Event Marketing – the Lessons from Red Bull Strategy

There be few shops that can draw extinct more lessons in how to approach the following generation of merc giveise than vehement dickhead. Focusing their scheme on earned media, cultural integration and measure out creation, rose-cheeked Bulls approach is pioneering, and a template that more brands would love to follow. However its also proven a tough strategy to replicate, specific all toldy because just how variant it is from the tralatitious selling model. Its definitely not just or so sponsoring a couple of offspring typefaces and calling it a day.The scale of exit Bulls committal to non-traditional marketing is unprecedented. As far rump as a ex ago, rubor Bull was spending more than 80% of their significant marketing budget on non-measured media. Thats completely inverse to the traditional marketing formula of focusing on packaged communication messages and the giganticcast media to bedspread them. Core to tearing Bulls success has been their unique st rategy of focusing on brand- witnessed events.It struck me that one of the best elbow rooms to profess the point to the highest degree what it takes to seriously succeed at their level and at this game was to show the scale they are operating on. Creating vs sponsoring After sponsoring a handful of existing events early in the brands history, redness Bull made a strategic decision to make water their own events and fill followed this direction consistently ever since. This is a hugely burning(prenominal) differentiator for them, and sets them a league ap artistic creation from sponsor brands . Early coronation becomes equity As a sponsor brand, the more important and best-selling(predicate) the event becomes, the more it cost. However Red Bulls initial dropment in creating the event quickly starts paying compound interest, and as the event grows in meridian they reap all of the rewards while cost them only the maintenance of re-running the event. 2. Sole-branding Most t remendous events have their platinum, gold and ash gray sponsors. How much are brands really getting out of these sponsorships?And if you want to severalise your brand by putting your name on the event, be disposed(p) to shell out mega bucks. Red Bull on the other hand is the title sponsor for every one of these ninety events, and their branding is present and seamlessly integrated into the event rather than tacked on and diluted amongst a century other sponsors. There is no question who is putting on the event and responsible for bringing it to everyone and making it happen.3. Au thereforeticity and credibility For me there is a big difference with a brand simply paying to have their logo attached to some affaire, and with a brand who puts their energy, resources, and creativity to work in bringing something to life themselves, even if it is of course delivered behind the scenes by a host of event and activation agencies. Theres a different level of commitment involved, and a d ifferent type of authenticity and credibility is conferred to the brand as a result. Successful creation signals commitment to and slurred understanding of the space, whereas anyone can pay to logo-ize something.Im not saw sponsorship is always a bad thing by any stretch, still Id argue it definitely lacks the same resonance with the audience. 4. undercover up There is something powerful about how so many of these Red Bull events started out small and local, and have grown to be big and hugely important and influential amongst the athletes and their fans. Athletes themselves say voluntarily that many of these events are as important or second only to the X-Games in stature and importance to their career. This is huge for authenticity with their target.Red Bull has grown up with its audience, and them with it. 5. Control Last point on creation vs sponsorship is about control. Namely, when you own the event, you do what you want with it. You control the promotion, the PR, the mess aging, the branding, when it happens, where it happens, whos involved. Everything. Even as a long-term sponsor of an event, you are ultimately at the benevolence of the events owners and along for the ride. Longevity many another(prenominal) brands flit from labor to campaign, with their event activation a tacked on component that is rarely intercommunicate consistently. Getting ommitment to ongoing events from a brand can be undecomposed impossible. Red Bull is basically different in this regard. They create experiences that bring forth value for the brand and then they build equity in them consistently over time, just as most brands would do with important increase innovations and sub-brands. This is hugely cost effective compared to reinventing the wheel every year, and it ensures the brand becomes fundamentally woven into the lives of the athletes and influential consumers they wish to r distributively, as Red Bull is guaranteed to be part of their year, every year.Plus the audience often scales in coat annually. Flugtag and Red Bull Soap Box race are presently yearly highlights for many consumers, reaching in-person audiences of hundreds of thousand of volume in many cities. In Brazil over one million people turned up for the Red Bull Air Race. From the list under you can see sponsorship of some events