https://www.the-cma.org/about/blog/why-transparency-is-important-on-social-media

The blog discusses how, for any company, transparency, especially in social media is crucial for a company’s reputation and success. It expands in discussing how promotion through social media can be detrimental to the success of a company based certain details such as tags made on a post during a tragic event. It also discusses that companies that own up to its own mistakes and subsequently address/fix these issues will develop customer trust in their brand, hence strengthening company reputation/improve branding.

I felt that the points made in this blog post touched on a major mistake that has continuously been made by Pepsi Co in terms of its marketing campaigns for its beverages, in particular, Pepsi and Mountain Dew. One of my previous blog posts mentioned the continuous release of commercial ads by PepsiCo. offending various social/racial groups and creating negative feedback from consumers.

This blog reinforces my previous opinion on PepsiCo that they need to re-evaluate their screening process for commercial ad ideas in order to create commercials that will not harm their reputation and brand image and continue to create negative criticism towards their company. They need to show the public through social media that they are planning to change their way of screening commercial ad ideas and producing ads that won’t offend the public.

For our marketing project, our group chose to focus on Pepsi Co. Prior to doing proper research and analysis, I had a very narrow-minded perspective on the company itself, only aware that it is one of the biggest beverage brands in North America and that their advertisement strategies have sometimes produced negative responses from the public due to poor company screening of ad/commercial ideas prior to production and release.

The process of systematically researching and analyzing various aspects of the business using tools we learned through lectures such as using the 4 P’s, STP and SWOT analysis not only showed the real-life application of these tools in the business world, but also helped to better understand the motives, direction, and vision of Pepsi Co.

Our group was effective in communicating and cooperating to complete all the assignments for the project, equally distributing the work, and learning from each other’s findings through group discussion and writing.

By learning how to creatively communicate our findings and analysis through media in order to present our ideas to the rest of the class, it helped not only solidify my personal understanding of what I had learned, from the theories and tools learned in the classroom but also taught me to translate what I had learned in class into something tangible, reports, videos, and presentation.