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DID IT SELL RED BULL? OR JUST PLAIN BULL?

Posted
October 25, 2012
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Brand
Creative
Customer Experience
Social Media
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Last week I wrote about why it’s never a good idea to cheap out on guerilla tactics. This past weekend gave us an example of one marketer who not only didn’t cheap out, but may have set a record for spending on a one-time sponsorship event.

The example I’m referencing is this past Sunday’s “free-fall skydive” of Austrian Felix Baumgartner. “Fearless Felix” jumped out of a capsule suspended by a balloon 128,000 feet (24 miles) above the earth. He not only smashed the record for the highest ever free-fall, he also became the first skydiver to go faster than the speed of sound, reaching a maximum velocity of 833.9 mph before touching down safely just outside of Roswell, New Mexico.

FearlessFelixSkydive

From a social media standpoint, the numbers are pretty incredible. A reported 7.3 million people watched the event live. Soon after, a Facebook photo generated nearly 216,000 likes, 10,000 comments and more than 29,000 shares in less than 40 minutes. And on Twitter, it occupied half the worldwide trending topics, pushing past seven NFL football games. The blogosphere continues to buzz about it. And the major news networks, newspapers and magazines have run stories on the stunt.

Mr. Baumgartner’s feat was not your ordinary extreme stunt or quest for a world’s record. Rather, it was a promotion bought and paid for (and managed) by Red Bull.

The question that begs asking here is a simple one: despite all the attention the event received, did Red Bull get a good value for its participation? Did it get an ample bang for its buck?

This is where the spin meisters come in. Barely 12 hours after the stunt, Huffington Post’s Janean Chun calls Red Bull’s sponsorship of Baumgartner’s jump “the most successful marketing campaign of all time,” noting that the brand “broke the traditional barriers of marketing, sponsorship and social media.” And a CEO of a digital agency opines that Red Bull stands to rack up “tens of millions of dollars” in sales because the stunt, although in typical social media style, he fails to quantify where those sales will come from.

But let’s back off the social media hyperbole for a moment. There’s no arguing the event generated a ton of social media eyeballs for the brand. But these are “social media” eyeballs. Eight million live views is big news in social media, but in the world of marketing it’s nothing special. By way of comparison, Sunday’s season opener of AMC’s “The Walking Dead” attracted over 11 million viewers–and this is basic cable.

And while the promotion is consistent with the “extreme stunts” Red Bull has become known for (at least within a select vertical market) and with its “Red Bull gives you wings” tagline, we need to remember Red Bull isn’t the lead in this story, Felix is. And while the stunt generated a ton of “free media” (specifically TV and newspaper stories), how much of it haloed onto Red Bull? I saw a one-minute story on NBC news that never bothered to mention Red Bull. I got a quick glimpse of the Red Bull logo on the parachute, much like you’d see a sponsor’s logo on a NASCAR driver’s suit.

While Red Bull has yet to release any spending figures on the sponsorship, one could easily envision an investment of $20 million or more on the stunt, plus all the advance promotion (check out this slick CG “movie trailer” that teases the event) with no guarantee of a happy outcome.

I’m not arguing that Red Bull shouldn’t pony up for events such as this. They’ve sort of primed their audience to expect such things. But the real measure of whether or not it was successful can’t be ciphered by social media buzz alone, no matter how much it gets. At some point, it has to be about sales. Good old fashioned ROI (remember that?). “Soft metrics” like mentions, hashtags, likes, shares, sentiment, etc. might make you feel all warm and fuzzy. But did the $20 million+ spent on the event generate incremental sales? Did it help drive distribution? Did it increase market share? Did it allow Red Bull to charge a premium for its product?

To be clear, I’m not saying we needed to see 40 million cans of Red Bull fly off the shelves in the hours after the stunt. Give it time. But for the cost of running a spot in each of the next SEVEN Super Bowls, it’d be a shame if all Red Bull got in return was a few million YouTube hits and some news photos with an incidental logo splashed across a parachute.

