How down-to-earth amateurism can be the flywheel of a million turnover
By: Roxane - Brandsociologist
Tags: Marketing, Business Strategy, Go To Market, Branding, Sociology

And a slick marketing department can be the beginning of the end…

The Sociology of Brands — Fun as a go to market can be a good strategy depending on societal context

Growing in turnover from 50 million to 200 million in seven years. The sweet American drink called Snapple did it! And you know what? Not because they had a super slick marketing department that marketed the drink according to conventional marketing methods.

At the height of Snapple’s success, a large American company (Qacker Oats Company) with a professional team of brand managers came to buy Snapple. The result? Within two years, the brand managers had to sell the brand at a great loss. The mythical glory that clothed the drink in the late 80s and early 90s had melted like snow in the sun under the slick regime of the fire managers!

Unconventional succes

Despite all conventional marketing strategies (emotional and cognitive branding or viral branding). Snapple’s success was precisely in the unconventional. Snapple was a company started by three amateurs who knew nothing about professional marketing. And they did not have the ambition to learn more about this. Actually they didn’t want to take their marketing too serious and wanted to have fun above all! They knew how to do that, so well that, they hit just the right chord.

‘Poorly’ produced commercials featuring amateurs, distributing drinks in amateur foodtrucks, small family drugstores and shops, local restaurants, as long as it was amateurish it was interesting for the Snapple do. Combined with a continuous stream of new snapple flavors (just because they liked it), a few of which really became a hit. How could this down to earth amateurism become so successful? And how could a professionally equipped marketing department take the brand to the abyss? The answer lies in the socio-cultural setting in which Snapple’s anti-marketing took place. If they had deployed the same amateur strategy decades earlier, it would have been a different story and its success was unlikely to be the same. The key to Snapple’s success was in its brand alignment with societal sentiments.

Societal context

In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan’s mission was to foster America’s economic and political stature. ‘The bigger, the more, the better.’ An economy where companies could grow unbridledly also referred to as ‘The Great Expansion.’ At the same time the threat of restructuring or downscaling was constantly present as a necessary intervention. ‘Anything necessary to do business better.’ Corporate profits started to grow and so there was a rise of successful entrepreneurs (Bill Gates was one of them). The motto of the ‘just do it’ spirit was omnipresent. It was the time of the big corporates and the overpaid elite who managed these corporates.

In this ‘the bigger the better rat race’ a counter movement arose in the late 1990s with a thirst for cynical and nihilism. The flywheel of opposition has been echoed in television shows as ‘The Simpsons’ and ‘Beavis and Butthead.’ But also in music like ‘Nirvana’ (Come as you Are, Nevermind) and ‘Wayne’s World.’ A counter-note to the pursuit of success. Snapple has exploited these developments in the socio-cultural setting. They presented themselves as a company run by amateurs, who literally created fun with their consumers (in contrary to the big corporates). See also this commercial where Wendy from Snapple answers questions of customers in a sober, amateurish way. The amateurs of Snapple managed to hit the right tone with their crazy drinks and quirky flavors by ‘playing’ too casual with their own products and promotions. They were the epitome of the opposition, the anti-hero of the ‘road to success’, and that’s what Snapple was bought for.

Brandsociology is a strategy to brand in allignment with societal opportunities. The interaction between consumers, society and brands is the central focus of interest. It’s goal is to develope a succesful grow and position. Research reveals that succesful brands succeed cause of societal alignment.

Now you may think but how can you be so sure that Snapple was successful because of their alignment with specifiek socio-cultural development? Well, the moment the brand managers of ‘Quaker Oats Company’ started to: apply their conventional mind share and emotional branding ideas, bought out the amateur owners, removed ‘amateur’ Wendy from the commercial and deleted the 100% natural additions; the company lost 1.5 billion and was forced to sell Snapple. Snapple was not that amateur flavour anymore.

Brandsociology as succesfactor

Snapple’s sales took off like wildfire because they embodied what people needed in that specific time, in the midst of a rat race to ‘bigger’ and ‘better.’ They had the right fit with hidden sentiments in society. And that’s exactly the field of brand sociology. To seize into the opportunity within consumers, brands and society. Research shows if a brand knows how to respond to developments in society in the right way. The brand functions as a mean of self-expression for their consumers. This recognition serves as a flywheel to success. The right social connection to a societal opportunity delivers more brand success than a calculated marketing and branding technique.