Bronze: Best In-Store Retail Campaign 2015

Exclusivity, instant redemption, a gift with purchase: Each of these marketing tools on its own has been proven to boost sales. Put them together in a campaign, as Pepsi and agency TracyLocke did with their Toast to Great Taste, and you’ve got an almost certain winner.

To increase sales of Pepsi products at Target stores among 20- to 49-year-old women in the run-up to Memorial Day and summer, the soft drink brand offered a set of two 16 oz. drinking glasses, marked with the Pepsi logo and available only at Target, free with the purchase of four Pepsi eight-packs of bottles or 12-packs of cans.

Tying the premium to a larger purchase increased sales and average order values, of course, but it also positioned Pepsi as a solution for summer entertaining. And making the glasses instantly redeemable with the purchase—a first for a Pepsi promotion—spurred impulse buys while eliminating the possibility of Target’s having to put the glassware on clearance after the conclusion of the program; the retailer could continue to run the promotion for as long as it had the glasses in stock.

The campaign was featured in Target’s circular, reaching 40 million homes. Pepsi also promoted the offer to its 34 million Facebook followers and 2 million Twitter followers. In stores, special end caps made the offer tough to miss. All told, the promotion generated more than 150 million impressions, with a 13% lift in unit sales of 12-packs and a whopping 86% jump in unit sales of eight-packs. Senior buyers at Target praised the campaign as the best Pepsi shopper marketing program in more than a decade—and not surprisingly, they repeated the partnership in 2015.