Packaging Performs in the Marketing Mix

Mountain Dew drinkers' enthusiasm for the product, together with the brand's emphasis on creativity and self expression, made social media a natural choice for the collaborative DEWmocracy 2 campaign. The 12-month, seven-stage campaign will culminate with the launch of a new, permanent addition to the Mountain Dew line-up this October.

"Our fans are incredibly passionate about Mountain Dew," says Angie Gentile, assistant brand manager for Mountain Dew. "Of course they love the product, but it's more than that to them. It's a lifestyle. They live, breathe, sleep Dew every day. To them, it says something about who they are."

Because the fans care so much, "They actually want a say in what the brand does," Gentile adds. "DEWmocracy gave them that opportunity in a real way." The brand used social media to identify and reach out to its brand fanatics, starting a conversation that ended up in DEW Labs on Facebook. DEW Labs consists of more than 4,000 of the brand's most hard-core fans.

In addition to helping Mountain Dew develop flavor profiles and choose product names, colors and descriptors, DEW Labs collaborated with the brand owner on package graphics.

Using Facebook, the brand put out a call for package designs for the three finalist flavors. Consumers voted for their favorite package graphics, winnowing the 357 submissions to 10 designs. From there, DEW Labs members narrowed the selection to a single package design for each of the three flavors. The top 10 designers each received an Apple MacBook Pro, and the top three also received a prize of $10,000.

The three winning designers worked closely with the Mountain Dew brand team for two to three months to finesse the package designs. "We truly brought them into the process," Gentile recalls. In essence, "they were on the brand team during that time. We didn't tell them anything different than what we were telling each other here at PepsiCo headquarters."

Within the promotional mix, "There is nothing quite as impactful as the actual packaging and the package design," Gentile adds, noting that the package-design competition "was one of the most exciting stages of our campaign. People got passionate about it because they knew how important it was."

Using an online process similar to that of the design contest, the brand recruited television ads for the three top flavors. In a two-step vote, consumers and DEW Labs members chose the winning ads, which ran nationally.

The three finalist products hit store shelves in April, and consumers voted for Mountain Dew White Out as the winning flavor. At the time of this writing, the brand's online community is developing a launch plan for White Out.

DEWmocracy 2 has yielded ongoing benefits for Mountain Dew, drawing an enormous number of fans into conversation with the brand. "It's been a crazy ride on Facebook," Gentile says. Between July 2009, when the campaign started, and July 2010, the number of fans on Mountain Dew's Facebook page grew from fewer than 200,000 to 970,000—without promotional spending on the site.

Some observers have wondered if it was risky to bring consumers so far into the product and package development process, but Gentile believes it was not. "You can argue that [our fans] know the brand as well as we do," she says. "We knew we were doing the right thing."