Bryce Blakely's Blog

How ’bout no?

We talk a lot in class about the added value that social media can bring to a brand; the two-way communication with consumers, brand exposure at minimal cost, and its use as a relationship building tool. For many brands these benefits are valid, that is to say their usefulness to the brand is matched by the consumer’s willingness to participate. To illustrate, consider my last post about the GoPro and their photo/video of the day program. The program works because the consumers want to participate, they are actively engaged because they want to be.

Now consider brands like Cottonelle pictured above and their “Lets Talk About Your Bum” campaign. First of all lets not (I closed the window immediately after saving the picture this was so ridiculous). Personally, and I think this can be applied more broadly, I don’t want to start a dialogue about my bowel movements with my toilet paper brand of choice. I’m fine with commercials on TV telling me how soft it is, great, I like soft. Do I want to like your Facebook page and broadcast my affinity for Cottonelle Toilet Paper to all my friends? Absolutely not. Sometimes attempting to start a dialogue on social media only makes sense to you and your marketing team and Cottonelle is certainly not the only offender.

Sept 2nd Photo of the Day

GoPro is miniature camera that over the last 4 years has taken the action sports scene by storm dominating all the competition in popularity and even moving into aspects of mainstream film production. To what can we credit this meteoric rise of one specific brand in a industry laden with comparable substitutes? The answer doesn’t lie in product differentiation but in the community GoPro became an integral part of.

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From the original release of the GoPro 1 in early 2010 the company immediately aligned itself with the action sports community by giving sponsorships to athletes in various action sports disciplines and releasing the footage they got with the camera throughout the year in a video. Edits (short videos featuring action sports) were and continue to be hugely popular within these communities and GoPro asserted itself as a premiere tool for edit creation by showcasing the unique angles that could be captured using their mountable cameras.

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The slogan for GoPro from the launch of their brand has been “be the hero”. Through videos posted on the official company page they demonstrated the quality of edits that now every athlete had the means of producing. They went about proving that this level of production could be achieved by anyone by sponsoring the USC Ski Team who came out with videos on a regular basis shot exclusively on GoPros.

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USC was just the starting point for the progression of GoPro’s business to client relationship. They moved beyond exclusive sponsorships and began looking to users of the product to generate a large portion of their posted content. GoPro’s Facebook page and Instagram both have a respective photo and video of the day section in which one user video and one user photo are selected from daily submissions and the winner is broadcasted/posted on the official company page. This not only creates exposure for the athletes involved it also generates a huge amount of traffic to the site and thereby exposure for GoPro. Users exchange notes on settings used in winning photos and this fosters a community of committed, interested users loyal to the brand and all at very little expense to GoPro.

Recently, Dodge ran a series of ads  for the release of next year’s Durango SUV. The ads were run on conventional TV stations and also uploaded to YouTube as most large companies now do. The campaign was run in conjunction with Paramount Studios to promote Will Ferrell’s upcoming film “Anchorman 2”, which is scheduled to be released this December. It’s an unconventional pairing that resulted in some memorable ads, some of which are nearing the 1 million view mark on YouTube, but who really benefitted from this joint venture.

It would be safe to speculate that Dodge fronted the majority of the bill for these ads, the talent (Will Ferrell), has already done numerous promotions for Anchorman 2 and on top of this the original Anchorman was a highly successful film that in many respects elevated Farrell’s career to new heights. But is having Will Ferrell on board to advertise the 2014 Durango worth its weight in revenues? It’s hilarious to hear Ferrell’s character Ron Burgundy speaking about the Durango’s glove box but what message is being sent to consumers about the vehicle?  As one viewer commented: “Is it safe to assume I can fit one turkey sandwich and 35 packs of gum?”, unlikely the sort of dialogue Dodge intended. Yes, it has been proven men in the demographic between ages 18-30 respond to humour in marketing (see Kraft’s “Mio” campaign and Old Spice’s “Smell Like a Man” campaign) but I would argue that in this case they are responding to Paramount’s advertising rather than Dodge’s. People are more excited that Ron Burgundy is back in action than they are about Dodge releasing the 2014 Durango model. The exposure is there but the message gets lost in the Ferrell’s funny-as-always razzle-dazzle.