SELECTED ONLINE BRAND COMMUNITY
For this assessment, I have chosen “RED BULL” as the focus of my study because the brand has become a part of popular culture and Red Bull is America’s most popular energy drink capturing a huge market. The brand started in 1987 as an energy drink company and over the years the brand has pioneered into a giant market with loyal customers, brand awareness, and a strong community with millions of followers. The brand is really powerful as it is the most recognizable energy drink of all. The impact of the brand can be seen when people feel “energy, vitality, spirit, spark, fire, passion” are the synonyms of Red Bull. These are not just some words that come to mind while thinking about it but these are the key associations and factors the brand has built over the ages.
Now, let’s have a look at what a BRAND COMMUNITY is and why people like to be a part of it.
A brand community is a group of individuals with similar thoughts and the same mind who love to consume products or services from a particular brand. They love to get associated with the brand not only in monetary terms but they are also engaged with the brand emotionally. They tend to buy all the products from the brand and tell their friends, and family about it and show a connection between them and the brand. One such fine example of such a brand is Red Bull.
Redbull’s slogan, “GIVE YOU WINGS” is wholesome, it made Red Bull the brand with the highest market share of an energy drink. The slogan was created to target their potential audience by making them believe that you and your thoughts will get wings after consuming our product. The tagline was brought to life when the brand started adopting various ideas of showcasing stunts like skydiving, and wingsuit flying in the market to promote their product. This maneuver has proven an enormous success for their brand engagement and the brand is successful in building such a grand community.
Red Bull community:
Redbull has its own vibrant community which can be found at Redbullcontentpool.com and Redbull.com .
Online Red Bull community portal page at Redbull.com/us-en/projects/gaming-community.
Portal for all content at Redbullcontentpool.com
DIFFERENT SOCIAL MEDIA PRESENCE
1) Facebook: The Red Bull Facebook community has over 47 million likes and 49 million followers.
2) Red Bull X (Twitter) Community: The Red Bull X community has 1.9 million followers with daily active involvement.
3) Red Bull Pinterest: The Pinterest community of Red Bull has over 61k followers.
4) Red Bull Reddit: The Reddit community of Red Bull has 11k members and it is in the top 5% of the Reddit communities.
5) Red Bull Instagram: Red Bull has 18.6 million followers on Instagram with every post having high engagement.
WHAT IS RED BULL DOING WELL
While some brands are struggling to build a strong online community, Red Bull is at a very rapid pace of building a powerful online community just like Apple and Lego with millions of followers, and is still acing it. As we all are aware, Red Bull is not a unique product in the market. The market is bursting with a variety of energy drinks, however, the brand’s courage, creative vision, marketing strategies, and enduring efforts to rule the energy drink market have made them what they are today.
Below are some of the reasons how and what they are doing well:
- CREATING RELEVANT CONTENT:
The brand is well-known for creating strong core content for its audience and people tend to resonate with it. Their content revolves around an interaction between the interests of their audience like adventure, athletics, sports, and fast-paced lifestyle with the ability of their product to keep energetic and awake during those events. The best example of that is “#GivesYouWings”, people resonate with their content and use the tagline as a hashtag to post something to look like a part of the brand. - CONSISTENT VISUAL BRANDING:
The brand knows its audience very well. Red Bull puts out a lot of content for its audience, the brand looks consistent with its branding because Red Bull posts several videos in a week to promote their brand. The more content, the more are people going to see it and the more they are going to remember it. - KEEPING A SIMPLE MESSAGE:
Red Bull is committed to their message today, the brand started with one simple message “GivesYouWings” and they are still sticking to it. The brand stays true to its original message across all the social platforms it uses. - “NEVER TALK ABOUT…” SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGY:
Red Bull avoids direct marketing of its product, instead, it focuses on visualizing extraordinary human achievements like skydiving, surfing, skateboarding, mountain biking, and other extreme sports and stunts. One of the remarkable and memorable examples of such a campaign was Red Bull Stratos which was completed on 14th October 2012. This project from Red Bull went viral when Felix Baumgartner, a famous daredevil sponsored by Red Bull, jumped from space at a height of 39,969.4 meters (127,852.4ft) at a speed of Mach 1 or the speed of sound without an aircraft towards Earth. - GIVE FANS WHAT THEY WANT:
Red Bull focuses on creating content relevant to its audience. They put emphasis on activities their audience would participate in while consuming their drinks. Red Bull also publishes their content everywhere where their audience can be found. The brand always seems to keep an eye on its audience and use the information to its advantage resonating with its audience’s needs and desires.
VISUAL EVIDENCE: WHAT IS REDBULL DOING WELL
1) One of the best community-building campaigns from Redbull was the Stratos Space Diving Project as we have discussed earlier. The combined views of this project playlist on YouTube were 116 million.
I Jumped From Space (World Record Supersonic Freefall)
Red Bull Stratos Space Diving Project
The complete Stratos Space Diving Project Playlist can be seen at the below link.
2) Another popular community-building campaign was “The Athlete Machine | Red Bull Kluge”.
The German adjective Klug (meaning “clever”) was the motivation behind this Red Bull Kluge initiative to combine complex machinery, extreme sports, stunts, and skills of world-class athletes.
These events pushed the physical limits of extreme sports to see what is possible when skill combines with energy. This campaign gathered 37 million views and 11k comments on the YouTube Red Bull community alone.
The Athlete Machine | Red Bull Kluge
The Athlete Machine | Red Bull Kluge
WHERE ARE THEY COMING UP SHORT
Reb Bull has one of the best and most vibrant online communities and campaigns. There are very less areas of improvement that Red Bull might implement. One such occasion where there was an issue with Red Bull’s online community-building strategy was coming up with a campaign
“Red Bull gives you wings”. This campaign backfired as there was a legal dispute In a US court where the campaign was ruled to be “misleading advertising”. This dispute was settled for over $13 million. There was a backlash and negative feedback from the Red Bull community due to this campaign. This was one of the incidences where Reb Bull’s community-building approach failed. The brand should learn from this episode and prevent any further disasters like this failed campaign from repeating in the future.
VISUAL EVIDENCE: WHERE ARE THEY COMING UP SHORT
The marketing strategy and social media community-building efforts from Red Bull have been exceptional but for one major failed strategy which was “Red Bull gives you wings”. People in the Red Bull community were not welcoming about this campaign. As a result, Red Bull faced multiple lawsuits as we have discussed earlier. The detailed campaign can be seen below.
Source: CBC.ca – Red Bull settles false advertising lawsuit for $13M
Source: Businessoutreach.in – The 13 million story behind red bull’s 3 i’es tagline.
REFERENCES:
How Red Bull established its brand community
Welcome To The Red Bull Community!
Community | NewYorkRedBulls.com
PR Case Study: The Red Bull Community | Doctor Spin
The Big Brand Theory: Red Bull’s Social Media Marketing
How Red Bull Fuels Its Facebook Community With Winning Content
Red Bull Marketing Strategy: The 9 Ways Red Bull Changed The Marketing Game
Red Bull Social Media Campaign & Digital Strategy | Cuker Work
Red bull final report (pdf) – Course Sidekick
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