Pepsi Pass

An app enabled loyalty program that inspires, celebrates, and rewards friendship. 

The app loading screen summarizes the users activity and tells them how many Pepsi points they have.

The app loading screen summarizes the users activity and tells them how many Pepsi points they have.

Pepsi’s brand is all about music, sports and fun, but their previous rewards program, PXP, was none of those things. Pepsi asked The Barbarian Group to help them transform PXP into something that reflected their brand values and resonated with the target millennial audience better. The Barbarian strategy team conducted extensive research to discover what millennials wanted in a rewards program. The result was Pepsi Pass, a new kind of rewards program built on rewarding users for doing what they love to do: Hanging out with friends. When users hang out with a Facebook friend who also has the app, they both earn points. And Pepsi Pass uses geolocation to give you bonus points when you visit Pepsi locations. No check-ins required.  

A short 1 minute explainer video demonstrating how the app works.

An overview of some of the apps primary screens.

An overview of some of the apps primary screens.

The point system was intentionally transparent so users could easily see what activities earned them the most points to get the prizes they wanted.

The point system was intentionally transparent so users could easily see what activities earned them the most points to get the prizes they wanted.

A series of custom icons were developed to communicate the core point earning tactics and multipliers.

A series of custom icons were developed to communicate the core point earning tactics and multipliers.

Pepsi wanted to have 1 million users by summers end; more than double the number of users on their previous rewards platform. To help us achieve our goal we released a series of short videos to explain the apps primary features and benefits. Including the summers point bonus tactic, snap a cap. By the summers end we had

Team

Brian Crooks, Edu Pou, Amy Toddenhagen, Michael Tseng, Dan Nichols, Felix Yip, Amanda Hellman, Giselle Guerrero, Dexter Cruz, Michael Mitzman, Mikell Fine Iles, Alex Lang, Alice Ng, Amy Rakowski and Ingrid Millman to name some of the many people who helped bring this project to life.

Version 1.2 update

With the summer snap a cap launch campaign over, we developed a new evergreen point earning feature: selfies with friends. Utilizing facial recognition, Pepsi Pass can now reward users with points for every face in a photo. More friends in the selfie means more points.

To make the experience unique and shareable, users could choose a custom frame when snapping a selfie with friends.

To make the experience unique and shareable, users could choose a custom frame when snapping a selfie with friends.

Pass was an ambitious program and was not without its hurdles. For example, we emphasized experiences over other forms of point earning and reward types. Follow up research showed this was a missed opportunity. Our target audience wanted more ways to earn points with product and more ways to redeem points for product.