Your “Viral Marketing”: Will it blend?
Working in online marketing, we often have clients ask for “viral” campaigns, as if they were a banner size format. Email blast to our list? check. Banners for trade websites? check. Promo area on our website? check. Viral campaign? uh, what?
“Viral” isn’t an ad format, it’s a way that an idea is spread. It’s word-of-mouth, it’s forward-to-a-friend, it’s hallway conversations, not something you can plan for. (Although you can make it easy to spread.) Companies don’t plan for a “brilliant” product, they plan for a cell phone that meets users needs, is marketed well and thereby sells well. Brilliant comes later. The iPod started out as a music player, it was executed well, at the right time, with the right product/market support (iTunes music store) and grew virally because it met users needs and made emotional connections.
Virally-spread media becomes that way by being clever, amusing, facinating, well performed, poorly performed or even just weird. Some companies come up with campaigns that have these attributes, but also are closely related to their product and can really help impact their business. That’s the perfect storm of viral.
Blendtec’s Will It Blend? website is a perfect example of this. It’s a micro-site that has videos of “Blender-master” Tom Dickson putting all kinds of wacky stuff in the company’s blenders. It’s kitchy, memorable, funny and a blast to find out what things look like once blended. The stuff he blends is not your everyday food menu: a full coke can, a yard rake handle, 50 marbles, 40 pens, cell phones, hockey pucks… and the most recent – Tom’s old iPod (so his wife will get him a new one for the holidays.)
It’s not over-produced, it’s got psuedo-dramatic 70’s tv show music, it’s branded well and it’s consistent. To increase brand awareness, the site name is the catch-phrase. They’ve also included direct links to buy the company’s blenders – the visitor has seen proof of the power of these blenders, and from there it’s a few clicks to purchase. Well done.
They also have a blog, RSS, forward/share with a friend links and a suggest something to blend form. (I submitted an idea for junk snail mail.) The only things I see missing are social bookmarking links. Looks like they are even planning to sell the “blended up” iPod on ebay… nice!
I sure would like to see the results of this site/videos. Anyone at Blendtec care to share?
What can you do with your product or service that can really go viral? Don’t be afraid to say “nothing” – this doesn’t work for everyone.
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Hi Charlie -
Will it blend? is certainly an amazing project. The most amazing thing to me is the rapid development of the campaign. Will it Blend delivered the type of results I was hoping for but in days - not months.
The best part about this is that what you see is all real. And we have (thanks in part to your suggestion) literally tens-of-thousands of requests as to what will be the next victim for the Total Blender.
Through this viral campaign, we have created “top of mind” awareness and a strong branding presence for Blendtec that literatlly only cost us a few dollars. (Our first blending session cost us about $50 - and delivered classics like the Rake, Extra Value Meal, Marbles and Ice into Snow.)
So far, the results are impressive! Web traffic is through the roof, Web orders have grown exponentially and all of our business channels, including our commercial blender lines, have reported significant impact from Will it Blend.