Review of "Dew XP: Rank Up Your Game" Campaign
Summary of "Dew XP: Rank Up Your Game" Campaign
When consumers purchase specially marked Mountain Dew products, they receive codes they can enter on the site to redeem combat cards and XP points. Mountain Dew has a YouTube page with over 200 videos. One of the videos shows the audience what this campaign is all about.
For the campaign, 470 million codes were produced. These codes are distributed between both Mountain Dew products and Doritos. Consumers are given an incentive if they buy both. When you purchase both products together, you are given even more XP points.
Mountain Dew uses Facebook as a platform for their campaign. The Mountain Dew page has over 6 million likes, and they also have a link that takes viewers to a more specific Game Fuel XP Page.They also have a Twitter account with 47,507 followers. They use this to respond to these followers and answer questions. There is not, however, a specific twitter for the Game Fuel campaign.
Critique of "Dew XP: Rank Up Your Game" Campaign
Overall, I think this is a very strong campaign. In previous years, Mountain Dew has represented other video games, such as Halo 3. They created new, limited- time-only flavors for the games. However, this is the first year they offer codes in order to benefit the consumer in the game. I think this is a huge strength in this campaign. This campaign compared to previous ones provides a mutually beneficial relationship between the company and consumer.
Their official site does a good job at promoting the specific campaign as well. They provide a link to bring the viewer to the specific "Rank Up Your Game" page. The also have links to all of their social media. The site does a good job at helping viewers find this campaign.
The "Rank Up You Game" site is easy to navigate and find. It is the first site that appears when you Google Mountain Dew. It also has two applications that allow you to update your status or tweet about the campaign and redeeming your points.
However, if you use this application to update your status, the status appears on the main Facebook page. It does not take your attention to their specific "Rank Up Your Game" page. I think this would have been helpful in order to separate posts about the campaign from generic posts about the product. That’s the purpose of having separate pages in the first place.
Other than that, their Facebook has a great two-way conversation between the company and its consumers. They respond often and quickly to users’ questions/ concerns. They even have polls where consumers can vote for their favorite new flavors associated with the new Call of Duty, along with other polls.
I believe this campaign would benefit from a separate twitter account though. Their feed has a mixture of tweets about the promotion and generic tweets about the products. Similar to the Facebook page, this makes it hard to navigate through if you want to find specific information regarding the Game Fuel campaign. Mountain Dew has great response to followers though.
Other thoughts for this campaign would be to utilize even more social media tools. For instance, they could use QR codes where people are purchasing their Mountain Dew. These could take consumers right to the site and allow them to quickly redeem their points.
Also, I think they could use foursquare especially when the game comes out. Maybe when people check-into Best Buy or wherever they purchase the game, they can have a promotion on foursquare. An example could be a “buy one get one free” on a 20 oz. bottle of Mountain Dew with the purchase of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. The stores usually just have these at the check out counter anyway.
Overall, it’s a very effective campaign that utilizes social media. There are certain weaknesses they could improve upon, but “Rank Up Your Points” is a strong campaign.
