Mountain Dew

Mountain Dew Is Mountain Dew's advertising campaign directed at the right market segment, does it differentiate the product from the competition, and does it communicate effectively the product benefits? Explain your answer. Mountain Dew's latest advertising campaign as defined in the recent BusinessWeek article Mountain Dew Wants Some Street Cred (Stanford, 2012) is directed to the right market segment, who are young adults in the 18- to 24-year-olds. The advertising strategy is attempting to reach multiple new audiences while staying solidified on its primary core target market.

This strategy will be challenging to accomplish with only Mountain Dew itself, hence the decision to launch Code Red and LiveWire, two new beverages. With these two new beverages, Mountain Dew has a better chance of accomplishing the goals as defined in their advertising campaign. The foundation of any effective marketing strategy must begin with the actual product and the value it delivers to the customer.

Mountain Dew is moving in the right direction to differentiate itself in a very crowded, competitive and inferring from the article, slow-growth market by concentrating on the unique needs of each new segment they want to sell into. Differentiation will be easily accomplished with Code Red and LiveWire, yet will be more challenging with the core Mountain Dew product which is now decades old. The benefits of Mountain Dew are being communicated differently to each market segment as well.

In the Southeastern U.S., Mountain Dew is known as a substitute for caffeinated beverages, based on personal experiences traveling there. The campaign that the company communicates via the BusinessWeek article shows the core messaging and benefits will stay unchanged in their core market segments, the white consumers in the Plains states and Southeastern U.S.

The company is struggling to get the right focus on the young blacks and Latinos located in the more urban areas, singing up rap star Lil Wayne as their spokesperson, in addition to skateboarding champion Paul Rodriguez. The company continues to fuel demand in its core markets in the Plains and Southeastern U.S. By also signing Jason Aldean, a country music singer.

Celebrity endorsers can't differentiate a product that lacks relevant benefits for each target market; these celebrities will not be enough to make Mountain View attractive to the diverse markets the company is attempting to move into. What's needed is a benefits-driven strategy anchored to the product levels, with Code Red and LiveWire offer the potential of. Provide a proposed redesign of the campaign that could have a more universal appeal. What communication channels should be focused on? Why? The communication channels today are based on traditional media vs.

The more popular and rapidly changing areas of social media. Mountain Dew needs to focus on the core personas or prototypical, prospective customers of the young blacks and Latinos if they are to be successful. They also need to make the benefits of traditional Mountain Dew more relevant and communicate them with greater clarity. The Code Red and LiveWire beverages can also change the entire marketing strategy for the urban market by including customer feedback and by showing they are listening to this market as well.

In short, the existing marketing strategy lacks the voice of the customer in it. If Mountain Dew is going to be successful they need to get their prospective customers into the communication strategies more effectively than they are. The best way to get greater engagement with the young blacks and Latinos, in addition to solidifying relationships with their core customers, Mountain Dew needs to use social media more effectively. The age of customer engagement and conversation is now driving a revolution throughout many consumer and business-based brands (Bernoff, Li, 2008).

Mountain Dew.