P.O.S.T done P.R.O.P.E.R
October 15th, 2013
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.