During the economic crisis, when consumption shifted to multi-serves, Pepsi wanted to increase sales through a promotion. Although Pepsi had targeted young people in the previous campaigns, this time the focus was on the primary shopper: Housewives who prefer bigger sizes for the family.However, there was a bigger challenge this time as housewives were not used to text-and-win promotions like the young people.Therefore we decided to engage housewives in such a way that would encourage them to participate in the mobile promotion not only once, but several times. We had to make our message travel virally among the target.

Giving away free airtime credits was not enough to motivate housewives to participate in the promotion. We had to surprise them and motivate them for repeated participations.We picked Seda Sayan (Oprah Winfrey of Turkey) as the spokesperson and used her voice to surprise our target. Each time a housewife texted a unique code, she received a different IVR call from Seda. Housewives were shocked to hear Seda on the phone every time they participated. A ring-back-tone (RBT) announcing the promotion was also assigned to each participant’s phone. IVRs and RBTs changed everyday which helped to spread the word virally on mobile.

The new mobile campaign outperformed all previous Pepsi promotions:Pepsi received 16.2 million SMS in 12 weeks.On average over 200 thousand people participated everyday.3.2million unique consumers participated, doubling previous promotions.80% of all participants were first-timers, who haven’t joined any previous Pepsi promotions.For the first time, 63% of the participations came from family size products.Ring-back-tone was listened to 21 million times!Campaign achieved overall 5% increase in market share and received 2 MMA Global Awards for Mobile Innovation / Creativity.

Mobile was a difficult medium for a housewife target because they were not used to texting unique codes and participating in text-and-win promotions. So we decided to surprise housewives by shocking them on the phone hearing a celebrity congratulating and motivating them each time they participated in the promotion.Consumers got thrilled about receiving phone calls from Oprah Winfrey of Turkey. Different IVR calls created a genuine word-of-mouth. The promotional ring-back-tones spread the word as well. On average, 4 other people called the participants during the day, and they were all exposed to the Pepsi jingle and promotional messages.