Social Media Case Study: Blendtec
The appearing is picket, the music is tacky, however Blendtec’s ‘Will It Blend?’ is deservedly one of many all-time-nice viral campaigns…
Tom Dickson is an unlikely celebrity. He’s chubby and completely unable to behave, but his reputation has reached such ranges within the US that ‘Tom Dickson is my Homeboy’ T-shirts at the moment are all the fashion. Why? Because since 2006 Mr Dickson has fronted a collection of on-line movies through which he cheerfully drops every part from marbles to the brand new iPhone A right into a blender and mashes the bejesus out of them.
The cause for such wanton destruction is in order that Dickson, the CEO of blender producer Blendtec, can reveal the efficacy of his firm’s product. It’s a easy but intelligent concept. But what’s actually intelligent is that Blendtec’s advertising director, George Wright, created a totally built-in, absolutely interactive social media marketing campaign that has resulted in an enormous seven hundred% improve in gross sales for Blendtec in 4 years.
All expense spared
The Blendtec marketing campaign demonstrates the important great thing about social media as a advertising software. You need not spend a small fortune on a sophisticated promoting marketing campaign when you’ve obtained a very good product and a good suggestion that you’ll be able to execute properly.
When he joined Blendtec, Wright had heard that Dickson used to mix seemingly un-blendable objects to check the blenders’ talents and to entertain his staff, and immediately realised that these enjoyable, crowd-pleasing antics have been advertising gold. With rudimentary props and filming within the Blendtec break room, Wright created the primary of the movies.
In a stroke, he had succeeded in humanising the corporate through the use of the partaking Dickson, he had appealed to the kid in all of us (who hasn’t needed to throw a golf ball in a blender and see what occurs?), and he had demonstrated simply how good Blendtec blenders have been.
Integrated, interactive strategy
‘Will It Blend?’ was instantly built-in into all of Blendtec’s advertising. It seems on Twitter, on Facebook, on a microsite, on the Blendtec web site and on the corporate weblog. Importantly, Blendtec interacts with its clients, permitting them to recommend objects for Dickson to mix, which in flip turn into future movies. Through this easy technique, Blendtec has not solely engaged with its clients on a elementary degree, it’s also permitting the purchasers to create content material that they themselves disseminate by means of social media channels.
The movies proceed, typically that includes extra ‘refined’ storylines (one features a Steve Jobs lookalike), however nonetheless retaining their sense of enjoyable and never taking themselves or the corporate too significantly. Dickson stays entrance and centre in them, and his irreverent, barely cheeky, barely goofy persona nonetheless serves to personalise the model.
Wright’s aim was to boost model consciousness and model recognition. For an preliminary outlay of $one hundred, mixed with a canny appreciation of the attain of social media, he achieved that in spades.
