The Cluetrain Jumps the Tracks
This is an entry I’ve been meaning to write for a few weeks. I’ve put it off not because I didn’t know what to say (that’s the easy part), but because there’s just been so much going on in the ad jungle of late.
Back in late May, some rather ingenious students at M.I.T. designed and built a raft made entirely of Gatorade bottles and duct tape. They published their picto-story on their Xanga page and, faster than you can sing “Row, Row, Row Your Boat,” the story began spreading in typical viral fashion.
Rightfully proud of the fact they didn’t die a watery death in the middle of the Charles River, the students wrote to Gatorade and told their story.
By way of response, the kids received a personal letter from someone at Gatorade, some coupons and a few freebies, which is worth noting.
I’ll get back to that, but before I do it’s also worth noting that in the ensuing flurry of “oh, look at this” posts, one popped up taking Gatorade to task for not creating an ad around the students’ exploits and urging Gatorade to “get on board the cluetrain” and do so immediately.
Fine. This is the Democratic Internet (unless you’re logged in from China) and everyone’s entitled to their opinion. Whether or not it’s an informed, well-considered opinion is an entirely different matter altogether.
So here is mine: should Gatorade rush out and create a spot centered on these two hella-smart kids and their three-hour tour aboard the S.S. Is It In You? Nope.
Anyone who’s read this blog longer than a week or two knows I have some issues with consumer-generated content. Actually, I don’t have issues with consumer-generated content, I have issues with the people who profess to be thoughtful, cutting edge marketers who don’t think through the issues surrounding CGC and how it intersects with the brand before launching a smug tirade on how they are the ones who “get it” and how every brand should jump in with both feet and launch a CGC campaign now, damn the consequences (it’s all good) and damn the rationale for why (”come on, this is hot, you should do it”–or worse, “you should do it because it validates my consultancy“).
I’m absolutely certain there’s a way to do CGC right and do it in a way that deserves to be blown out into a full-fledged broadcast campaign. The Gatorade raft simply isn’t it for one very large reason: it’s off brand.
Before I go on, let’s pretend the world isn’t familiar with the product and consider for a moment what Gatorade represents as a brand and then look to see if two product-fanatical kids, floating on a raft made of bottles in the middle of the Charles River, are a good fit for a multi-million dollar ad campaign under its brand umbrella.
Gatorade, the product, promotes a very well defined proposition: it contains the fuel athletes need to perform at their peak performance potential. The brand, and the imagery associated with it, easily falls out of this rather simple proposition: athletes (and, often specifically, athletes known for delivering outstanding peak performances); high-intensity, hard-core physical exertion; force of will under difficult and trying situations; blood, sweat and tears; and, finally, triumph in the face of impossible circumstances.
If you’re following along you can probably already see how the story of a lazy sunny day’s float on a raft and the story of Gatorade’s brand don’t intersect. If you can’t and you’re in marketing, you should probably reconsider your choice of careers (if only for the sake of your clients).
Now the question might come up, “but why doesn’t Gatorade just create an ad about it, anyway? They have the money.”
First, they might have a lot of money, but they don’t have unlimited resources and, even if they did, you wouldn’t want to split your brand message into a million tiny voices showing each and every possible way the product can and might be used (no matter how off-brand the usage might be). Brands are built through consistency of messaging.
I come from the advertising camp that says “consumers are intelligent people,” and I know they will get to other usage occasions on their own with no reason to roll out a million dollar production defining each and every possible way to interact with the product (no matter how fanatical that interaction might be).
Let’s take Nike as an only slightly tangential example. Like Gatorade, their brand proposition is fairly simple to discern: they produce the equipment athletes need in order to get the most out of their physical activity.
Let me ask you this question: throughout the world’s population, where are Nike products used most frequently? On the playing field by a sweaty athlete or as everyday wear by people going about their daily business?
Points to you if you said everyday wear. Hell, I’m wearing a Nike soccer dry-weave shirt and Converse high-tops as I write this and I don’t intend to drop in to a half-pipe on my board, float a three pointer in from long range or head a ball into the net at the World Cup anytime soon.