Success in the world of social media isn’t about dreaming up outrageous ideas that’ll get attention. That’s the easy part. The currency of a social media program is how well it marries to an organization’s business objectives. And in this case, we’re yet to see how that works out.

A side note to this campaign: a marketer that seems to have successfully “coat-tailed” on this sponsorship was Mars, who sent a Kit Kat bar into outer space to give Felix a “break” during his jump. You can view that one-and-a-half minute video here.

Posted by Mickey

 

WHY NOT CREATE A ‘BRANDED EXPERIENCE’?

Posted
September 28, 2012
Categories
Brand
Creative
Customer Experience
On Customers
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Every day, we have dozens or even hundreds of transactional experiences with products, businesses or organizations. Everything from using their products, to visiting their websites, to interacting with them in the flesh. And it’s a pretty safe guess that in 80-90% of cases, these experiences are “unbranded.”

branding_iron

By “unbranded,” I don’t mean to imply there was anything wrong with the experience, or that you came away with a negative view of the company. Rather, an “unbranded” experience in this context simply means there was nothing within the experience that made it unusual or special in the view of the customer. What you ended up with was an experience that could have been provided by any number of different suppliers.

Now let’s talk for a moment about “branded experiences.” These are the ones that bring a smile to our faces days after the transaction itself. The ones we somehow acknowledge and validate who we believe we are. The ones our friends talk about on Facebook. And the ones that come up unsolicited in conversations we have with friends and colleagues.

Branded experiences are associated with only one provider in the customer’s eyes. A few examples? Starbucks and Ikea come to mind, as does Harley Davidson and Method cleaning products. The experiences these companies give is unlike what anyone else in the category can deliver.

The thing is, though, that for most categories, the existence of a branded experience doesn’t exist, either because the marketer isn’t providing that “something special,” or because customers aren’t in a position to experience it.

Is there a secret formula to providing or architecting a branded experience? There are a few elements they seem to have in common. A uncompromising understanding of what’s important to the customer, for one. An authentic passion about what what’s being provided, for another. And generally within the experience somewhere lies the element of surprise.

Branded experiences are generally built by transcending the functional side of what you do and focusing on customers’ emotional needs. By knowing the values you wish to impart (your Brand Vision) and reconciling that with how your products or services fit into your customers’ lives, you should be able to find ways to add a wrinkle to your customers’ experiences that will surprise and delight them, and give them a story they will enthusiastically share with others.

Posted by Mickey

Creativity vs. Clarity.

Posted
September 18, 2012
Categories
Creative
Customer Experience
Ramblings
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One of the many marketing newsletters I received this week came from Marketing Sherpa. The guest-written main article was a lesson on crafting the right “subject line” for your emails that would generate the highest “open rate.” Good information. But it was the title of the article that really got my attention: “Which performs better: Creativity or Clarity?”

versus-hand

That got me thinking. Are there really folks out there who view the whole clarity/creativity dynamic as “either/or?” Who somehow think if something is “creative” that it can’t be “clear?”

To most of us in the business, being “clear” is actually the first consideration when being “creative.’

In its most basic form, creativity is “making the mundane interesting.” In an era where we’re overloaded with both targeted and random messages coming at us from all quarters (by some estimates as many as 5,000 ‘selling’ messages each day), making your communications interesting is a must. Unless your marketing offer is so unabashedly attention getting on its own (”Cure for cancer, just $10!”), you’re going to need some help rising above the pedestrian drivel our well-honed BS filters are good at keeping on the periphery of our consciousness.

Granted, there are practitioners who’ll go to any length to get your attention, even if the way they earn your attention has nothing to do with their actual offerings or benefits (Go Daddy, anyone?). Such practitioners are actually doing a disservice to both their clients and the public at large. As ad legend Bill Bernbach once said “It makes sense to run an ad with a man standing on his head only if you’re demonstrating pants that keep things from falling out of the pockets.”

