Unless you’ve been hiding in a cave for the past week, there’s a good chance you’ve heard about the new iPhone App released by Pepsi under its AMP energy drink brand. The “AMP UP before you score” application is a cheeky attempt to appeal to the AMP brand’s core audience of young males by providing them strategies to “pick up” a couple dozen different types of women categorized by stereotype. It then encourages those men to brag about their successful conquests using social media. Needless to say, the app has offended many and caused plenty of controversy – exactly what it was created to do.
Let’s get one thing straight: Pepsi isn’t stupid. It’s naive to believe that they didn’t spend plenty of time crafting, planning and staging this controversy. They wanted it to happen, and they’re getting tons of publicity and brand recognition for their AMP brand because of this. And you can bet they had already planned their initial and secondary responses for all of those offended. It’s the same formula used by Burger King, Ralph Lauren, Peta, etc.
The Ad Mavericks at Lessing-Flynn aren’t easily offended. In fact, in many ways, this is a brilliant marketing ploy because the truth is, strong brands can’t appeal to everybody. With the AMP app, Pepsi definitely isn’t doing that. They’re going after their highest-use, hard-core market … and trying to “out-man” their competitors in the niche.
However, there’s a difference between using aggressive marketing to carve out a niche, and intending to offend people just to gain attention and recognition. The belief that all publicity is good publicity is not true. There are plenty of other strategies Pepsi could have used to reach this audience without being so blatantly offensive. Would they have been as effective with this target audience? Maybe and maybe not. But the problem for Pepsi isn’t how this campaign will affect the AMP brand. The core AMP audience will eat this up. The bigger issue will be how it affects the other Pepsi product brands. Because Pepsi’s meager attempt at apologizing via Twitter seemed to stoke the fire more than douse it, my guess is that Pepsi will let this controversy go until they see sales of their other brands affected at the grocery store by the moms who want their young sons to grow up respecting women, not gaming them.
Congrats Pepsi, you’re our worst of the week.
Author: Tom Flynn III
www.lessingflynn.com
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