Deploying the hardcore brand fan
By Simon Fuller. When it comes to getting consumers to listen to what you’re saying about a brand, there’s no more potent voice than that of the real life fan. And while lots of campaigns have featured brand ambassadors in some form or another, few have had followers travelling across the country on a brand-based mission, as seen in the recent DEWmocracy: The Flavour campaign, driven by agency Motive.
The story was that three new Mountain Dew flavours had been cooked up, but only one would earn a place on store shelves. With that in mind, Motive assembled three ‘flavour teams’, made up of real-life Dew mega-fans, whose mission it was to travel the length and breadth of the States, spreading the word about their respective flavour in the hope of getting it voted into the Mountain Dew range. Along the way, the teams organised events and gave consumers a taste of the new Dew options via sporting events, gigs and the like.
“Hardcore fans play a huge role in any brand’s communications, especially when they are responsible for creating a real, authentic voice that surrounds the product or service,” explains Matt Statman, Motive’s founder.
“DEWmocracy handed fans an even larger role as they were essentially the backbone of the program itself. Their responsibilities included making key brand development decisions and serving as the voice of the newly developed brands in a number of key program phases. It was passionate, attentive fans who determined which of the original test flavours would be brought to market. Hardcore fans developed the attributes – including name, color, packaging and marketing -for each of the products. And in the end, hardcore fans were the ones to rally behind each flavour, encouraging the masses to show their support.”
Not only did the teams take to the streets of US cities, dropping in to the homes of consumers to deliver Dew-based ‘influencer kits’, but they also helpfully blogged and tweeted about it as they went along, to keep faraway fans filled in on how the campaign was progressing. And consumers at home could drive the campaign by suggesting cities for the teams to visit and even which marketing activities the team should get involved in.
The idea was that fans would be inspired to get behind their faves by these Dew activists and eventually add their vote to the contest via the DEWmocracy site.
“Being that the… campaign was designed to build grassroots awareness about the three new flavours of Mountain Dew and rally consumers to vote for their favourite, we naturally took inspiration from successful approaches that we’ve seen implemented across a myriad of grassroots movements and political campaigns,” says Statman. “This influenced us at every level, from how we designed our ‘propaganda’ and structured our ‘constituent communications’, to what tools we empowered consumers with to ‘take up the fight’ for their favourite flavour on their own.”
This article is sponsored by Clustrmaps
