Pepsi gives money for others to pursue “great ideas” instead of doing great things themselves.

Part of my job is understanding what others are doing on the web.  That means I spend time every day reading relevant blogs and exploring social networks.  I do this for the same reason that we as an agency do this for our clients; understanding the market you are engaging in will result in the most probable success.  Or, as it was stated over and over again in my high school, “prior planning prevents piss poor performance”.

A few weeks ago I read a post on TechCrunch titled Social Marketing Gone Awry: Pepsi Refresh Needs To Refresh Its Security Settings.  The article was about how Pepsi was using the $20 million it would usually spend on Super Bowl advertising to sponsor “great ideas” of others but had not properly tested the system for running their marketing campaign before going live, which in itself was interesting to me as a social media professional and reminded me of the “6 P’s”.   I sent the link to myself because I knew I had more thoughts on the matter as an entrepreneur; Pepsi is giving away money to individuals and organizations to explore great ideas and man-o-man do I have a lot of ideas.

Since bigMETHOD is my life and I am a very environmentally conscious person here was my big $250,000 idea: Take a small environmentally conscious US market, only a few hundred people with limited shopping options, and replace all current Pepsi distribution with a reusable solution as a test market to prove not only the success environmentally but also financially for Pepsi.  Specifically I am saying that they should:

• give every community member a set of reusable beverage storage containers of varying size
• replace all market / grocery plastic bottles and aluminum cans with large dispensers, just like is currently offered for filtered water in many grocery stores, that use credit card payment and are metered just like a gas pump (only pay for what you consume)
• require all to-go restaurants to sell reusable containers provided by Pepsi instead of disposable cups or allow patrons to fill their own containers at a metered rate
• (here is where bigMETHOD fits in…) use the social web to broadcast a constant stream of feedback from the consumers in this test market so that the rest of the world at large can be a part of this idea in action

Benefits include:

• less waste
• more efficient delivery (trucking just the Pepsi syrup like restaurants receive instead of the heavier pre-mixed bottles)
• locally and globally consumers might choose Pepsi over competitors because of this new care for the environment
• locally and globally consumers might choose Pepsi over competitors because a new social standard is set

Possible downsides include:

• people might be so rooted in their process and not their brand loyalty that they might buy competitor products instead

Now let’s be clear about something, I don’t drink soda and Pepsi is not one of the “good guys”.  Did you see the movie American Gangster?  Frank Lucas (Denzel Washington), just like his mentor before him, gives away turkeys to the people in the poor area of town around the holidays and they love him for it while they ignore the fact that the drugs he sells are the major causes of their financial, crime, and social issues.  This is just like Pepsi “giving away” $20 million so others can do “great things”.  They sell sugar water that makes a great deal of money for their company while slowly killing people (diabetis, obesity) and the earth (plastic bottles and more).  We all know this but that knowledge has not stopped people from buying soda for lunch just like they would take the turkey for Thanksgiving dinner.

Pepsi, I know why you are doing this marketing campaign - it sets you apart from the competitors who are all doing expensive television ads and hopefully will raise more awareness than the advertising budget would have gained itself because you are doing something “selfless”.  This (well, and tax breaks) is why fast food companies donate to diabetes and obesity research, cigarette companies donate to lung cancer research, alcohol companies donate to M.A.D.D., oil companies donate to investigate clean energy technologies… But doing perceived good while you are being bad is still bad and sooner or later you are going to have to change.

So what am I asking from Pepsi?  What am I asking from all product manufacturers?  Be less like Frank Lucas and more like Tony Stark.  Make a change to prove to people that you care and give them something that they need, not just what they want, and “be the change you want to see in the world” instead of relying on others to do great things.  If there is one encompassing thing that the social Internet will bring to our world it is corporate accountability.  Remember, people follow leaders.