The Pepsi refresh project was a campaign in 2010 which allowed people to send in ideas on how to make the world a better place. These ideas were voted on by other people and the ideas with the most votes would receive grants from Pepsi so those ideas could happen. The grants ranged from $5000 to $250,000.  The project did a ton of good in many communities and made a change in a ton of peoples lives and it was very popular in the media and led to a lot of publicity for Pepsi. During the campaign the website had over 18 million unique users visited the website and over 80 million votes. Unfortunately for them it was not very profitable and led to a decrease of 6% of Pepsi’s profits. It is a very rare occurrence where a company campaign helps the community and not the company. Pepsi created a commercial to gain popularity and get people invested in their idea.  Pepsi had no problem getting people to like an idea that benefited their communities. The target audience of the campaign was younger people in their 20s all the way up to late 50s.  Pepsi really relied on the kindness of this age group, and their ability to ‘make a change’ in their community.  These people were the future, so Pepsi directed their message at them.  Pepsi tried to appeal to these people’s emotions (pathos), and used rhetorical devices to sway them to make use of the campaign. The campaign was made to help communities and who would not want to do that?  What Pepsi should have done to increase sales is have a bar code on a can of Pepsi that people have to scan to be able to submit ideas and vote on other ideas.  The main thing that really went wrong with this campaign is that there really was no tie to the soda itself. Having people create ideas to help the community and having a company grant money towards these ideas has nothing to do with soda at all so I do not know how Pepsi could expect sales to go up. Pepsi actually tried to fix this by have a power vote initiative. What they did was they had a code on the inside of every Pepsi bottle cap that would give you more votes on their website but that ultimately failed. Pepsi also tried to expand the Pepsi Refresh Project to Canada which also did not work out well.  Another thing Pepsi could have done to increase profit was add a subscription service.  Allowing people to still vote for one idea, but asking them to purchase a subscription to cast unlimited votes.  This still allows the public to have a say in at least one idea, but if they want to contribute more, they have to pay a small fee.  Pepsi could have charged a small amount for the subscription, maybe something like the price of a can of Pepsi.  This would make Pepsi money over a long period of time so they would have a return on investment. All in all Pepsi ultimately took the refresh project down after their sales of diet Pepsi went under diet Coke. Since it was making no profit there was no reason to continue which is really sad to see with such a good campaign for the community.