Now, when was the last time you saw an ad campaign from Nike that showed their products in use by people sitting behind a desk, pecking away at their keyboard? You haven’t because it would be off brand and consumers are perfectly able to “get it” on their own. The lack of a million dollar ad campaign (or even an on-the-cheap, online CGC campaign) hasn’t prevented consumers from rightfully reaching the conclusion that, “Hey! I can use this product for something other than what they advertise!”
There is absolutely no reason to show each and every usage occasion for your product in an ad campaign and, in fact, it can be quite detrimental to do so. A large piece of the pie-of-reasoning why someone would choose Nike over Adidas is, in large part, due to how well they relate to the brand on a personal level and how much of that brand image they see reflected in themselves (or how much they wish to see).
And just because you’re a fan of the product and do fanatical things with it in your life, it doesn’t mean what you’re doing is of any benefit to the brand image, either.
I don’t care how fanatical he might be, seeing a hairy, overweight, translucently white bald man running naked down the street, showing off the Nike “swoosh” tattooed on his chest will do nothing but make me wince. Repeat that experience over and over again and I’ll eventually come to the conclusion that Nike’s not a brand “for me.”
This isn’t to knock what the M.I.T. students did; it’s just to say that, in order for it to make enough sense to warrant an ad campaign built around it, the raft simply doesn’t float. Had they used Jones Soda bottles, a brand built on its consumers’ fanatical (to the extreme) use of the product, sure, I can see that.
But Gatorade? Nope.
Now back to Gatorade’s response to the kids that I mentioned earlier. In the end, they received a couple of coupons, some freebies and a nice letter from Gatorade. While there’s no way I’d build a campaign around their rafting experience, Gatorade could have sweetened the pot a little and generated goodwill of a magnitude or two greater than what they did. As a brand, you reward loyal users (just not always with their own ad campaign).
But don’t tell me Gatorade needs to get on the cluetrain. They’re one of the few brands out there who consistently get it right when it comes to speaking to their core consumer (those athletes I mentioned earlier) in a voice that rings perfect-pitch true. And their ever-expanding penetration, share and frequency of use speaks volumes about the fact I’m not the only one who understands who the brand is, what they represent and whether or not they speak to me in an engaging way.
They do.
And if you’re a marketer or consultant scorning Gatorade’s hesitation at boarding the raft, you need to step back and reconsider your position.
That and retake your Marketing 101 class.
Email Article Tuesday, June 20th, 2006 at 12:27pm Mack Simpson
Filed under: Ad Monkeys, Ad Jungle, Ad Nauseam | add this post to del.icio.us
Technorati Tags: Advertising, Gatorade, Raft, MIT, Cluetrain
10 Comments Add your own
1. makehelogobigger | June 20th, 2006 at 1:10 pm
Now that’s pent-up brand frustration folks. Good take.
I could only add that if they or other brands do/did give in and do an ad for users like that, then there go the floodgates. What’s next? Jackass The Sequel - sponsored by Gatorade for that inner Jackass in all of us?
“See Johnny Knoxville tease alligators while wearing Gatorade branded apparel.”
101 indeed. Bottom line: no matter what product it is, what’s right for the brand and what’s not?
Funny you wrote this. Tangental to the topic, but there was the story at adpulp on how Cristal finds their rapper audience “curious”. Hmmm. Not sure I’d insult my cashflow like that. When I worked on Land Rover, they, like Timberland, faced a similar situation.
Their intended demo had become something other than the Ralph Lauren/prep crowd. Now they found had appeal with the urban and “new money” crowd, (athletes, rappers, etc.). Unlike say, Hummer, which as a brand in its shorter history, seemed more tailor made for this demo right out of the gate. But I digress.
In that situation though were you have new revenue streams coming into the brand, you ride the wave and enjoy the sales blip the brand is seeing. But what you don’t do is all of a sudden is change all your marketing message and efforts to target just them.
Trends/fads/flava come and go, and your core audience will remember if you abandoned them in favor of some dead presidents and the flava of the month in a new demo.
Word, G.
