You've got to give PepsiCo
It's a match made in heaven. Pepsi has positioned Mountain Dew as the drink of choice for extreme-sports fanatics and young caffeine junkies. Microsoft's next-generation gaming device is a natural for teen and young-adult controller jockeys.
But where Pepsi really earns my syrupy praise is in the way it is carrying out the giveaway. True to its "Every 10 Minutes" promotional tagline, Pepsi will be awarding a new Xbox every 10 minutes over the next nine weeks. Staging the promotion before the new console hits retailers for the holiday season is clever. The way Pepsi is going about it is even better.
Mountain Dew drinkers with specially marked sodas will be able to enter promotional codes to enter the contest. Through a website powered by Yahoo!
This twist adds a level of strategy to the quest of landing a new game system. It's perfect, if not entirely original. At Electronic Arts'
I took Pepsi's marketing to task three years ago when it rolled out its doomed Pepsi Blue. The company tested 100 different formula combinations before settling on the Windex-blue concoction, but then blew it by promoting the drink with a band whose first hit single was about teenage suicide.
The cola wars have often found Pepsi and rival Coca-Cola
Coca-Cola is a recommendation of the Motley Fool Inside Value newsletter service; Electronic Arts has been selected in Motley Fool Stock Advisor.
Longtime Fool contributor Rick Munarriz isn't a huge fan of Mountain Dew, though his son can down the Code Red variety as if it were water. He does not own shares in any of the companies mentioned in this story. He is also part of the Rule Breakers newsletter research team, seeking out tomorrow's ultimate growth stocks a day early. T he Fool has a disclosure policy.