Mktg 2101 Red Bull Case Study Essay

Red Bull has strong brand personality to make customers remember it and separate it from its competitors. Red Bull’s brand image is a red bull with the blue cans. The design is unique and link to the brand name and its product. All these factors create a image of Red Bull to customers. As consumers subconsciously exercise selectivity about which aspects of the environment they perceive (Schiffman et al., 2014), Red Bull could enter the evoked set of consumers as long as it could catch customers’ insights. Besides the unique brand, Red Bull handing out free samples of the product and sales teams driving Minis with a Red Bull can strapped on top of the car. These actions catch consumers’ insight and attract them to purchase.

• Red Bull has made an art of creating and sponsoring events, all of which are designed to enhance its brand image and build brand equity.

I have been asked to evaluate the marketing strategy for Red Bull. More specifically, I have been asked to identify new ways that Red Bull could maintain its leadership position in a maturing category. Although Red Bull did create this market and is a top seller for energy drinks, it is now vulnerable to other competitors who have the resources and brand recognition to aggressively compete, such as Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, and Hansen, to name a few.

Red Bull’s marketing mix seems to harmonize based on its success. Especially the use of sponsorship marketing was taken to the next level by the Red Bull marketing team. Today it is almost hard to think of a sport that Red Bull does not sponsor. Their logo appears on motorbikes, wakeboards, snowboards, formula1 cars, soccer jerseys and even high-tech space suits designed for jumping from the edge of the stratosphere. They even organize a quirky competition of homemade flying machines to support their proposition “Red Bull gives you

“Image”: The brand image is the factor that influences the consumer’s behavior regarding the new category of product under the evaluation of the core brand image. We’re talking here about the global perception of brand personality.

If I am a brand, how would you get to know me? How would you get to like me? How might you develop real feelings for me? Brands today are just like human personality, it is both distinctive and enduring. Imagine a Harley- Davidson tattoo on your arm; would you perceive yourself to be more muscular or less muscular than before? In the article, the authors revealed that brand personality do “rub off” onto some consumer who hold certain beliefs about their personality- entity theorist in particular. In this paper, I will be discussing the research topic and the methods used and explore the practicability of the article.

Just like human beings, a brand soon assumes a personality. It is a set of characteristics associated with a brand. Drawing analogy with human personality, brand personality is unique, distinctive and enduring and provides the brand a differentiation from competitive offerings. It is built by the overall experience of the consumer with the brand , which inturn is affected by the expected value from the brand.

The company underwrites a number of extreme sports competitions and sponsors about three dozen athletes from alternative sports.

The target market that Red Bull heavily depends is growing and becoming older, hence there is a belief that the target market is stating physically, mentally and

Red Bull is a unique company with a niche that dominates the energy drink market, competing against large companies such as Coca-Cola and PepsiCo. Red Bull was created in 1987 in Australia by Dietrich Mateschitz, who created a new drink category of beverages with no early competition. While Coca-Cola and PepsiCo spend hundreds of millions of dollars in prestigious marketing and advertising strategies, Red Bull employs their exceptional brand positioning to sell their products. The brand begins with the company’s slogan: “Red Bull gives you wings” and from there all the marketing strategies begin. Red Bull hosts extreme sport events such as car racing, cliff diving, mountain biking, sky diving, and much more similar activities. These are examples of event marketing which is “creating a brand-marketing event or serving as a sole or participating sponsor of events created by others” (Kolter 498). The sponsored events are just not about the event, but about creating engagements between the customers and brand. When a person attends an event, they are living in what the brand truly

The last point was about the advertising. Three different ways of advertising have been explored. Students brand managers, consumer educators and sponsoring extreme sport events. These techniques were very effective to generate the word of mouth; hence, build a strong image.

the sport organization has an opportunity to market its brand to the new consumer, and they also

Aaker (1997) defined brand personality is the set of human characteristics associated with a brand. Aaker’s framework as figure 1 shows, and it represented “Big Five” personality model, which are the original work (Norman 1963; Tupes and Christal 1958), NEO Model (McCrae and Costa 1989), Big Five Prototypes (John 1990), ACL (Piedmont, McCrae, and Costa, 1991), and Inter-Circumples Model (McCrae and Coata 1989). The framework was divided five brand dimensions: sincerity (Down-to earth, honest, wholesome, cheerful), excitement (daring, spirited, imaginative, up-to-date), competence (reliable, intelligent, successful), sophistication (upper class, charming), and ruggedness (outdoorsy, tough).

Brand today is hard to stand at the leading position. Clifton and Simmons (2003), the CEO and former director of verbal identity of Interbrand, underline that brand is about choice and yet it has to compete in the crowded and competitive situation. In addition, brand is facing many challenges so as the consequent, a brand has to compete one to another. Even a strong brand may find several challenges to keep remain on its top position. The competitions of strong brands include, for example, Coca-Cola and Pepsi in soft-drink industry, Apple and Creative in mp3 player industry, Kellog’s and Nestle in cereal industry and so forth. Therefore, businesses should consider to the five distinctive traits (Clifton and Simmons, 2003) in order to make their brands great, as follow:

Keller, K.L. (2006), ‘The Importance of Corporate Brand Personality Traits to a Successful 21st Century Business.’ Journal of Brand Management. Vol. 14. Nos. 1/2, 74-81.