Branding

BM: CASE 3: A NEW MORNING FOR MOUNTAIN DEW

Mountain Dew was launched in 1969. PepsiCo initially marketed Mountain Dew with the countrified tag line “Yahoo Mountain Dew! It will tickle your innards”. Since then, the drink has outgrown its provincial roots. After an unsuccessful attempt in the early 1980s to bring urban teenage drinkers to the brand by advertising on MTV, the company switched its focus to using outdoor action scenes in its ads.

In the late 1980s, Mountain Dew posted double-digit annual volume increases. This phenomenal growth continued thro’ the 1990s and Mountain Dew was the fastest-growing major soft drink in the US for much of the decade. The brand’s aggressive pursuit of young soda drinkers aided Mountain Dew’s market share rise from 2.7% in 1980 to 7.2% in 2000, the year Mountain Dew briefly passed Diet Coke to become the number 3 soft drink in terms of market share.

Mountain Dew updated its outdoor image in the 1990s by using extreme sports such as skydiving, skateboating and snowboarding. Early ads featured athletes participating in extreme sports while consuming Mountain dew, accompanied by the tagline “Do the Dew”.

A more recent ad featured a man on a mountain bike chasing a cheetah to retrieve a can of Dew while another portrayed a man who butt-heads with a ram in order to protect his Mountain Dew. To reach the urban demographic, which typically does not watch action sports competition, Mountain Dew also developed a series of print, radio and TV ads featuring hip-hop superstar endorser Busta Rhymes.

Mountain Dew balances its high-profile nationally televised campaigns with grassroots marketing efforts such as sponsoring action-sports athletes and events such as ESPN X-Games, offering samples from its branded Dew Hummer trucks and subway cars and staging promotions at local skate parks.

Another grassroots campaign involved a beeper promotion in which more than 50,000 teens bought reduced-price