Mountain Dew Case Analysis

The target market for Mountain Dew is males, 18 years old and above who are extremely interested in energizing, fun, and adventurous activities. Since this case report, Mountain Dews marketing strategy which is focused on their extreme sports campaign has been over used. Mountain Dew has relied on this same marketing concept of marketing their drink to be a part of an adventurous, active, youthful, and cool lifestyle for as long as I can remember, the problem is that their competitors, like 7up, sprite and Surge are also using this similar concept to market their drinks. Also, the current generation is entirely concerned with health and exercise, so when choosing which energy or sports drink to drink, most people are going to select a more healthy option, which, with the high sugar content in Mountain Dew, means consumers most likely will go with a different option. This has given Mountain Dew tough competition and has made it difficult to maintain their current target market.

The first problem Mountain Dew is faced with is being able to differentiate themselves from these other products who are marketed very similarly. Mountain Dew needs to begin to consider other options which may not include extreme sports but maybe sports that are more common such as basketball. Mountain Dew has many competitors that use very similar marketing techniques including Monster, Vault, EMV, Formula X, and Surge. Surge is probably the most closely associated with Mountain Dew. It is highly associated with extreme sports just like Mountain Dew. It is a citrus based drink with high caffeine ingredients that is produced by Coke which functions as a soda and an energy drink. Their biggest competitor, Coca cola offers a diet version of Fanta and Sprite and Fanta which has been stealing consumers by being a healthy alternative. Mountain Dew also faces Dr Pepper as a competitor who also offers their carbonated drink in diet and whom also offers a 10 calorie version of it’s drinks. Mountain Dew also faces competition when it comes to non-carbonated drinks which is a huge problem with todays generation being so health conscience. Coca Cola is heavily marketing its tea product called Fuze. This is a juice/tea brand. Mountain Dew has done a good job with responding to the new health generation and their competitors by introducing Mountain Dew Diet, which has one half of the calories of the original Mountain Dew. They have also created bottled tea called Tazo. They teamed up with Starbucks to create this bottled tea which would appeal to more of the healthy conscious people. While I believe that all of these expenditures were extremely effective in increasing Mountain Dews sales, this mainly focused on a diversification strategy which is marketing a new product to a new target market. In my opinion, especially with the tea, this seems to target more of a female market who are probably in their mid to late twenties through their thirties and forties.

Mountain Dews customer perception towards their products as an unhealthy drink is something that will continue to hurt the companies sales. While they have done a good job of try to create a new brand image, they need to continue to push this even more aggressively in order to continue to maintain their target market while also pursuing new markets.

Pepsi and Mountain Dew have been targeting young people ages between twenty and thirty years old and has been associating their drink with extreme sports. More recently, Mountain Dew has started to associate their product with to only sports but with music as well. I think this is an extremely effective way to market their product to their original market of males ages eight-teen and up. The most important factor to this is selecting the correct music to hit their target