True creativity doesn’t conflate with clarity. It builds from the Universal Truth of a product or brand, and presents it in a somewhat unexpected yet memorable way. This alchemy that creates something that is both clear and creative is most definitely the “heavy lifting” of our profession.

On some occasion, a marketer may shy away from a “creative” solution because he feels some readers/viewers might not “get it.” But as I mentioned in a guest post some time ago, it is poison to create for the dullards. This recent spot for FedEx is an example of how you can be creative without leaving the masses in the dust. It unmistakenly communicates “FedEx provides small businesses a competitive advantage,” but it does it in a way that is fun, memorable and relevant.

Be clear. But be creative. It’s not either/or.

Posted by Mickey

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A mistake of Olympic proportions.

Posted
July 26, 2012
Categories
Copyright
Creative
Ramblings
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Legally, I’m not allowed to use the ‘O-word,’ I’m not allowed to show the five rings. Or the official logo. Or, if this were a podcast or video blog, to play the theme music that one associates with the, uh,…big event that’s going on in London these next few weeks.

london-2012-olympic-games-celebration-thumb19199246

See, the promoters, stewards and powers that be of the…athletic competition started by the Greeks many centuries ago…insist on having a stranglehold on the branding elements surrounding the…event….and jealously guard them the way the military guards Fort Knox. The International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) intention is to protect those elements so that only official sponsors can use them, thus making their multi-million dollar sponsorships of the…big show…even more valuable.

That’s all well and good. If McDonald’s is an official sponsor, they should be able to cash in big time. But what the IOC is imposing on participants this time around is a bit of a head scratcher. Basically, they are trying to impose the kind of Draconian rules reserved for use of the Olympian graphic elements to the athletes’ and insiders’ use of social media during the games.

No posting photos to Facebook. No uploading videos to YouTube. No tweeting “in the third person” (tweeting about fellow athletes or competitors).

As logical as this might sound to the IOC (who wants its social media hub to be the only outlet for content), to anyone who knows social media at all, this is ridiculous. I can’t keep my teenager from texting at a restaurant. And you expect to keep some Albanian swimmer from posting a photo of Michael Phelps to his Facebook page?

And what happens when the high-jumper from Papau tweets about his teammates? Does the IOC sic their hordes of lawyers on the poor guy, and banish him from all future competition (now THAT will generate positive word of mouth…)?

While I’m sure the IOC is going to do a rocking job with their social media hub, it’s going to feel too controled. Something will be missing: an authentic interface with the athletes themselves. The unadulterated transparency that leads to authentic engagement.

As unnatural as it feels to the IOC to back off and let things just happen, that’s exactly what this year’s, uh,…big games,…could use. The primary goal of the IOC shouldn’t be to totally control the “O” brand, it should be to turn the event into a real-time event that can be enjoyed and talked about by everyone in the world, including the athletes themselves.

Let the games begin.

Posted by Mickey

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SHOULD HARLEY DAVIDSON MAKE A SCOOTER?

Posted
July 12, 2012
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Creative
Ramblings
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Dumb question, right? When you think “Harley Davidson,” chances are you think “authentic biker,” or “classic road cycles” or even “loud,” “tattoos and leather” or “badass.” Not exactly the same images that come to mind when you think of a cute pink and white scooter.

The Cadillac Cimarron. Seemed like a good idea at the time.

While there may be universal agreement that a Harley scooter wouldn’t do much to solidify the Harley brand, brands are making just that kind of mistake everyday. A few examples? Dial soap launching a deodorant. A-1 Steak Sauce coming out with a chicken glaze. PanAm putting its name on hotels. And does anybody remember the Cadillac Cimmaron?

All these decisions were greenlighted by really smart people, backed by impeccable research and sound marketing principles. In a nutshell, these brand extensions were viewed as a way to borrow the equity of a well established brand to “buy” a significant portion of a “related” market, and to inexpensively build incremental sales. Make the most of your brand, and give people more reason to think of it.

