teachthe4ps.com - For instructors of marketing.

According to “Mountain Dew Wants Some Street Cred” (Bloomberg Businessweek, April 26, 2012) Mountain Dew accounts for 20% of PepsiCo’s US soft drink sales.  The brand is especially popular in the southeastern part of the country — even outselling Coca Cola in convenience stores in Coke’s home state of Georgia.  Mountain Dew’s customer demographics skew to young whites – a slow growth demographic.  So the company has been trying to reach out to young Latinos and blacks.

This short article touches on many different elements of marketing — demographics, targeting, new product development, and advertising.  You could describe the demographic issue in a couple of slides, show the ad below — part of the new “This is How We Dew” campaign — and then ask students what else Mountain Dew could do to appeal to these new target markets.  We have also posted this over at Learn the 4 Ps.

With sales slow in the U.S., Procter & Gamble brand managers are looking to sharpen their appeal to the growing Hispanic market.  In 2010, there were about 50 million Hispanic-Americans living in the U.S.  In our books we cover this demographic trend in chapter 5 (Basic Marketing) or chapter 3 (Essentials of Marketing).  Obviously P&G sees this growing market these numbers.  So its crack marketing research uncovered new ways to appeal to this market.  This article, “Hola:  P&G Seeks Latino Shoppers” (Wall Street Journal, September 15, 2011, non-subscribers may need to click here) highlights efforts in packaging and product.

This example will work well when you cover demographic trends, market segmentation, cross-cultural, or product — since most of the examples in the article have to do with adapting product to this market.

The fast-growing Hispanic and Latino population are commanding the attention of many consumer products firms.  This short article “How Marketers Are Courting Latino Consumers” over at ClickZ (October 15, 2010) gives some short example of tactics used by NBC Universal’s Telemundo, General Mills, Yahoo!, and Univision.

The article might give you some examples to use in class when teaching about demographics, Hispanic consumers, and/or promotion.

This article (“The Hispanic Market Is Set to Soar,” Adweek, November 2, 2009)provides a detailed preview of the demographic shifts expected in the 2010 Census. The focus of this article is on the implications for agencies and media outlets.