“Interweb the Rainbow” – This is the way Skittles titled their brave and experimental foray into the Twitterverse and rather than taking baby steps they went all out. After the jump I’ll tell you why its an absoultely brilliant example of a company ‘being their brand’.
Before I explain how Skittles’ latest online market campaign is a great example of ‘being your brand’ I should probably explain what it is they’ve been up to. Well, what they’ve been up to is sacrificing control of their homepage to Twitter. Yup, if you visit the Skittles homepage you are not met, as is so often the case, with some fluffy flash site, oh no siree, what you’re met with is the Twitter page for the hashtag #skittles. Y’see Skittles have invited the Twitterverse to tweet about Skittles; appropriately tagging messages with the ‘#skittles’ hashtag to create an aggregated feed of all things Skittles. Oh the brave new world we live in… possums.
Why then is this such a great example of Skittles ‘being their brand’? Well, the reason is that Skittles aren’t in fact being their brand. Rather, thaey’re getting their audience to be their brand for them. I say this because one cursory glance at the #skittles feed shows that people have been using this stunt as a chance to be, how to say, ‘cheeky’. Yes, as is often the way of these things people have been leaving rude and inappropriate messages tagged #skittles. The brilliance of this is that whilst these mischievous rascals have been attempting to sabotage Skittles campaign they’ve only served to reinforce the Skittles brand. When I think Skittles (the confection, not the pub game) I think of their bold primary colours and sense of childlike fun. And low; the Skittles audience have been oh so very childlike in their reaction to Skittles campaign.
As a result, Skittles’ campaign reinforces their brand values but has done so only by their audience being their brand – by being childlike, immature and having some fun. And for this reason, good sirs and madames, I conclude that Interwebbing the Rainbow was a bloody marvellous idea.
Hi Matt,
I agree that it’s a clever approach but I disagree that this has been a successful brand exercise. My biggest concern is who Skittles are targeting, i would expect Skittles’ target market to be children/teenagers and some of the comments left on their site are disgraceful and unacceptable, childlike or not I wouldn’t have thought any parent would want their child to see what some people are writing on the site and whether Skittles takes responsibility for it or not is irrelevant it is still all being said under the Skittles brand name, something that may tarnish the brand in future.
I also don’t agree that Skittles has done this and yet have no social media interaction with it. The idea of social media is to be social yet they are just jumping on the band wagon and using social sites to get others to talk about them, or in this case spam them. I tell clients that social media is all about interaction so to see a campaign like this will scare clients away from the true reason to use social media and that is to talk to the customers.
Although i don’t deny this generates a lot of buzz for skittles i think I don’t see it as a ground breaking campaign
Hi Adam
Thanks for your thoughts!
To your first point I agree that some of the coments left are quite unsavoury (ironic considering they’re a ‘sweet’ brand teehee…) and could bite them in the ass. If we draw an analogy with a party – its ok to be the host and let your guests have fun in your house but you wouldn’t want them trashing the place so yes, I agree that Skittles were foolish to let it go un-moderated (but then we’d have all complained that they’d moderated catch 22′s being what they are…)
To your second point I think you are right on the money. Skittles haven’t been social at all! Back to my party analogy: what kind of host would invite people round for a party and then spend the evening like a wall flower watching from the corner not talking to any of their guests?! You’re right – as a SOCIAL media campaign they’ve spectatularly failed.
Now, that said, I maintain that I’m correct in saying that as a branding exercise it was clever as it enabled thier audience to wonderfully embody their brand. In the long term I don’t think the unsavoury comments will be seen as Skittles fault (it is afterall hosted by Twitter, not Skittles) and thus not damage the brand.
Branding exercise = good
Social media exercise = bad