Is Pepsi a Social Conductor?

A social conductor is an individual or organization that enables people to use their organization to achieve wants, needs and desires. The opposite is a social producer who uses people to create  direct benefits to their organization.

Pepsi Initiates the “Conductor” Model

Time Magazine states :To Pepsi, and to companies around the world, the days when mass-market media is the sole vehicle to reach an audience are officially over. Instead of pouring millions of dollars into a Super Bowl commercial, Pepsi has started a social-media campaign to promote its “Pepsi Refresh” initiative. Pepsi plans to give away $20 million in grant money to fund projects in six categories: health, arts and culture, food and shelter, the planet, neighborhoods and education.

People can go to the Pepsi website refresheverything.com — which can also be accessed through Facebook and Twitter — to both submit ideas and vote on others they find appealing. Among those on the site now: “Help free healthcare clinic expand services to uninsured in rural TN” and “Build a fitness center for all students in Hays, Kansas community.” Every month, the company will offer up to 32 grants to worthy projects.

“This is such a fundamental change from anything we’ve done in the past,” says Lauren Hobart, chief marketing officer for Pepsi-Cola North America Beverages. “It’s a big shift. We explored different launch plans, and the Super Bowl just wasn’t the right venue, because we’re really trying to spark a full-year movement from the ground up. The plan is to have much more two-way dialogue with our customers.”

5 Elements of the Conductor Model

The conductor model leverages five elements of interaction with the marketplace.  These are:

1. Attention: They do things that create attention from the marketplace. However the things they do draw attention to people’s ideas, wants, desires and needs rather than direct attention to themselves. They build social capital by doing things that people can participate in and benefit from. They provide content that is in context to people’s intentions rather than the intentions of their organization.  The Pepsi campaign will and is drawing the right attention not just for one event rather 24/7 and 365 days of the year.  Main stream media is discussing the Pepsi move away from Super Bowl to the above social media campaign and will likely report the results continuously.
2. Awareness: Social conductors draw attention to people and things that are social. Such things could be anything that people desire, want or need and the conductor enables people to easily access information that is in alignment with their intents. By raising awareness of issues of importance to people conductors are in fact raising awareness to their brand.  Main stream media and the participants are likely to discuss the Pepsi campaign and the blogosphere will explode with commentary for a long long time.
3. Affinity: Social conductors create affinities to people by enabling people to interact, support and communicate relevant information that is important to people’s wants, needs, desires and intentions. By creating such affinities the social conductor is indirectly creating an affinity to themselves for the value created by the experience and interaction they enable.
4. Audience: By creating attention, awareness and affinity the social conductor builds an audience who relates to the conductors actions, intents and value created on behalf of the audience.
5. Action: The social conductor enables people to “act” on their desires, wants, needs and intention thus becoming the enabler of action on behalf of the audience. Being the enable builds trust and confidence in the conductor. Something every brand and individual aspires to accomplish.

The social conductor model is well socially oriented and aimed at giving people tools, content and experiences that enhance an individuals or other organizations objective. The results produced by a conductor come from the results that produce for people.  Enabling people to produce results comes back to the conductor in ways typically not measured or considered.

The bottom line grows because of the context of being a social conductors that people appreciate.  Such sentiment creates a transaction of appreciation which translates to a transaction for the conductor. A social conductor draws in support from the audience because of its intent rather than its marketing. On Twitter, Ashton Kutcher reveals to his nearly 4.5 million followers that he can barely wait for the voting to begin for the Pepsi campaign. Pepsi just may have started the race for organizations to learn how to become social conductors.

You decide.

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