2. Mack Simpson | June 20th, 2006 at 1:59 pm
I imagine the Cristal/rapper disconnect has more to do with old money French culture’s head-scratching at a young, urban, cutting-edge, trend creating demographic than anything else. They find it “curious” because they don’t know what it is, much less how they were able to reach them in the first place. I can’t imagine any disrespect was intended.
I could be wrong; they are French, after all.
Thanks for the props.
3. John Koetsier | June 20th, 2006 at 11:02 pm
Good post - I like your arguments. However, I come to slightly different conclusions.
One reason: I have never bought Gatorade in my life, and probably never will. (Even though I play ice hockey, soccer, baseball, and a variety of other sports.)
Why?
I don’t care what Michael Jordan does. I don’t care what the latest sports athlete du jour sells. And I actively dislike campaigns that think I’m so stupid that if I see someone successful and handsome and athletic I will sheepishly (understand how I’m using that term) go out and buy the product.
But I could be a Gatorade drinker and buyer … if only it seemed to me that it fit with my self image.
OK. That’s one thing. (And I think there’s more people out there like me, and growing.) Which leads into the second thing.
I hate the term “consumer-generated media.” I blogged about it right here.
Why?
I hate the term “consumer.” Who has the right to define me by what I eat, buy, use?
More and more people are become more and more conscious of this, I think, and that’s part of the emerging web 2.0 trend: people defining themselves by what they do, not by what they buy. At least not only or solely.
That’s a very early and emerging trend so far. But it’s growing. And as I mention here, 6 out of 10 young people on the web are contributing “content:” videos, photos, blog posts, you name it.
Something is changing, and marketers who don’t adapt will not be successful.
4. J. Scrivner | June 21st, 2006 at 10:52 am
Why the hell am I reading this!?!?!?
Any way, I agree with John above — I usually will go the other away from celebrity/athlete focused advertising. It typically insults me that someone would think that just because some athlete/famous person/insert name here wears/eats/drinks/drives/etc some particular product that I would want to do the same. It doesn’t work for a lot of folks I that I consort with.
Just 2 cents worth from a non ad-monkey dude.
5. Mack Simpson | June 21st, 2006 at 1:56 pm
I’m going to roll a couple of responses into one (sorry for the slow comment approvals, they came in after I turned in for the night and, J, yours came in when I was in the studio this morning).
Let’s start with the whole celebrity issue– which isn’t even a part of my reasoning of why I wouldn’t use the raft kids in an ad campaign.
Gatorade, the brand, was incredibly well-established before they ever signed Michael Jordan (their first celebrity spokesperson). Gatorade, the drink, has been around since
19741967 (if I recall correctly) and Jordan was signed in 1991, so for the first1724 years or so of their existance, they were celebrity-less and did just fine, thank you very much.Next, it’s worth pointing out that celebrities in spots really work– assuming you match the right celebrity with the right product. Gatorade produces roughly 25-30 spots a year for domestic broadcast consumption (plus more for the international market) and of those, only 3-4– roughly 10%– have celebrities in them. Yet it seems those are the ones John and J remember. Go figure.
I see absolutely nothing wrong with celebrity spokespeople, especially when they’re endorsing a product, like Gatorade, that truly is a player on the sidelines in real-life professional sports. Put it this way, those orange tubs and green bottles aren’t filled with water– and there’s a reason they’re not: Gatorade works and really is used by athletes performing in the upper echelons of their sports.
What’s wrong with professionals saying they use the stuff and it helps them perform better when both those things are true? Jordan was drinking the stuff before he ever became a spokesperson and given the penetration of Gatorade into all active sports, the same can be said of each of their spokespersons.
We’re not talking about something that’s a complete disconnect; this isn’t George Foreman hawking perfume. This is something they drink, believe in and purposefully consume in order to keep their bodies performing at their peak during gametime.
Is it you don’t feel professionals deserve a voice? Or perhaps a lesser one? Is it that they’re paid? If the raft boys had a campaign created around them, they’d become paid performers as well.
