For those of you who might have missed it, on November 23^rd, Dr. Pepper sought to fulfill their promise to America. In our opinion, they did not do a very good job. Errors like this dont have to happen but if they do, they have to be corrected or they will hang around the brand forever.

Disappoint your customers and you will pay a price

DP made a promise to give everyone a free DP. Then they created a very technical, three step process which consumers had one day to sign up on a web site to eventually get a coupon in which they could have as few as 60 days to redeem before it was invalid. This created grumpy consumers. DP then failed to even deliver on this by not having enough server space to handle the incoming volume. 

Behold the power of word of mouth

Ideas that are interesting, relevant and authentic get shared. DP supporting Axl met all three of these criteria for fans of both DP and GNR.   An Influencer’s story gets shared approx 40,000 times in the course of a year.  Fizz was tracking over 6,000 Influencers across the US who had picked up this story and were passionately sharing it with all of their friends. At one point on the fulfillment day, Google Trends showed that 7 of the top 10 searches WORLDWIDE on Google had some combination of “Dr. Pepper”, “Chinese Democracy” and “Guns ‘N Roses”.     

Use the right people for the right marketing channel

Word of mouth marketing is not easy. It takes the right idea combined with the right execution. Lots of firms say they can do WOMM but few really pull it off time and again. Ask for case studies and make the agency demonstrate that their client’s noted a rise in sales due to the WOMM program. Impressions don’t count and neither do samples passed out. To paraphrase Zyman, “Sell more stuff, more often for more money or go home”.