The original Mountain Dew DEWmocracy campaign began in 2007 when the brand created a successful, consumer and social media campaign building up to the January 2009 launch of its new beverage, Voltage. The campaign was named DEWmocracy, and it enabled Mountain Dew’s loyal customers to choose not only the new flavor, but its colors, name, and label graphics. In July 2009, Mountain Dew returned to its recipe for launch success and introduced the aptly-named DEWmocracy 2 campaign.
DEWmocracy 2 was planned as a seven stage campaign, which included a taste-testing truck tour, a Twitter race between the three flavor finalists, and a design contest for the new Dew’s label. DEWmocracy 2 allowed consumers to get more involved in the product selection and the launch process by creating an advertising agency competition asking fans to vote on their favorite 12-second spot from a selection of concepts submitted by different creative agencies. DEWmocracy 2 participants could follow the whole campaign by monitoring the Facebook page, watching video updates on Mountain Dew’s YouTube channel, and checking out the flavor list on Mountain Dew’s Twitter account.
The three flavor finalists in the DEWmocracy 2 campaign – Mountain Dew Distortion, Mountain Dew Typhoon, and Mountain Dew White Out – hit shelves in April 2010. During the 31-day Flavor Campaign, street marketing teams for each flavor finalist visited cities to rally votes, with polls closing on June 14, 2010. Mountain Dew White Out, the winner of the DEWmocracy 2 campaign, scored 44% of the national votes, and will become a standard flavor in the Dew line of beverages beginning Labor Day.
In the two revolutionary DEWmocracy campaigns, Mountain Dew employed both social media and grassroots marketing tactics to garner unprecedented levels of consumer engagement to decide the newest DEW. It’s clear that the campaign created opportunities for product trial, and most likely helped entice new consumers to try the brand. Will other beverage marketers follow suit and Dew more to engage consumers?
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i would like to know why white out is not on supermarket shelves in my area.