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Managing Meaning
The people who work on building the Red Bull brand never cease to amaze me. They understand the “brand-strategy-is-everything-and-everywhere� principle better than most companies that dwarf them in size.
This morning, as I worked through my daily regimen of brand strategy reading I came across yet another Red Bull strategy nugget that reveals just how ingenious and relentless the Red Bull branding brigade can be.
Marketing professor Joel Steckel of NYU’s Stern School of Business described how, when Red Bull was starting out, they would place empty Red Bull cans in trash containers outside New York’s hippest, coolest night-spots (Building your special brand identity, Jamie Herzlich, Newsday, February 5, 2007).
So, whether you’re walking into the club or out of the club, one thing you figure out is that the other cool people who are showing up drink Red Bull. Amazing. It’s subtle. It’s cheap. It takes advantage of Red Bull’s distinctive can shape and design.
Because most people don’t know how to manage evidence of “cool,� they default to just claiming it. Of course, anybody who really gets the essence of “cool� understands that claiming “cool� is uncool. What works better is to create the evidence that leads your target audience to draw that conclusion for themselves.
The - and I do mean THE - core strategy principle underpinning brand-building is management of evidence. Success comes from understanding and working the dynamics of inference. When your target customers draw a conclusion, they do the making of meaning; you don’t. You can’t compete with them. You shouldn’t try.
Posted on February 6, 2007 08:38 AM | Permalink
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