You (well, some of you) asked for it, PepsiCo is now responding. After a 12-year absence, PepsiCo is reintroducing Mountain Dew to Britain in the coming weeks, backed by a major social media launch campaign. But even before the first green bottles appear on shelves, industry observers are wondering: if a core of die-hard fans can bring back a forgotten brand like Mountain Dew, what else might the people want next?

To hear Pepsi tell it, Mountain Dew’s European return can be traced to ardent online campaigning from a core of loyal UK fans. This is what PepsiCo’s brand manager, Tiffany Welsh, said about the upcoming relaunch:

The launch is all because of fans and their online campaigning, so it felt right for our marketing strategy to be an extension of this. That’s why we have focused on social media, to harness the power of word-of-mouth that made this launch happen.

Ever since it was removed from the UK market in 1996 because of poor sales, UK Mountain Dew fans have been trying to get it back. Their latest effort was the creation of a Facebook fan page “Mountain Dew UK“, which was founded, in the exact words of the fan page, “a few weeks ago.” The few hundred fans are now celebrating their ‘win’ by giving out free samples of the new UK Mountain Dew version (called Mountain Dew Energy) to the most loyal petitioners. PepsiCo is riding on the online fan excitement by congratulating them and setting up some company-run social media pages for the new release. The brand gets all the social media accouterments befitting a youth-oriented soft drink brand: a  new Twitter page (already teeming with 800 fans), and a Facebook fan page (with the same name as the old fan-run petition page) that new has about 24,000 fans.

Some critics though are questioning the whole power-of-the-people premise, doubting the impact of consumers on PepsiCo’s decision to return to Dew it again in Europe. They do cite precedent, noting Cadbury’s decision in 2007 to bring back the Wispa candy bar back following a consumer campaign that caught fire online. :Now, PepsiCo is attempting to reverse-engineer the same kind of demand, but this time lighting the touchpaper itself,” remarks Reputation Online.

To be sure, the movement to get Mountain Dew back in the UK is relatively small (a few hundred Facebookers and few thousand online petiton signers) compared to Wispa online movement that caught the fancy of the mainstream press.

Whether or not this reverse social media marketing tactic works is yet to be seen. After all, if the sales don’t match the hype (whether it originates from bottom-up or top-down social media marketing), then it doesn’t really matter how many fans wanted it back in the first place. Still, it’s comforting to think we might have influence over bringing back beloved brands.

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