The Continuation of Mountain Dew’s Advertising

In the 1970’s, most soft drink companies started to offer their beverages in plastic bottles. Mt Dew 2To Pepsi-Cola’s disappointment, the plastic bottle manufacturers were initially unable to produce a bottle that would maintain the right shade of green needed for Mountain Dew bottles. Luckily, by 1978 that problem was solved. Pepsi quickly produced 2-liter plastic bottles and predicted that sales would greatly increase up to 300 million cases. Soon after, Mountain Dew became one of the top selling soft drinks in America, with sales that grew at a whopping 20 percent that year.

RELATED: The Evolution of Mountain Dew Advertising

In 1980, the new advertising campaign was “Taste the Sunshine.” The advertising was similar to what had been done in the previous sunshine-themed campaigns, including a song with lyrics targeted at a youth market. Unfortunately, “Taste the Sunshine” did not connect with the consumers as well as Pepsi had hoped. Halfway through the year, a new advertising campaign was in the works. Pepsi decided that sampling Mountain Dew had to be a vital part of their marketing because it was impossible to describe the flavor through words. Its flavor was one-of-a-kind and they had to give their consumers an opportunity to fall in love with it. The samplings were held at grocery stores, civic events, and any other place where large numbers of consumers congregated.

Pepsi, still thirsty for a change, gave their new sampling campaign a catchy name: “Give me a Dew.” The most important element of this campaign was showing their consumers that they no longer had to use the full ‘Mountain Dew’ name when ordering – they could simply call it ‘Dew.’ From that point forward, a nickname for loyal drinkers was created.

Mt Dew 3After the success of the “Give me a Dew,” Pepsi decided to incorporate that theme with their new advertising and created “Dew It, To It.” The new campaign included two television commercials, “Football” and “Hat Chase.” These spots were filled with the classic, fun-in-the-sun imagery and action-packed scenes further targeting their young demographic. Soon after, “Dew It, Country Cool” was created and it demonstrated how kids more country locations kept “cool”. Mountain Dew had finally found their niche market and realized that casual changes in their overall campaign were the right way to increase their success.

Come back for our next blog in our Mountain Dew blog series in about 2 weeks!

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