Willy the Hillbilly: Using Integrated Marketing Communications to Reposition a Brand

Jack McCann, Dean of the Lincoln Memorial University School of Business

Who are Ally and Barney Hartman? These brothers are possibly two of the most famous people that you’ve never heard of from Knoxville, TN. They were soft drink bottlers by trade who contacted a local flavor company in search of a lemon-lime flavor that they began bottling and distributing to the locals. They designed a paper label for the product featuring a gun toting hillbilly by the name of “Willy the Hillbilly,” and named their concoction, “Mountain Dew.” They trademarked Mountain Dew in 1948 with the U.S. Patent Office in the name of their company, Hartman Beverage Co. of Knoxville, TN. They primarily sold and bottled the drink for locals and their own after-hours consumption, as a mixer with hard liquor.

Mountain Dew changed flavor and became a beloved regional, then national brand, through the work of Dick Bridgforth, who grew up with Mountain Dew. His father, Bill Bridgforth, was the manager of Johnson City’s Tri-City Beverage, which first commercially bottled Mountain Dew in 1954 and then began selling Mountain Dew the next year. As of 2010, Mountain Dew is the No. 4 carbonated drink brand in terms of sales in the United States along with its diet version ranked at a respectable No. 9 (America’s Best & Top 10, 2010).

In 1964, Pepsi-Cola bought the brand, and in 1973 they repositioned it after years without substantial success. They re-launched Mountain Dew with the help of BBDO New York who created ads that cast Mountain Dew as a high-energy, youthful oriented, flavored drink, and pushed sales in the 1980s to over the 100 million case mark. The Mountain Dew Brand has remained consistent over time with its unity of message and purpose. The brand has focused on exhilaration and energy through its brand marketing and its integrated marketing communications.
Mountain Dew initiated its integrated marketing communications program that includes TV, radio, outdoor and print, media, and the internet, sports, event sponsorship, grass-roots events, and many other public relation activities, all designed to develop and promote the Mountain personality. Mountain Dew’s unique selling proposition remains the same, it is the “ultimate, indulgent, thirst-quenching soft drink targeted to the brand’s key consumer groups: teenagers and 20 to 39 year-olds.

If only the Hartman’s could see their Mountain Dew, and Willy the Hillbilly, today. The success of Mountain Dew is attributable to Pepsi’s repositioning efforts using an integrated communications effort that holds true to its message regardless of the advertising medium used to promote it.