Since Coke is generally acknowledged as the world’s top brand, Pepsi is the ultimate challenger brand.
Went all in and placed a big bet with its Amp Energy drink and landed Dale Earnhardt Jr.
A coordinated full-year sponsorship calendar starting with the Super Bowl XLI halftime show through the New Year’s Day Amp Winter Classic.
Historically that has made Pepsi a “big idea” company, whether that’s with powerful concepts like “twice as much for a nickel too” that challenged Coke in the 1940s, an infinite number of new and not always successful brands (anyone remember Crystal Pepsi?), or marketing tie-ins with pop icons including Michael Jackson, Britney Spears and the “Star Wars” films.
When it comes to sports sponsorship, there may never be a more eventful period than the past 18 months, during which the company put its imprimatur on the Super Bowl, NASCAR’s most popular driver, and the NHL’s novel outdoor game in Buffalo.
The pairing of Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s new Hendrick Motorsports car with Amp Energy Drink was the talk of the new NASCAR season and has already moved the beverage up to fourth place in a category where competitors such as Red Bull had already lapped Pepsi as the market exploded.
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Pepsi’s market share at soda taps in big league facilities has gone from 22.4 percent to 45.2 percent over the past decade.
Junior’s presence helped the brand’s visibility grow to unprecedented levels, catalyzing retail activation where Amp had not been previously. Not surprisingly, sales and brand awareness are up double digits.
“Our goal when using sports is to tap that passion to build a connection to consumers and increase our penetration at retail,” said Ralph Santana, Pepsi’s vice president of sports media and interactive marketing. “Bringing on Junior might be the best example ever of how we did both.”
Pepsi also leveraged Amp as the title sponsor of the NHL Winter Classic in Buffalo, which gave the league its biggest television rating in 12 years. And at the most recent Super Bowl, Amp had bike riders power the Super Bowl pregame show that the brand title sponsored by pedaling for five straight days to provide the power.
Super Bowl advertising is nothing new for Pepsi — it has bought ads during more than 20 games. However, Pepsi’s marketing assault on Super Bowl XLI was unprecedented. Looking to boost awareness of its new can design, Pepsi created a can with “bling” and built the first Super Bowl watch-and-win contest around it. Specifically, Pepsi offered a can studded with jewels and worth $100,000, along with Super Bowl tickets for life. Consumers had to register online for a code, which allowed Pepsi to beef up its database. The winning code was announced at halftime, during the Pepsi-sponsored halftime show with Prince.
While it’s difficult to make a direct cause-effect relationship, all that incremental sports marketing came during a time when Pepsi’s stellar financial performance was one of the bigger stories on Wall Street. During the 2007 fiscal year, profit grew about 2 percent, revenue rose about 7 percent, and stock shares climbed 27 percent.
Other highlights include continued retail activation around Jeff Gordon, Pepsi’s longest-standing endorser. A Wal-Mart program in which consumers designed a paint scheme for Gordon’s race car generated a 22 percent sales lift there.
An original X Games sponsor, Pepsi dropped the seminal action sports exhibition in favor of keeping just the Dew Tour. Sales increased 19 percent in Dew Tour markets in 2007.
“There’s no doubt when you see what we’ve taken on that we’re spending,” Santana said, “but we’re spending because it works. We’re building points with consumers and we’re moving cases at retail. Otherwise we wouldn’t be doing this.”