In practice, you trade in your reputation (another word for brand) in exchange for a short-term boost of awareness or profit. Unfortunately, many times the price to be paid for that short-term gain is a diluted brand than quickly loses its cache. The poster child example of this is Yahoo!, which went from being the dominant search engine of the 1990s with a market cap of $114 billion, to a I-have-no-idea-what-they-are-now company who’s had six top executives in six years and is now worth less than 1/6th of its high value (with less than 10% of the market share of Google).

So how do you go about determining whether your proposed brand extension will be the next Diet Coke or the next Xerox Computer?

We’ve found that brand equity is a two-way street. More often than not, a successful line extension doesn’t just “borrow” equity from the brand, it also “adds to it.”

The key that often determines a successful extension vs. an exercise in futility is this: does the proposed line extension jibe with “the real business we’re in.” This goes beyond the functional aspects of a product to more of the “problem” the brand solves well in the minds of your most ardent supporters. For Coke, for example, if you’re “real business” (Brand Vision) is “refreshing the masses,” then yeah, a new product that serves that purpose stands a good chance of success, and of not only “borrowing” equity from the brand, but also adding to it. Likewise, if you’re McDonald’s and your “real business” is ‘providing a variety of fast, taste-pleasing meals in a clean and friendly environment, then Chicken McNuggets or McRib sandwiches make sense. If, on the other hand, you are Dial soap, your real “business” in the minds of consumers is most likely “clean,’”not “defeats perspiration.” And if you’re A-1, your real business is “adding flavor to cheap cuts of beef.”

Looking at brand extensions through the “what business we’re really in” lens even helps explain outliers such as Apple or Virgin. Apple’s “real business” was not building and selling computers, it was in creating elegant, user-friendly cutting edge technology. Which perfectly describes the iPhone, iPod and iPad, as well as the Mac. And for Virgin? Their ”real business” could be described as “turning mundane, low-interest unimaginative markets on their ears.” Rings true for Virgin Airlines, Virgin Mobile, and even the original Virgin Music Centres.

The key to all this is to understand what your brand means to your customers, how they see it, and what “problem” your brand elegantly solves for them.

Lose sight of that, and you could end up with another Levi’s shoes.

Posted by Mickey

The Essence of Creativity.

Posted
June 13, 2012
Categories
Creative
Ramblings
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single-brick

If, however, I asked you, “What 40 ways can you think of to use this?,” I’m likely to get a whole different kind of list. After exhausting the obvious uses above, you’ll find yourself uncomfortably searching for other unthought-of uses. Some will be totally silly, or non-sequitar. But before long (probably around number 25 or 30), you’ll actually hit on something truly original (paint it gold and hand it out as a Fort Knox souvenir…). It is here, at this uncomfortable point when you think you’ve exhausted all practical uses for the brick, where true creativity lives. It’s where you start to find new connections between the object at hand and the world around you. You start thinking beyond the obvious solutions. Your ego stops judging every passing thought in the name of quantity.

Creativity can be defined as the process through which the mind finds formerly unrecognized relationships between two entities or ideas. It is something that allows our audience to see something in a different way.

Creativity is hard. It is a trip into uncharted territory. It is bumping into ideas that quite frankly you don’t know how to judge or evaluate.

It is taking the obvious and making it interesting.

Knowing how our mind’s creativity works is the reason few advertising creatives settle on the first idea (or handful of ideas) they find. The thinking being, if it was that obvious to me, it must be obvious to everyone, therefore there’s nothing new or exciting about it. Truly creative solutions are a bit unnerving, not because they are provocative or irrelevant, but because you’ve never seen something quite like this, and your mind doesn’t know how to evaluate them.

So next time you’re presented with an idea or concept that makes you a little uneasy, avoid the reaction of rejecting it out of hand because it is “different.” Deconstruct it to see how that idea was developed. See if it answers the needs spelled out in the creative brief. Live with it for a time. Then form your conclusion.

Posted by Mickey