As we all know by now, social media opens up new doors for businesses large and small; but who is pushing the limits and creating their own opportunities and becoming a “Big Brand“ in the new world of social media?
Blendtec’s “Will it Blend?” campaign promotes its blender and similar products on YouTube as a way to market in low cost manner. Tom Dickinson, the CEO, attempts to blend objects such as an iPhone, 50 marbles, an air soft gun with bee bees, all of which end up as dust. These videos are short, silly portrayals of how this blender will work with anything you throw into it. Blendtec’s YouTube videos, also Facebook and Twitter pages, were successful in setting their products apart from others like it in a creative and innovative way using social media that resulted in positive feedback and increased business.
Burger King is another company that has been testing the waters of social media, and marketing in general for that matter. I’m sure you all have seen the string of “Whopper Virgin” commercials on TV and perhaps even visited the website; well, following this campaign they began a Facebook application where you could sacrifice 10 friends by removing them from your friends list, to win a free whopper. The application quickly gained over 20,000 users who sacrificed over 200,000 friends. However, because of privacy issues, Facebook had to take away the application. Burger King did use a different concept than social network users are used to though, because instead of inviting friends to the app or gaining new friends, which is what these networking sites are intended for, they had you delete friends to promote the legendary Whopper.
Another great example of testing social media is Ford when promoting their new Fiesta. They gave 100 people, in their twenties, each models of the car in hopes that they would share their experiences with it over a six month period. None of their volunteers had any experience with advertising and this tactic was especially more risky than those of Blendtec and Burger King, because they were not sending the messages, their customers were. This I think is the true nature of social media, allowing the audience to have control of the messages. Ford could have received a great amount of backlash and a huge tarnish on their reputation, but in this economy and struggling times, they sought to start from the bottom, let the people do the talking for them and hope for the best. It was complete transparency into their flaws and into the true “Ford experience.”
I also agree with Ford’s method of marketing the Fiesta — it’s a true “grassroots” campaign. There’s no better way to advertise a product than through the consumers, as opposed to a large corporation brainwashing these consumers with one-sided messages. Also, given the way the automotive industry is struggling, I applaud Ford for trying something completely new and taking a risk. I find the Blendtec & Burger King ad campaigns to be a little quirky, but I guess something is working for BK if 20,000 Facebook users deleted 10 friends to get a free Whopper!
oh my goodness, that video was ridiculous hah. I have actually heard about that blender and the weird things they put in it.
I think Ford’s campaign for their Fiesta was a great marketing tool. The fact that they had the customers selling it, basically, showed transparency and credibility, because no car manufacturer would do that if they had crappy cars. They just wouldn’t take the risk. That’s where Ford differs, because they DID take a risk and it proved successful.
I think that Ford’s use of consumer-generated marketing is a great idea. I mean, we’ve all head the stereotypes for car salesmen; they’ll tell you anything they have to in order to sell a car. By allowing customers to test the product and then promote it how they see fit, the advertising “campaign” becomes more believable. I would certainly believe Mary Kate if she told me a car was great before I would believe a man with a cheesy smile pasted on his face down at the Ford dealership.
I thought that this post was really interesting. I have heard people talk about the blender videos before, but I had never actually seen one. Although I do think they are weird and amusing, this idea really seems to work as a marketing strategy. I also think that they may have reached a different audience than most of the other companies selling similar products do by having these crazy videos online. I feel like most kitchen appliances are normally geared toward women, especially mothers. With this tactic, I feel like they would draw in more men who are all about products being tough, and even some members of the younger crowd who are at least telling their parents about the videos and to check them out.
The Burger King tactic really did use social media in a different way, which I think is probably why it gained such success. I know that I have some friends on my facebook, who I don’t necessarily know or know that well and if I were to delete them, I wouldn’t mind getting a whopper out of the deal. But I do wonder if their tactic was more of a sarcastic response to the growing social networking tools. After all the point of the social networking tools is to network. If I were going in and deleting friends, I wonder how many networks I would delete that could possibly help me in the future.
[...] 22, 2010 by Aaren Cecere As I discussed in an earlier post, Who’s testing the limits of social media?, Ford promoted its 2009 Euro-spec Fiesta through the social media influences of 100 [...]