Event Marketing – the Lessons from Red Bull Strategy

There be few brands that can offer more than lessons in how to approach the next generation of marketing than inflamed Bull. Focusing their strategy on earned media, cultural integration and value creation, redness Bulls approach is pioneering, and a template that some brands would venerate to follow. However its also proven a difficult strategy to replicate, specifically because just how different it is from the traditional marketing model. Its by all odds non just close to sponsoring a couple of youth essences and calling it a day.The scale of carmine Bulls committedness to non-traditional marketing is unprecedented. As far back as a decade ago, rosy-cheeked Bull was spending more than 80% of their significant marketing budget on non-measured media. Thats wholly inverse to the traditional marketing formula of focusing on packaged communication messages and the broadcast media to disperse them. Core to chromatic Bulls mastery has been their unique strategy of focusi ng on brand-owned events.It struck me that one of the best ways to make the point about what it takes to seriously succeed at their aim and at this game was to show the scale they ar operating on. Creating vs sponsoring After sponsoring a handful of existing events early in the brands history, Red Bull made a strategic decision to create their own events and have followed this direction consistently ever since. This is a hugely important discriminator for them, and sets them a league apart from sponsor brands . Early investment becomes equity As a sponsor brand, the more important and general the event becomes, the more it costs. However Red Bulls initial investment in creating the event quickly starts giveing compound interest, and as the event grows in stature they reap all of the rewards while costing them further the maintenance of re-running the event. 2. Sole-branding Most big events have their platinum, gold and silver sponsors. How ofttimes are brands really getting out of these sponsorships?And if you want to distinguish your brand by putting your name on the event, be prepared 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 omnipresent and seamlessly integrated into the event rather than tacked on and diluted amongst a hundred other sponsors. There is no question who is putting on the event and responsible for carry it to everyone and making it happen.3. Au whereforeticity and credibility For me there is a big difference with a brand simply paying to have their logo attached to something, 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 different type of authenticity and credibility is conferred to the brand as a result. Successful creation s ignals commitment to and deep understanding of the space, whereas anyone can pay to logo-ize something.Im not saying sponsorship is always a bad thing by any stretch, but Id argue it definitely lacks the same resonance with the audience. 4. Underground up There is something powerful about how so many of these Red Bull events started out small and local, and have vainglorious 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 messaging, 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 mercy of the events owners and along for the ride. Longevity Many brands flit from campaign to campaign, with their event activation a tacked on component that is rarely addressed consistently. Getting ommitment to on-going events from a brand can be near impossible. Red Bull is fundamentally different in this regard. They create experiences that generate value for the brand and then they build equity in them consistently over time, just as almost brands would do with important product innovations and sub-brands. This is hugely cost effective compared to reinventing the ramble every year, and it ensures the brand becomes fundamentally woven into the lives of the athletes and influential consumers they wish to reach, as Red Bull is guaranteed to be part of their year, every year.Plus the audience frequently scales in size annually. Flugtag and Red Bull Soap Box race are now yearly highlights for many consumers, reaching in-person aud iences of hundreds of thousand of tidy sum 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 years are still ongoing, year after year.Depth and breadth. Another key differentiator with Red Bull is the incredible effort they have gone to in allege to own put through sports and become embedded in youth culture crossways the board. They have quite literally gone after every action sport you can think 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 adroit 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 absolutely essential to the vitality of the sports they sponsor. Use crea tivity to reinforce the brand and create cut-through Looking down the list, another thing becomes immediately undetermined 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 names to build excitement around events before youve even heard of them to and to indelibly seal them as Red Bull.Additionally, Red Bull seek out and create a sense of drama and the spectacular with each event to couple 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 ice skates? Red Bull has made it their mission to bring barely imaginable experiences into existence, and give them all the spectacle and pomp of a real sport. And then to do it again, year after year. Create shareable content 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, given 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 interaction at the tangible experiences themselves, both from participants and spectators. And then through a combination of PR, word of mouth, and pull media channels they get an absolute ton of exposure of their content. And through platforms like their popular Facebook page, content-rich website, Red Bulletin, and a legion of popular microsites and brand communities like FMXWorld, Red Bull can legitimately claim to be a media brand in its own right at a time when most brands are still chew uping about the idea.The reason Red Bull is so fire 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 trust 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. Only when a market is deemed mature does the company begin a media push.The idea is to reinforce, not introduce, the brand. Media is not a tool that we use to establish the market, said vp-marketing David Rohdy. It is a lively part. Its just later in the development. The brand spent $100 million in the U. S. last year, according to the company Measured med ia 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 globose 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 start 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 Youth presentations on Red Bull. Basic ally 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 signalise from this post and the preceding list that Im a massive fan of Red Bulls strategy. Its unique, its effective, and it has a carry on 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.