Do either of you own anything manufactured by Nike? They’ve surely been left untouched by the professional athlete’s hand…
Now on to other things, like this Web 2.0 business. “Web 2.0″ is one of those sly little marketing phrases that rings warning bells in my head (”Consultant! Consultant!”) every time I hear it. I agree with Jeff Zeldman and say let’s just skip past the bullshit and head straight on to Web 3.0. This sounds snide– it’s not meant to be– but I’m frankly surprised someone who’s so “on to” celebrity marketing would even toss the phrase around. Call it “Puffery 2.0″
And call it consumer-generated content or user-generated content (I use both), it doesn’t really matter to me. Like any specialized industry, I work in one that uses its own shorthand language in order to communicate clearly and effectively amongst ourselves. “People” will always be “consumers,” “targets,” “demographics,” or “psychographics” when conducting business (depending on how thinly I’m slicing them up).
This doesn’t mean I see someone as a “thing” when I receive my brief (”General market males, 18-34 with X psychographic profile”), it means I understand the shorthand. I know enough people, of all ages, sexes and races, and enough about human psychology to usually put a pretty exact face and name to a “target.”
When I write, direct and produce spots, I’m writing, directing and producing to that person.
It’s the beauty of the whole target/demo/psycho profiling that, when we get a bunch of people together who share those same attitudes in a room to watch the spot I wrote for “Bill,” they also seem to spark to it in the same way “Bill” did.
I really believe one of the reasons non ad-types like to rail against demographic and psychographic profiling is, when it comes down to brass tacks, it really, really works. (Sorry, but it does.)
Let’s go back to CGC for just a second. In a study, commissioned by IPG and produced by YouTube, here’s what they found out about the creators of CGC:
The study found that video creators are overwhelmingly young males: 86 percent are male and 72 percent are under 25. About half took less than an hour to create their videos, and 57 percent said they created videos multiple times per month.
So essentially it’s the same demographic that plays video games. Why in the hell would I rush a CGC campaign out for a product that skews older (like high-end cars, credit cards or, really, just about anything that can’t be bought with an allowance) or– GASP!– female? (source)
Do you ever hear this from the consultants? Nope. They’re too busy trying to push their consultancy, and the new hip, hotter than hot consultancy right now is hyping Web 2.0 (sorry) CGC as the savior of everything under the sun.
Thanks for writing, John, and it’s always a pleasure to see you’re still around, J.
6. J. Scrivner | June 21st, 2006 at 2:49 pm
I happen to agree with you Mack about the Gatorade raft boys — their angle just doesn’t seem to fit the image of Gatorade. And I have no doubt that certain celebrity based endorsements work for certain (younger) demographics. It’s that as I get older those endorsements just don’t matter any to me. But, I guess in the eyes of an advertiser, the ad served some usefull function if I remembered it (maybe not favorably) due to the celebrity of the persons involved.
It’s interesting to see some of the insight you ad folks have about what is perceived to work and why. However, being an engineer, I simply cannot match your sheer quantity of words to describe my thoughts. I enjoy the blog — keep it up.
7. makethelogobigger | June 21st, 2006 at 7:06 pm
Sorry to jump on the Web 2.0 Hate Wagon, but when I hear that or any other phrase like Xers, Early Adopters, (People who adopt kids before 10:00 am?) etc., it smacks of an industry trying to get a handle on an emerging trend by “owning” a proprietary term associated with that trend, when all that word really means is not much of anything.
Mack, as far as the orgins of ze Gatorade, I think it’s been around longer than that. I saw Keith “Whoa Nellie!” Jackson in a spot about football in the late 60’s and them creating it for that sport. But I remember as a wee lad playing tennis with the old man who got me hooked, and that was definitely pre-1971. (And I think it was a big fav with the tennis crowd back then if I’m not mistaken.)
And Jordan never influenced me to buy anything, $160 for kicks is stilI $160, although I have many Nike shirts. As for drinking, I always drank Gatorade because it was the one thing besides water I could drink room temp and continue to play sports without cramping.
One odd thing I remember though, which goes to for lack of a better phrase, the memory of taste, was that it tasted slightly less harsh than it does now. Since everything was either in old-school Man-Laws steel cans or glass bottles, Gatorade falling into the latter camp, I wonder if the switch to plastic has affected it somehow. Maybe they tweaked the formula?
