Two different companies ran two different cultural branding campaigns, focusing on different tactics. Old Spice ran a campaign using humor to humanize their brand. Chipotle ran a campaign attempting to solicit emotion. Both of these brands saw sales and social media engagement success as a result of their campaigns.
Old Spice is an old brand, one of the oldest in men’s personal care products. The outdated advertising focused on the brand’s efficacy and sales had been lagging. They needed to connect to the customer on a more emotional level, one that would address the personal needs and desires behind choosing a personal care product. It focused on the scent, claiming it was the manliest of scents on the planet (Old Spice, 2010). Old Spice chose humor to humanize their brand as a strategy. The main character of the ads made fun of what it meant to be ‘manly’ and ‘attractive’ (Holt, 2016). The humor made the content likable, relatable, and shareable. The videos were short, some as short as seventeen seconds. This was a new strategy for online marketing. Also, they had a high level of brand participation, with the Old Spice Man responding within 24 hours to tweets with videos, especially if the videos were from people influential on social media. Personalized videos were shared for free on the sites of the influencers, which gained more viewers. The campaign was a huge success. The Old Spice channel was the most viewed company channel on YouTube. The videos had 236 million views. Facebook interaction went up 800%. Most importantly, sales figures increased by 107% (Bullas, n.d.). Many commentators have recognized this social media campaign as the quintessential case study in viral social media marketing (Old Spice, 2010).
Chipotle focused on soliciting emotion as their strategy. With their Scarecrow video they targeted an anxiety that was prevalent in crowdculture, namely the idea that industrial food production is feeding us garbage and lies. This strategy aimed to positively affect the brand by framing the brand as one of the good guys. They wanted their customers to feel that they were a company that serves fast food but they are calling out the industrial food production industries, they are producing ‘real food’ and the consumer should feel good about eating there. This campaign was effective because the videos aligned with a larger emotion that was circulating through social media. The videos were viewed tens of millions of times and drove large sales and profits for the company (Holt, 2016).
Both of these companies connected with larger ideologies that were pulsing through social media and engaged in cultural branding. Old Spice engaged in the discourse around gender and sexuality and succeeded by identifying with their ‘ironic hipster aesthetic’. Chipotle engaged in the conversation about large-scale food production and positioned themselves as a player the preindustrial food movement (Holt 2016). Both of these brands moved away from just discussing the virtues of their products and instead positioned themselves as influencers in the larger conversations their products fit into. They were both successful in their efforts. I don’t think one was better than the other.
Works Cited
Bullas, J. (n.d.). https://www.jeffbullas.com/11-social-media-marketing-lessons-from-the-old-spice-campaign/. In JeffBullas. Retrieved from https://www.jeffbullas.com/11-social-media-marketing-lessons-from-the-old-spice-campaign/
Holt, D. (2016, March). Branding in the Age of Social Media. In Harvard Business Review. Retrieved from https://eds-a-ebscohost-com.vlib.excelsior.edu/eds/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=2&sid=dd1f7d51-0c1a-4d36-a489-520f97096d96%40sdc-v-sessmgr03
Old Spice Case Study: Effectively harnessing social media in personal care. (2010, October 1). In Business Source Complete. Retrieved from https://eds-b-ebscohost-com.vlib.excelsior.edu/eds/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=5&sid=c521412a-86af-4c4f-8e73-b6fe56ac5031%40pdc-v-sessmgr03
DJ Snickel 