Pepsi Refresh Project: the US launch

Read the campaign story

Pepsi Refresh Project turned a brand promise about optimism into a system for proposing and funding community ideas. In the United States, people and organisations could submit projects, then invite the public to vote for the ideas they wanted supported. Pepsi became the named organiser of that process. The campaign offered participants something more consequential than a chance to appear in an advertisement: a route toward resources for a cause they cared about.

Pepsi’s own January 2010 announcement records the opening of submissions, and its February announcement records the first public voting round. The programme covered areas including education, neighbourhoods, health and the environment. These releases establish the designed process and funding intention. They should not be mistaken for independent proof of long-term community benefit or a measured effect on beverage purchases. This entry is limited to the original US programme, rather than later international versions.

The creative mechanism, in my reading, is to give participants a practical reason to distribute the campaign. A person supporting a local project has an existing audience of friends, neighbours or fellow members. Asking them to vote can carry Pepsi’s programme into that network without every contact beginning with a brand advertisement. The subject of the message is the project; the brand provides the infrastructure and potential funding that make the request relevant.

The same mechanism creates a governance problem. Popular voting can reward the ability to mobilise a large network rather than the quality or need of a proposal. MediaPost’s early-2011 account reports that large organisations and alliances had dominated selections, contributing to changes in grant levels and voting rules. That is a useful operational lesson, not a reason to dismiss participation altogether. A smaller version needs clear eligibility, manageable application effort, fair review and a plan to explain decisions before asking people to campaign for support.

Commercial evaluation needs equal care. Votes, proposed projects, funded work, brand preference and product sales are different outcomes. A rise in participation would not automatically prove sales success, and a contemporaneous brand sales decline would not establish that this campaign caused it. No such causal conclusion is made here. The transferable idea is a useful public process with a credible brand role, provided the team measures its social commitments and business objectives separately and can actually deliver what it offers.

Give sharing a useful purpose

Design a request people have a real reason to pass on, such as supporting a relevant community project, rather than asking for promotion alone.

Design fairness before launch

Decide how eligibility, review and network-size advantages will be handled. Publish understandable rules and resource the review work.

Separate outcome types

Report participation, delivered benefits and commercial effects separately. Do not use one as a substitute for another.

A small test for another brief

Design a small, fixed-scope community-support pilot with transparent selection.

Application burden, breadth of participation, delivery of promised support and brand attribution as separate measures.

Do not launch without delivery resources, transparent rules and safeguards against popularity overwhelming suitability.

• Define one eligible community need and a realistically deliverable contribution.
• Use an expression-of-interest form and an accessible review process.
• Publish the selected project’s delivery milestones and an honest evaluation plan.