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Customer experience and sugar water
Mar 19, 2008
A brief article caught my eye recently, saying something interesting about customer experience.
The article (read it here) reports that PepsiCo is launching a new sugary drink and has retained the services of a "brand experience" agency to help get the word out.
This made me think: Can you really create a sugar-water "experience"?
I have a hard time believing so, with a few exceptions I'll get to.
A good experience needs to deliver on at least one, preferably more than one, of these "three strands": meaning, aesthetics, and utility (see Three strands of good experience). Let's consider Pepsi's new fizzy drink...
• meaning: does fizzy sugar water mean, or stand for, something significant or authentic?
• aesthetics: is the taste remarkably better or different from other carbonated sugar drinks?
• utility: does the drink help you accomplish something?
Again, it's hard to say yes to any of these. Soft drinks are essentially just expensive substitutes for water - which has plenty of all three qualities above, and at a much lower price point. (I think this is why soft drinks need a lot of advertising to "wow" customers into paying up.)
Now for the exceptions. Yes, some drinks have tried to deliver on one or more strands in the past, in various ways...
• meaning: organic ingredients, fair-trade certified, some percentage of profits going to worthy causes, etc.
• aesthetics: unusual packaging (i.e., shape of the bottle), special or limited-availability label designs, etc.
• utility: vitamin-enriched, less sugar, extra caffeine (for possible short-term productivity boost), better packaging for opening, pouring, or carrying, etc.
A good experience has to be substantial, or real, in some way - preferably multiple ways. Simply brewing up a new sugary flavor and slapping a label on it does not an experience make.
And yet that's what Pepsi seems to be doing. (I will note that the new drink has no caffeine, so perhaps there's an element of utility, but there are lots of carbonated caffeine-free products in the marketplace already.)
Indeed, Pepsi's strategy is striking in how traditional it appears: identify target consumers, invent a name and flavor that is palatable to them, and launch... which is, I suppose, how sugar water has always been marketed.
What's new is that Pepsi calls this a "brand experience" and is seeking to get the product into the hands of influentials - employees of Apple, Google, and MTV; Sundance attendees; etc... all in the hopes that the strategy will, in the words of one executive, "have people experience the product on their own terms and turn them into brand ambassadors."
Would a smart 20- or 30-something become a "brand ambassador" after their "experience" of drinking a carbonated fruity drink? I mean... really? Hold that thought.
Brands succeed today because of good experiences. I've seen people recommend JetBlue (on competing airline flights) - because of the inflight experience. I've seen people recommend Zappos.com, because of their online customer experience. Google. Apple. Whole Foods. Trader Joe's. I've seen people voluntarily recommend them all, because of a meaningful, fun, helpful, or otherwise significantly good experience that they've had with the brand.
Good experience drives the success of companies, whole industries even, but I'm not sure that fizzy sugar water is part of that movement. Generally speaking, there's just not enough substance to recommend it.
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P.S. This column may also bring to mind the famous quote, which I'll paraphrase: "Do you want to spend the rest of your career selling sugar water, or do you want to change the world?"
This is roughly what Steve Jobs is supposed to have said to John Sculley when he recruited him to Apple Computer in the 80s (see my column Customer experience and the next 20 years).
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See also: Defining "branding"
After reading the article, I agree that this sounds more like some ad agency's pitch than a considered way to connect to potential customers. Nor is it a way to design a new product.
Saying that, I have recently become a sort of a “brand ambassador” for a Pepsi product: Diet Pepsi Max. What it delivers to me is that it is diet, i.e. no sugar, and second, it has double the caffeine of regular diet Pepsi. It is my drink of choice in the morning and at the office.
I don't drink coffee, and many times tea is too much work (I hate bottled teas) and I absolutely need caffeine (I have a two-year-old). I normally drink Diet Pepsi, but there’s not nearly enough caffeine in it compared to coffee, so Diet Pepsi Max fits my niche perfectly. I would think that Pepsi would have an easier time selling this to the overworked minions of Apple, Google, et. al. by pointing out the higher caffeine amounts, and that it has ginsing (which sounds like it might almost be good for you). Yet, I've never seen an ad for it, and had to ask several times at my grocery store before they began offering it.
Someone's not getting it at Pepsi, and I'm not so sure Mark gets the allure of so-called "sugar water", as some peoples' preferred medium for self-medication, over the much-higher-priced "roasted-bean water". :-)
Andrew
If you take a broader, dare I say open minded view, anyone can form a relationship with anything. There are only three things that are required - trust, alignment and, eventually, commitment. In the case of a soft drink, trust is born of economic necessity - I'm thirsty, the store that I'm in has this on the shelf, it looks reasonable. Alignment speaks to the experience, as well as the promise of the future. I like the taste, the look the can, what the brand stands for, what the drink contains, etc. From trust and alignment, commitment will grow over time. Before you know it, you won't be able to imagine your morning without your fizzy sugar water. Someone can have a relationship and by extension an experience with just about anything.
Do people really think they can have a relationship with a can of soda?
Maybe it's semantics, but to me it seems a stretch.
I think Seth Godin would have a field day over this one. Talk about meatball sundaes... taking sugar water an put it in the hands of "influentials" so you can grow by word of mouth? Pepsi is trying to play the game the way an independent, start up cult brand would play it and I don't think that's going to work. I don't think the "influentials" will become ambassadors of something that comes from Pepsico Inc...
You left out "sugar water in can as membership card". People do identify with sugar water. Mountain Dew grew like crazy in part because folks thought, "If I drink this, I'll be perceived differently." For some, it's a sign of belonging or a signal of attitude. All of this commentary notwithstanding, I think Pepsi is being silly.
This Malcolm Gladwell speach at Ted in 2004 actually talks about this exact topic (albeit perhaps tangentially and from a perspective other than just plain branding):
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/20
"To a worm in horseradish, the world is horseradish" is my favorite part.
I think the boys at Pepsi are getting a little overexcited.
Maybe they've had too much of their own product.