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Pepsi's bold experiment with social marketing

admin — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 16:08:23 +0000

This year, instead of spending $20 million on SuperBowl ads, Pepsi decided to put the money into Pepsi Refresh, a social marketing campaign which solicits the best ideas from consumers and plans to dole out $20 million in grants to good causes and “great ideas” throughout the year. The site opened up about 10 hours ago to take ideas from people applying for grants. On February 1, voting will begin to determine the best ideas, which will receive grants ranging from $5,000 to $250,000 each.

The Pepsi Refresh site is similar in functionality to other crowdsourced idea generating efforts such as Dell’s IdeaStorm (which is run on top of Salesforce.com) and the type of sites created by UserVoice, although it is not clear who created the site on behalf of Pepsi. I have contacted Pepsi to find out and will update if I hear back from them.

Regardless, this is not a good way to launch a massive social marketing campaign aimed at fostering warm-and-fuzzy feelings towards Pepsi. Hopefully, it can fix things quickly and recover because it’s actually a pretty good idea if Pepsi can get past the technical and privacy snafus.

Top 10 Consumer Electronics Innovators

admin — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 14:57:43 +0000

Everyone loves a list, especially (at this blog at least) one that ranks innovative companies. We publish our own annual Top 50 roster, which you can see here. Strategos, an innovation consultancy that is owned by UTEK, just released a Top 10 list of its own.

The rankings overlap a bit—Apple, LG, Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony are on both—but the order is quite different. At BusinessWeek, Apple is first, followed by Google, Toyota, Microsoft, and Nintendo. Strategos puts LG in the lead, trailed immediately by Nintendo and Microsoft. As for Apple, it ranks 10th.

One obvious reason for the different lineups: The Strategos list includes only consumer electronics companies, while ours encompasses all companies. I’ve asked Strategos CEO Peter Skarzynski for an explanation of Apple’s relatively poor showing. I’ll fill you in when I hear from him.

Here’s the entire Strategos Top 10:

LG
Nintendo
Microsoft
Sony
Hitachi
Canon
Sharp
NetApp
Audiovox
Apple

Ecolean – Lighter Approach to Packaging

admin — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 21:55:59 +0000

Ecolean is a new packaging alternative dubbed as “A Lighter Approach to Packaging”.

Ecolean

“Lightweight packaging is our answer to the demands of the liquid food industry and consumers asking for modern and clever packages. By using a minimal amount of raw material we create a lightweight package which combines low environmental impact with consumer convenience. Saving resources is saving the environment. That is why lightweight packaging has become a heavyweight argument.

The unique, pitcher-looking design has a generous face for consumer communication. It has a perfect surface for really high-quality print. Colours and sharpness will do justice to any communicative intention and will certainly draw the attention of a fast moving consumer.

Ecolean