we work with. We strive to create successful campaigns and at the same time help the schools by educating them about Internet advertising.”40

You can visit Future Pages’ Web site at

Ethics in Marketing

Cigars Become the Darling of Hollywood

Tobacco has long enjoyed a comfortable relationship with Hollywood. Since the 1930s, cigarettes have been found between the lips of sexy stars, such as Bette Davis, Humphrey Bogart, and Lauren Bacall. In Bogart’s day, cigarettes became the ultimate accessory in movies with a little financial support from big tobacco. Later, when cigarette advertising was nudged off television, the pressure for product placement on the big screen intensified. One example comes from the leaked documents of tobacco company Brown and Williamson, which apparently paid Sylvester Stallone half a million dollars for brand placements in five of his movies.

Today, however, it’s just as likely to see a cigar in a movie as a cigarette. Like their cigarette counterparts, cigar manufacturers routinely hire product-placement firms to get their products on the big screen. In the box office hit Independence Day, the pilot played by Will Smith couldn’t save the world unless he had a cigar in his pocket. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Mr. Freeze in Batman & Robin, lights up a cigar in a big cloud of blue smoke. A ci-gar conveys status as it is placed in Tom Cruise’s mouth in the hit Jerry Maguire. Actors lit cigars in 51 of 133 movies with a domestic box-office draw of at least $5 million in the most recent film survey by the American Lung Association. In 20th Century Fox’s Independence Day, cigars appeared in twelve scenes, or once every 12.5 minutes.

How much marketing punch have cigars in the movies had on the cigar industry? Although a direct correlation can’t be made, it should be noted that after a twenty-year decline, U.S. sales of cigars have jumped 53 percent to 5.2 billion cigars since 1993—proof that the stogie of old is no longer stodgy. Although other factors have certainly helped ignite the current cigar craze, Hollywood has definitely contributed to its “coolness.” Although cigar smoking in and of itself is a choice consumers make, what alarms many is the increase in popularity of cigars with teenagers. A 1996 survey sponsored by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that 27 percent of U.S. teenagers, or six million, have smoked at least one cigar.

Federal and state regulators, alarmed about booming sales of cigars and their sudden popularity among teenagers, are about to end the decades of leniency toward the cigar industry (most tobacco bills pending in Congress are silent on cigars). The Federal Trade Commission recently ordered five cigar makers to file advertising and marketing expenditures and told three of the five to report what they spend to have their cigars featured in movies. California’s Department of Health Services recently used several hundred thousand dollars from the state’s thirty-seven-cents-a-pack tobacco tax to combat movie and television smoking and smoking sponsorship of sports and community events.

The cigar industry, meanwhile, is voluntarily restricting the practice of putting cigars in celebrities’ hands. The board of directors of the Cigar Association of America said it would “admonish” its members to stop paying Hollywood brokers for product placements in movies and television.66

Do you feel that product placement in movies and TV for controversial brands is unethical? Do you believe there should be laws governing this promotional practice?

Closing 5

Try making up a crossword puzzle for the key terms in this part. Writing the clues will help you remember the definitions and the context of each concept. Check your progress by using the Grademaker Study Guide.

marketing miscues

Advertising Abroad Can Create Headaches for Multinationals

Advertising in foreign countries often leads to embarrassing situations for U.S. multinational marketers. In a spot that ran briefly on Peruvian television, Africans are seen getting ready to devour some white tourists until they are appeased by Nabisco’s Royal Pudding. Nabisco initially responded that although the commercial was “inconsistent” with company values, the Peruvian audience saw it as “a fantasy situation that was humorous in nature, and effectively communicated people’s preference for Royal Desserts over all else.”

After realizing that its explanation of local taste tests as justification for a racially insensitive ad was, to say the least, weak, Nabisco quickly moved to consolidate control of its international advertising under Foote, Cone & Belding in New York in an effort to keep ad campaigns more uniform. In a statement from Ann Smith, Nabisco’s director of marketing and communications, the company wanted to “ensure that the quality of our ads meet the standards we set for our brands.” The spot, she adds, was “a mistake.”