Pepsi Refresh Archives - Post Control Marketing

The term Best friends forever (BFF) is a close friendship developed by teenagers and young people. We may be friends with a few or a lot of social media sites, but I bet you have your favorite.

The Pew Research Center’s Social Media Update gives us a look into how social media use is evolving. As of 2013, 73% of online adults used social networking sites. Facebook was many people’s BFF in terms of number of users. But Pew Center Research also found that a striking number of users are now diversifying onto other platforms.

Results of the survey indicate that some 42% of online adults now use multiple social networking sites. What’s more, Instagram users are nearly as likely as Facebook users to check in to the site on a daily basis. Have you starting exploring personal, career, or business relationships beyond Facebook?But even this information from the Pew Center Research study can be limiting. It only looked at Facebook, Linkedin, Pinterest, Twitter, and Instagram. We know there is a lot more out there. It seems that every month another social media star is rising. Lately you may have been hearing about SnapChat or Quora, and Digg reinventing itself and gaining ground. Plus, you can never count out Google+, which keeps adding features to gain users. Let’s face it, social media can be overwhelming.

The key to success is realizing you don’t have to be in every social media channel to see real results. How do you choose? Start by organizing them into categories. You probably have high school and college BFFs, family BFFs, Work BFFs and neighborhood BFFs. They are all your friends, but you do different things with each. Below are the main categories of social media that I have developed with a list of the main players in each

Social Media Categories:

Social Networks – Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+

Blogging and Forums – WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr

Microblogging – Twitter, Pinterest

Media Sharing – YouTube, Flikr, Instagram

Geo-location – Foursquare, Facebook Places, Google+ Locations

Ratings and Reviews – Yelp, Citysearch, Google+ Local

Social Bookmarking – Reddit, StumbleUpon, Digg

Wikis and Social Knowledge – Wikipedia, Yahoo! Answers, Quora

Podcasts – RSS, iTunes

For personal, business, or career, you have to decide who you want to talk to and what you to say and how you want to say it. Wikipedia says BFFs are common when you are young, but you may grow out of them as you get older. Perhaps it is time you grew out of your social media BFF and start exploring some of these other options.

When designing creative executions, visual continuity is key – especially in today’s media cluttered world. Alex White in his book The Elements of Graphic Design says the goal of graphic design is to achieve visual unity or harmony. In an individual piece this applies to the organization of all the parts into a unified whole. All the parts no matter how different must be reconciled so they support each other. This also applies to individual pieces in a campaign. White puts it another way when saying that the “elements must work together with the greatest interest to the reader and with the least resistance from the reader.

I believe maintaining that visually continuity is especially challenging between traditional advertising mediums and the expansion of new digital forms. But I think I found an example of a brand that is doing it very well. I once again point to the Pepsi refresh project.

This was a brilliant integrated campaign built on a social media strategy but they use many traditional and non-traditional forms of marketing. And as I think you can see in picture below the visual elements of the campaign are all tied together well.

What you should notice in the examples is the design of the campaign is very simple and brilliant because it starts with the product – package design. From there they pull colors and the logo to make a simple and very appealing design in magazines/print ads, billboards, microsite, blog, Twitter, YouTube and a toolkit brochure.

Do you think it is too simple or is that where the brilliance comes? Even across traditional and digital mediums Pepsi is achieving harmonious, unified design.

Digital unity is so important these days that it has literally changed the way we work. The traditional creative team has expanded from a copywriter and art director to include a web designer as well. Throw in a PR person and you’ve got a real integrated marketing team.

Post Control Marketing

Insights for Digital First, Consumer Centric Marketing

Pepsi Refresh

Visual Continuity in Print And Digital