Back in early 2006, Chevy tried to get on the whole “consumer generated content” bandwagon (or bandSUV, I suppose), with a website which allowed users to easily create their own “ads” for the Chevy Tahoe using provided video and music assets. In theory, the idea was to generate interest in the vehicle through user created ads circulating virally around the web. But just months ahead of the release of An Inconvenient Truth, with all things “green” and “climate crisis”-related just on the verge of tipping over from environmentalist niche to major mainstream movement, the cluelessness of the folks at Chevy about the extent of the negative sentiment for this vehicle became all too quickly apparent, as the most popular results generated by the their ad-creator came out looking something like this: .
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Three years after what remains one of the most infamous examples of a social media reality check, Chevy is pursuing perhaps the greatest rebranding of any American car company, (not that it has a choice, exactly), with the debut of the whopping 230mpg, electric vehicle: the Chevy Volt. .
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A phenomenal advancement from the environmental perspective, for sure, but from the marketing side, perhaps, it shouldn’t take a government bailout to get you to really listen to what consumers are telling you. .
If, sometime circa 2004, you were out and about at certain underground parties in the Los Angeles Circus scene, and saw someone wearing a particularly striking pair of pants (male or female), created from asymmetrical strips of leather sewn in a twisted, impeccably tailored way, like the trappings of some Mad Max forest nymph biker gang escapee, and were compelled by this post-apocalyptic hipness to inquire of the wearer as to where these pants had come from, the answer you would inevitably receive is that they were made by someone named Cassidy. This would happen so often, in fact, that by the time I finally met Cassidy, out one night at a club on the shady side of La Brea, I actually recognized him by his trousers.
At the time, Cassidy was part of the Ernte design team, but soon thereafter co-founded SkinGraft Designs with partner Jonny Cota, and later Katie Kay. Even as the SkinGraft operation was growing with each year, headlining LA fashion week, opening the doors to a flagship store in Downtown LA this spring (no small feat for an indie fashion label in a recession!), and getting their sartorial grafts onto an ever-expanding assortment of celebrity skins, what Cassidy kept yearning to do was sing.
I discovered very quickly after we met that in addition to his fashion career, Cassidy is also a songwriter and performer. At one point, there were even a couple of production meetings held at my house for a show he was thinking of putting together around his music, and involving various performance-oriented friends. That show never came to pass, but after years of false starts, Cassidy finally revived his music focus from back-burner exile and 10 days ago self-released his debut album, Little Boys and Dinosaurs. What happened next is straight out of the viral phenomenon playbook.
On Sunday afternoon, August 15th, Adam Lambert, longtime SkinGraft friend (he’s currently wearing a custom SkinGraft jacket on the American Idol tour, and sported numerous other SG pieces during the show’s run) tweeted to his followers: “My friend Cassidy just shot this great video… http://bit.ly/18FvaM.” Within days, the video shot up to over 36,000 views, and Little Boys and Dinosaurs, sans label, marketing push, or pr strategy, rose to #3 on the iTunes electronic chart, between LMFAO’s “Party Rock” and Imogen Heap’s “Ellipse.” It didn’t hurt that the video was glam-rock pretty and sexually controversial, featuring some simulated sexual behavior, and a pair of undies slung Sports Illustrated-low. Within hours of Lambert’s tweet, a bonafide minor scandal had erupted over his linking the video, which was, by some contingent, considered inappropriate for his underage following. If you’re thinking this sort of outrage over music video explicitness seems strangely anachronistic in the post-Lil’ Kim / Britney Spears / Lady Gaga era, it should probably be mentioned that the dirty dancing in question here is exclusively male. In any case, the controversy only helped to generate further attention for the music, and by Thursday, Lyndsey Parker, was writing for Yahoo! Music’s The New Now blog:
At this point, Adam Lambert is pretty much like Oprah, in terms of his all-encompassing influence over his devoted fanbase. Just like any Oprah Book Club selection is certain to become a New York Times best-seller, in the pop music world there is perhaps no more ringing endorsement these days than a black-fingernailed thumbs up from the tastemaking Glamerican Idol.
So far the public response to Cassidy’s music, at least among diehard and very vocal Adam Lambert fans, has been hugely enthusiastic. Will record labels take notice? That remains to be seen, but if so, then Cassidy Haley may be the first artist to get signed out of American Idol without ever having appeared on the show.
If you’re a social media strategist, and your friend just so happens to become an overnight internet phenomenon, you’ve basically got no choice but to find the whole thing incredibly fascinating. On Tuesday, as Little Boys and Dinosaurs was climbing the chart, I got a call from Cassidy, and the question on his mind was, “What do I do now? What next?”
