Soft drink customers must have liked the truly direct advertising pitch - "Drink Pepsi, Get Stuff."
Pepsi-Cola launched the biggest marketing campaign in its history Saturday and "it was a huge hit" in Salt Lake City, said Paul Van Slooten, the company's marketing manager.The sales push is simple - buy Pepsi and collect "Pepsi points" that can be used to get items from a 19-page catalog. Items range from a Fila mountain bike (2,750 points) to a cotton sweatshirt (250 points).
Pepsi plans to distribute about $125 million in merchandise. The company is handing out 170 million catalogs nationwide.
"We want to reward Pepsi drinkers for consuming our product," Van Slooten said. "We're building on the successes of loyalty programs that reward their customers for loyalty, but we're taking this to a much broader scale. Anyone who drinks carbonated soft drinks can be rewarded with Pepsi points to gain free merchandise."
The campaign also is intended to make the ball-shaped Pepsi logo better known, and in doing so, take on mega-rival Coca-Cola, the No. 1 selling soft drink in the United States.
"We're taking the Pepsi ball everywhere and making it an icon for everything that Pepsi represents: fun, young, hip, cool," Van Slooten said.
He said this program is bigger than the taste-test "Pepsi Challenge" of the 1980s when Pepsi outranked Coca-Cola in supermarkets.
Pepsi currently is second place in the soft drink wars.
Single cans of Pepsi don't qualify for points. To earn points, customers must buy multipacks of 12 or 24 cans of Pepsi or other specially marked Pepsi products. The points are shown on the package.
If you don't have quite enough points for a particular catalog item, you can make up the difference in cash. Rules are listed in the catalog.
About 150 Pepsi employees, including top executives, turned out Saturday at major grocery and other stores to hand out catalogs.
All went well despite Saturday's unusual weather, said Dick Brace, Pepsi's general manager for Salt Lake, Price and Elko, Nev.
Brace, who distributed catalogs at an Albertsons store, said about half the people he talked to had already seen Pepsi's television commercial launching the campaign.
"A lot of people told me they already are saving them (points)," Brace said. "People are interested in what's in the catalog. I think it's what people are actually buying for summer this year."
Brace said other non-soft drink companies have had enormous success with similar campaigns.
"It was time for us to do that, to do something the public would be interested in," he said.