Call me crazy.
8. Mack Simpson | June 21st, 2006 at 7:21 pm
You’re right. It was 1967. I should know this; I just came back from their equity summit and I’ve worked on the brand for four years, now. I blame it on a World Cup-addled brain.
I know Gatorade’s exact formula is always being tweaked.
Gatorade has a science lab called the Gatorade Sports Sciences Institute (GSSI).
The lab isn’t touched by the marketing department (the marketers can’t walk in and say “we want a new product, make it happen”) and they don’t exist to sell product. The only thing they do day in and day out is test and experiment with the bio-physical aspects of sport and research ways to improve performance. If their work happens to turn into a new product, so be it, but there’s an iron curtain between them and the folks who sell the stuff.
So in all likelihood, the formula has probably evolved since you were playing sandlot ball.
You’re still crazy, though.
9. Grokodile | June 21st, 2006 at 8:18 pm
I can understand your take, but I do take slight exception at a part of your post:
I don’t think the reason to not show such off the cuff ads has anything to do with this aspect of your post. I do realize you did make the point it would be off-message, but even going in this direction is a mistake of the same type.
Well, I think so anyway. The brand does have a message as you convey, but it isn’t that we are buying the product because we want or need maximum performance for ourselves. If you are going to call us intelligent consumers, please realize that we aren’t buying the product because of the messages conveyed.
The average user, if intelligent, surely knows that they will never put the products to use the way they are positioned and sold to us. Instead, we can associate ourselves with people that do so.
Their is a sublte, or not so subtle, differences, but I think it is important. We don’t show fat slobs typing at keyboards because they aren’t cool. They aren’t revered. They aren’t heros. They aren’t people that other people want to be associated with by other people.
So, in some ways I agree that the consumer is intelligent, but they are also driven by emotion or non-cognitive issues as well. The trick is realizing what component of each will be at play in each situation.
Anyway, I have to laugh, I’m just a dufus with an opinion, there is nothing in my background that gives me the delusion that I’m actually informed about this… regards!
;)
10. Mack Simpson | June 21st, 2006 at 8:52 pm
Nice post.
You have, however, missed out on one very important thing by no fault of your own.
I can’t go into the specifics of how Gatorade targets a specific audience (simply watching and reading their ads should provide the specifics of “message,” but media tactics are another thing altogether and I can’t get in to those at all), but I can tell you who they are: Gatorade’s core consumer– the people we target– are active participants in organized sporting activities. Psychographically, these people want to win and will seek out any edge (practice, sports camps, training videos, etc.) that might put them over the top.
Gatorade specfically seeks out, through various media and direct advertising, people who participate in competitive sports several times a week. So, when I say Gatorade is “pitch-perfect” in speaking to their audience, it’s this active competitor I’m talking about as being the “audience.”
Because most media is imperfect, there’s a spill-over effect. They may place media on World Cup games, but not everyone who watches the World Cup is an active competitor (but I can assure you every active soccer competitor is watching the World Cup).
Gatorade doesn’t mindfully target a person who grows lazy behind a desk and only saw one of their spots because they were flipping through the stations.
We have a very specific target in mind.
I could go into great detail on a few of the reasons why people outside the target audience will see a message and then buy into the franchise, but J.’s already called me out on my wordiness.
Gatorade, I’m sure, appreciates every single individual who picks up a bottle, but they’ll never deviate from speaking to their core first and foremost– in “Texan,” we call that “dancing with the one who brought you,” and their core audience is made up of people who want an edge on the field.
One of the reasons they’ll never deviate, obviously, is because they’ve learned more people than just the active competitor set respond to that type of message, regardless of if they play sports or not. (Another even larger reason is, like Bill mentioned earlier, if your core target sees you leaving them, they’ll leave you even faster.)
You can hardly blame Gatorade for that; it’s simply smart marketing and advertising.
Thanks for writing. Nice insight.
Leave a Comment
Some HTML allowed:
<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <code> <em> <i> <strike> <strong>
Trackback this post | Subscribe to the comments via RSS Feed