Which is a great question for any marketer in the digital age to think about as well. All too often I think marketers have blinders on, criminally overusing the word “viral” (still!) in the frenzy for buzz and fans and word of mouth and all that. But what if you could get all of it overnight? What if all the promotional initiatives and exposure efforts paid off just like they were supposed to? Is that the extent of your strategy? Or would you be prepared for What Next?
My advice to Cassidy was to take his questions straight to his new-found fans; involve them directly in helping to shape and define the answers together, and keep the momentum going. And he did. The outpouring of ideas that came back to him from this nascent, yet incredibly dedicated, army included everything from ad hoc twitterstorms that got the attention of various media folks, to online community resources created by fans to connect to one another, and to Cassidy’s music. The troops even came up with a seriously cute name for themselves, Comets, (as in Haley’s).
Overnight, Cassidy was handed the sort of opportunity that many marketers and brands are tirelessly chasing after, and yet the most powerful move he made was the one AFTER that happened. He opened up to his fans and offered them the opportunity to be directly involved with him in the creation of what comes next.
In case you happen to have missed it, Tropicana changed the design on their cartons last month, and in the process discovered that “Some Buyers Are Passionate About Packaging,” as Stuart Elliott writes in the New York Times:
PepsiCo is bowing to public demand and scrapping the changes made to a flagship product, Tropicana Pure Premium orange juice. Redesigned packaging that was introduced in early January is being discontinued, executives plan to announce on Monday, and the previous version will be brought back in the next month.
Also returning will be the longtime Tropicana brand symbol, an orange from which a straw protrudes. The symbol, meant to evoke fresh taste, had been supplanted on the new packages by a glass of orange juice.
The about-face comes after consumers complained about the makeover in letters, e-mail messages and telephone calls and clamored for a return of the original look.
Some of those commenting described the new packaging as “ugly” or “stupid,” and resembling “a generic bargain brand” or a “store brand.”
“Do any of these package-design people actually shop for orange juice?” the writer of one e-mail message asked rhetorically. “Because I do, and the new cartons stink.”
Others described the redesign as making it more difficult to distinguish among the varieties of Tropicana or differentiate Tropicana from other orange juices.
Such attention is becoming increasingly common as interactive technologies enable consumers to rapidly convey opinions to marketers.
It was not the volume of the outcries that led to the corporate change of heart, Mr. Campbell, [president at Tropicana North America in Chicago] said, because “it was a fraction of a percent of the people who buy the product.”
Rather, the criticism is being heeded because it came, Mr. Campbell said in a telephone interview on Friday, from some of “our most loyal consumers.”
“We underestimated the deep emotional bond” they had with the original packaging, he added. “Those consumers are very important to us, so we responded…. What we didn’t get was the passion this very loyal small group of consumers have. That wasn’t something that came out in the research.”
What has essentially happened here is that the ultimate fallout from the responses of a “very loyal small group of consumers” has exponentially magnified the exposure for what was originally just your run-of-the-mill packaging redesign:
The campaign, which carries the theme “Squeeze it’s a natural,” was created by Arnell in New York, part of the Omnicom Group. Arnell also created the new version of the Tropicana packaging.
“Tropicana is doing exactly what they should be doing,” Peter Arnell, chairman and chief creative officer at Arnell, said in a separate telephone interview on Friday.
“I’m incredibly surprised by the reaction,” he added, referring to the complaints about his agency’s design work, but “I’m glad Tropicana is getting this kind of attention.”
That’s the thing. Because of this vocal minority of avid Tropicana fans the attention of a far wider audience has been captured. Tropicana has now made a bigger splash by announcing they will be changing the packaging design back, than they did by changing it in the first place. Suddenly the avid Tropicana-fan minority has company.
Suddenly a lot more of us are now talking about orange juice. Thinking about orange juice! And thinking about it in a way that we never did before. After all, for the vast majority of us, just how different is one OJ brand from another? It’s not exactly a lifestyle product category, is it? (The whole organic argument aside for the moment, as it isn’t really specific to orange juice in particular so much as to grocery purchases in general). Do most of us really think about purchasing Tropicana vs. Florida’s Natural vs. Minute Maid because one brand is more relevant to our identity than the others? Unlikely.
So after enjoying its moment of unique distinction, Tropicana is now planning to scrap the new packaging and bring back the old familiar design so that the small loyal group who asked for it can be appeased, and all the rest of us can go back to not caring about orange juice.
But what if you could do something different?