such as Flugtag reaching back all the way to 1991, but the vast majority of the events theyve created over the eld are still ongoing, year after year.Depth and breadth. Another come across differentiator with Red Bull is the incredible effort they have gone(a)(a) to in order to own action sports and become embedded in youth culture across the board. They have quite literally gone after every action sport you can telephone of, and in a number of cases essentially created their own sports. Theyve since started attacking music and art with the same vigour. Where most brands are happy to tack on their logo to a handful of events in a year and call it a sponsorship strategy, Red Bull is literally ubiquitous.In many cases they are short essential to the vitality of the sports they sponsor. Use creativity to reinforce the brand and create cut- through Looking down the list, another thing becomes immediately clear all of the events sound awesome. Last Man Standing. Down and Dirty. exodus. Chopper Assault. City Rage. Heavy Metal. Red Bull have used crazy sounding and subversive label to build excitement around events before youve even heard of them to and to indelibly stamp them as Red Bull.Additionally, Red Bull examine out and create a sense of drama and the spectacular with each event to rival anything Evel Knieval couldve ever imagined. Downhill bike racing through Rios most notorious barrios? Wakeboarding in the dark in a flooded mine? Motocross duelling in bullrings? Roller derby on internal-combustion engine skates? Red Bull has made it their mission to bring barely imaginable experiences into existence, and giv e them all the spectacle and pomp of a real sport. And then to do it again, year after year. Create shareable means and earn your media How can Red Bull possibly afford all this?Well, they do the opposite thing most brands do. Most brands spend a tiny bit on content, and then 10x as much on media to try and spread that content as far as possible, because people arent really that interested in what they are saying so they have to get it in front of eyeballs by force. Which of course then diminishes the value of reaching those people, addicted they would rather you werent. Red Bull was doing earned media before it was a buzzword. They invest in unique, compelling experiences, and in the creation of content from those experiences.They get a significant amount of very deep and powerful brand fundamental interaction at the actual experiences themselves, both from participants and spectators. And then through a combination of PR, word of mouth, and pull media channels they get an abso lute ton of word picture of their content. And through platforms like their prevalent Facebook page, content-rich website, Red Bulletin, and a legion of popular microsites and brand communities like FMXWorld, Red Bull can legitimately strike to be a media brand in its own right at a time when most brands are still scolding about the subject.The reason Red Bull is so exciting as a brand and a case study to so many is theyve flipped the traditional advertising model on its head. They invest most of their budget in experiences, content and media assets, and allocate comparably little to actual media itself. They conceive if they build cool things, people will seek it out and talk about it, and they are right. From a Brandweek article from 2001 In the antithesis of any majors marketing plan, Red Bull buys traditional advertising last. altogether when a market is deemed mature does the party begin a media push.The idea is to reinforce, not introduce, the brand. Media is not a too l that we use to establish the market, verbalise vp-marketing David Rohdy. It is a critical part. Its just later in the development. The brand spent $100 million in the U. S. last year, according to the company Measured media spending was only $18. 9 million last year, up from $9 million in 1999, per Competitive Media Reporting. In a way their model is to first build targeted, ubiquitous relevance rather than broad mass awareness. They dont blast out, they focus deep and then bubble up.And the latter approach gives them a much stronger and longer-lasting foundation for their activity, and costs them less. Paid media fits into the mix later to solidify the position, but its an enhancer rather than the foundation. Mix spheric platforms and local activation Red Bull is looking for the ultimate blend of local relevance and cost-effective impact. So they have a chaotic but effective mix of global platforms such as Flugtag and Air Race and tens of locally focused events. Many events st art out locally and then get rolled out across regions as the template is perfected. Living and creating with your audiencesI think I got this insight out of one of the many great Mobile younker presentations on Red Bull. Basically the point is everything Red Bull do is about creating and living with their audience, rather than messaging at them. What else? I think you can probably tell from this post and the preceding list that Im a massive fan of Red Bulls strategy. Its unique, its effective, and it has a lot to say about where the next generation of marketing is heading. Would love to hear what other lessons youve taken from Red Bulls approach, and what other brands you think are doing this right.