“In its first year, the Refresh campaign garnered more than eighty million votes, got three and a half million ‘likes’ on Pepsi’s Facebook page, and drew some sixty thousand Twitter followers. It was heartening to see so many worthy projects get funded - homeless shelters, school playgrounds, education programs for teen-age mothers - and maybe you thought better of Pepsi for it. But the campaign didn’t sell Pepsi. In 2010, the number of cases of blue-can Pepsi that were sold declined 4.8 per cent from the previous year. During the same period, PepsiCo also lost 2.6 per cent of the over-all carbonate-drink market. … It appears that hearing about all the good things PepsiCo is doing to help make the world a better place doesn’t tempt you to down a Pepsi.”
That’s from a New Yorker article about Pepsi’s attempt to increase it focus on the long term.
According to the Wall Street Journal (via a parenthetical reference in the New Yorker article), Pepsi’s problem might have something to do with who drinks Pepsi and who doesn’t…
Indeed, many voters and grant winners say they don’t generally buy soda. Don Evans, who runs a Vancouver homeless shelter that won a $25,000 grant in October, said his clients would have had no place to store their belongings were it not for the Refresh Project. But the shelter doesn’t serve soda, and Mr. Evans says he doesn’t even drink it.
Change would come a lot easier if everyone weren’t so goddamn different.
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