What if discovering that your brand has more deeply passionate consumers than you’d imagined, and being open to to their input and responding to their concerns is just one part of the new marketing equation? What if the other part is understanding when you have an opportunity to get people really engaged. And not just engaged in giving you feedback, but engaged in helping to develop the brand’s identity itself. What if a non-lifestyle product category suddenly had the opportunity to stake out a piece of the cultural landscape? After all, Tropicana spent $35 million on the “Squeeze” campaign Arnell developed, which it now has to partially undo. What other direction could future advertising money be invested towards?
Having worked with various music festivals, I’ve consulted on and helped execute a number of “Battle of the Bands” contests. A proto-“User Generated Content” initiative, it’s always exceedingly popular. Different music acts submit tracks, or sometimes videos, competing for a chance to perform at the festival. This kind of initiative is most effective when combined with a voting aspect, so that it can extend beyond just the music acts, and actually get greater swaths of fans to participate in the process of selecting the winner to be added to the festival lineup.
In a more beverage-oriented variation on this theme, there’s last year’s “DEWmocracy” campaign, which allowed fans to vote on the new flavors for Mountain Dew (incidentally, also owned by PepsiCo), including the product packaging:
According to the PepsiCo press release, “DEWmocracy is the first-ever interactive, story-based online game that will result in a consumer-generated beverage innovation.” The campaign, which consisted of several phases, involved the launch of a website with a massive multi-player game. Once users created a profile they could go into the game’s 7 “worlds,” earning points and selecting different attributes for their ideal Mountain Dew beverage–i.e. flavor, “boost”, color, name, logo design, and so on. On top of all of this, the game/campaign had quite the storyline. As BevReview explains:
Pepsi and ad agency WhittmanHart Interactive tapped into actor/director Forest Whitaker to help craft the storyline. The entire adventure is setup up via a 3 minute short film that evokes overtones of Big Brother and overbearing governmental/corporate control. This has resulted in a loss of creativity….As is the plotline in most of these types of stories, a “chosen one” rises up to rebel against this oppression. Here’s the product twist… he seeks an elixir that will bring creativity and “restore the soul of mankind.” Now if you move beyond the irony that PepsiCo is a huge multinational conglomerate and that Mountain Dew is a top 5 selling soft drink found pretty much everywhere, you can see the somewhat unique spin this campaign possesses.
Not that I’m suggesting something this over-the-top is really appropriate for orange juice, necessarily, but the DEWmocracy site did reportedly have over 700,000 unique visitors, with 200,000 registered users participating in the first phase of the game. And that’s when they had to stir up consumer interest in engaging with the process of defining a brand direction for the Mountain Dew brand from scratch. Tropicana’s already got that one in the bag.
So what could you do if you were Tropicana?
Now that there’s already quite the buzz about Tropicana’s openness to fan-feedback in general, and about its packaging design in particular, why not create a platform for people to submit their design ideas? Yes, ok, clearly they discovered that people are deeply connected to the original design, but that is in response to just one other, radically departing, yet not particularly dynamic option. How might Tropicana lovers re-envision what that OJ carton could look like given the chance? It could just be a fun exercise in creativity, but then why not consider the possibility that the new design direction could emerge from the fans? Perhaps some new designs would remix the beloved orange-with-a-straw-poking-out image, but put a new spin on it with additional design elements or layers. Perhaps others would reinterpret the iconic image in totally new ways. Maybe others would find new ways to recreate the Tropicana logo in an unexpected style. Who knows?
What is definitely certain is that a small group of avid Tropicana fans clearly have deeply feelings about the brand and its design, and that a whole lot greater audience now cares that Tropicana cares about their input. So why stop the train there? Why not see how far it can go? In fact, why pick just one new design? How about different winning carton designs printed in “limited editions”? If it’s art, suddenly there’s a WHOLE new reason for choosing one OJ brand over another. In that case, why not deliberately set out to discover and promote emerging artists? Giving them their first break of mass exposure through orange juice cartons in grocery stores across the country. Nike’s doing it. So has Mountain Dew, for that matter. Suddenly it’s not just about a “campaign,” it’s an opportunity to create culture.
