Reverse Marketing: Pepsi's Website

Ever heard of a brand that rejects customers? Not intentionally atleast from the marketer’s perspective. Brands are uniformly desperate to attract them. So why would a big brand like Pepsi take the opposite approach?

"Reverse marketing is the concept of making potential customers seek you out instead of the other way around."

Pepsi needed to revamp its website for a re-launch. The solution was extracted from a simple proposition: Kids love challenges. It became the basis for a highly unusual approach that aimed to reject Pepsi site visitors rather than embrace them.

To enter the site, visitors were required to pass an intelligence test. If their answers weren't clever enough, quick enough, or simply correct, the site rejected them. If visitors succeeded in getting in, there were prizes. The assignment proved that reverse marketing could be used as an effective tool. Thousands of kids tried to enter the site every day. And thousands of rejected visitors spread rumours about "backdoors" into the site that allowed users to bypass the test.

The site was an instant hit.

The "Pepsi challenge" was turned on its head. Suddenly, it was directed at the brand's customers instead of its competitors. Probably for the first time in corporate brand history, the challenge defeated and rejected most aspiring visitors.