At the start of every year, the Collegiate Marketing Group publishes a Spring Break Guide for college students across the nation. The guide was first published in 1992 providing travel tips, destination news and information on everything about Spring Break.
The Collegiate Marketing Group specializes in the youth market and basically owns all territory related to Spring Break marketing. Their Spring Break Guide reaches an estimated one million students including the print and web publication as well as the students on social media.
This year, Pepsi’s new Mountain Dew energy drink, Kickstart, is the featured annual sponsor, replacing Coca-Cola. The shift in sponsor seems to be due to PepsiCo’s efforts in supporting the Mountain Dew brand.
Kickstart was introduced in February 2013, and sales surged to more than 100 million in the first 6 months. PepsiCo is planning on supporting Kickstart even more in year two. Kickstart was given a 35% media spending boost compared to its first year on the market.
This 35% can already be seen through the increased spring break advertising PepsiCo has been sponsoring. There are a number of things that PepsiCo reveals about themselves by choosing to spend their marketing budget on college spring break guides. The first is that it identifies PepsiCo’s target audience for this campaign. A second thing is they are trying to associate this drink and its brand with the spring break scene (party, lights, sun, fun, etc).
While these 2 things stand out, there are many other things to examine in this campaign. While you are on spring break, will you notice Kickstart and give it a try? We’ll see how PepsiCo and Kickstart do with their promotional campaign.
– Rachel Gracy & Greg Rothman
IMC Hawks Blog 