It’s like that scene in the Mad Men pilot episode where Don Draper suddenly realizes that if all the cigarette companies are facing the same limitations on what claims they can make in their advertising, then it’s “The greatest advertising opportunity since the invention of cereal.” When you’ve got a bunch of pretty much identical companies, making a pretty much identical product–in this case, OJ–you can do anything you want to create distinction. The possibilities for what you could do are pretty limitless, if you were Tropicana.
i’ve been driving past this construction zone on the corner of vermont and washington for the past two years every time i need to get to the 10 onramp, only recently was the hard-hat area gauze removed to reveal what this building actually is: a school.
a couple of days ago i heard a really interesting bit on KCRW about a new kind of thinking that went into the construction of a particular school building, and before they even mentioned the location, i knew immediately which building they must be talking about. west adams prep.
among a lot of other great ideas they discussed on the show, the developers talked about approaching the creation of this facility for learning by researching the kinds of places that kids in l.a. actually LIKE spending time out of their own free will, and modeled the space to provide the same kind of “hanging out” experience as popular L.A. malls. they also asked the students to participate in various school-identity decisions like school colors and mascots. these are just some of a whole number of very conscious steps taken not only by the architects to create a space that would deliberately create a great experience for those in it, but also by the administrators to turn the school itself into a “concept” that kids would feel a part of and identify with in a positive way.
so basically they took the same kind of experience-creation and interaction/community-development approaches that brands are using in their strategies to win over the affections of the coveted high school demo, and applied it to–HOLY SHIT!–creating a high school.
you can listen to the full piece HERE. and you should. really cool stuff.
one of the projects i’m currently working on involves cleaning some wreckage from a web 2.0-style mess that was never resolved, and is coming back to haunt the client. it’s not huge, but it’s a template, i think, for ways in which web 2.0 messes get made in general, and may point to helpful tips in avoiding even bigger spills.
1. NOT EVERYONE GETS / WILL GET / SHOULD BE EXPECTED TO GET WEB 2.0
it’s easy to hallucinate that once we outgrow the infancy of this whole online community development/management process, everyone will just intuitively “get it,” but that’s about as likely as all of us who have never known a universe without cameras being born innately expert photographers. unlikely. community management is a skill. everyone complaining about how all those old geezers don’t “get” web 2.0–what’s going to be the excuse when there are people younger than you coming up not getting it? ok, by “get it” i mean, “trained in it.” specifically how it works from the back end. obviously everyone wants more participation and interaction, but that’s the “front end” of web 2.0. that’s like in the front end of photography everyone does, in fact, now understand what to do when there’s a camera pointed at them. that part’s pretty simple. “getting” the back end of web 2.0 is about understanding how to enable, manage, and not accidentally carelessly wreck these delicate processes. that’s the kind of thing that takes training, much like any other SKILL. are there 700-level college courses on “community management” required for that marketing degree yet?
2. YOU DON’T HAVE TO GET IT. IT’S OK.
ok, there may also be a little bit more to it than just training. one of my best friends jokes that i’m so right-brained i lean. if you and i ever go out to dinner with a lot of our friends i am the last person, literally, you’d want to be asking to figure out who owes how much and how much each person needs to put in for a tip. i don’t get math, and despite what all my high school math teachers insisted, that’s OK. see? now you know, and you will never expect to rely on me to calculate anything for you. it’s ok.
3. IF YOU DON’T GET IT, DON’T MAKE DECISIONS ABOUT IT.
you wouldn’t send out a press release without a publicist’s involvement, so why the fuck would you make decisions about web 2.0-related issues without first consulting an expert? it’s probably because you’re not aware that there is an “IT” to it that you don’t “get,” i guess. i’ve heard that saying “i didn’t know what the speed limit was” is a great approach to take when getting pulled over. this is perhaps the point we’ll get to after the infancy is over. people will at least recognize that there is a concrete, specific “IT” that they may or may not be getting.
4. NOT EVERYONE IS GOING TO KNOW THAT YOU DON’T GET IT
if the receptionist screws up and accidentally transfers someone over to you who was supposed to have gotten connected to the sales dept., and you happen to be a graphic designer, are you going to pretend like you know anything about pitching? probably not! you’re probably going to let the person know you’re not quite the right dept. to be talking to, and as quickly as humanly possible, i’d imagine, get that call away from you to one of thosesales people who’s actually equipped to handle it. i hope you see where i’m going with this. just because you’re approached to make a decision about something that you don’t “get” doesn’t mean you ought to. you wouldn’t want the sales folk mucking around with your design.
5. WHOEVER YOU HIRE TO “GET IT” OUGHT TO UNDERSTAND HOW TO FIX IT
this one deserves a whole other post unto itself. maybe a whole other blog. maybe a whole other graduate-level college course, and to be honest, i’m actually pretty exhausted from this day, and from this entry…. but i’ll say this: the web seems to be almost catholic in its obsession with sin and repentance. so if you done sinned, finding yourself a good priest is the way to go.
the longtime Tropicana brand symbol, an orange from which a straw protrudes. The symbol, meant to evoke fresh taste, had been supplanted on the new packages by a glass of orange juice.
