Marketing in the News: Pepsi's 'Dig In' Campaign

I chose Pepsi’s ‘Dig in’ campaign as my marketing example because it was one of the few ads that I found that had a good purpose. The why of this campaign stood out to me and is what gravitated me towards learning more about it.

“Pepsi launched a multichannel campaign to urge support for Black-owned restaurants and help them generate more than $100 million in sales over the next five years”(Williams). They have set a goal to help around 400 small black owned resurants. The soda brand is digging in by training and mentoring these small businesses to help get them out of the economic turmoil that the pandemic has put them all in. 

PepsiCo provides value for this campaign because of their reputation and large audience. The

commercial for ‘Dig In’ is 30 seconds long and is being aired from December 26th through February 8th on the NFL channel and website. The outreach for this is massive. As well as the immediate PepsiCo and NFL audience outreach, this is also getting a lot of attention because of recent events in 2020 that increased notice for the Black Lives Matter political and social movement. 

During the Covid-19 pandemic, “61% of 32,109 restaurants that closed, shut down permanently” (Williams). They will be working with the restaurants still open but struggling. One may objection is to close the digital divide in restaurants by helping with online orders and delivery, and also working to improve operations in order to maximize profit. In the commercial for ‘Dig In’, Pepsi adds the names and shows the food from some of the restaurants involved with the campaign. This shows the audience who the campaign is working with and where they can go to support some of the restaurants.

The main challenge Pepsi is trying to help with is the 61% of restaurants that have closed during the Covid-19 pandemic, specifically black owned restaurants. The on-going pandemic is obviously making everything in this world more difficult as well as this campaign. With covid-19 restrictions, most restaurants are not open for dine in, this is a major obstacle for revenue, and the reason why the push for online ordering and delivery is so high. 

“Outreach efforts can help small and midsize business (SMB) owners learn more about improving their operations and boosting revenue, while also fostering good will toward PepsiCo brands…” (Williams) I think this campaign is unique because not only is it for a really good cause that is helping a lot of people, it’s creating a ton of good publicity for the PepsiCo brand.

I think this marketing approach was good but there are a few things that I would do differently to improve it if I was the brand/product manager. PepsiCo works with the NFL a lot so the placement of the commercial is not surprising however, I feel like they missed a large target market of people. The campaign revolves around food, so running the commercial on Food Network or Cooking Channel may have a good reaction. As well as those two networks, I think the social and political movement pushes attention towards news channels with large viewing numbers so if the advertisement was ran there it would have a larger outreach. 

https://www.marketingdive.com/news/pepsi-seeks-to-help-black-owned-restaurants-with-dig-in-campaign/592804/ 

https://www.multivu.com/players/English/8831851-pepsi-dig-in-black-owned-restaurants/