If it fits, it BLENDS: Here’s the clever twist to this company’s guerrilla marketing campaign! [Thursday: Gorillas of Guerrilla Marketing]
Miles Everson’s The Business Builder Daily speaks to the heart of what great marketers, business leaders, and other professionals need to succeed in advertising, communications, managing their investments, career strategy, and more.
A Note from Miles Everson:
In the competitive world of marketing, it is important to understand how to make your business stand out. Guerrilla marketing provides creative and unusual ways for you to do that!
How?
The answer is simple. With the right amount of creativity and courage to go beyond the traditional, you’ll be able to leave a lasting impression on your target audience and enhance the branding of your business through unique and engaging marketing tactics.
Allow us to share with you an example in today’s article.
Read further to learn how this brand advertised its products in an odd yet satisfying way by using destruction as a form of entertainment.
Miles Everson
CEO, MBO Partners
Chairman of the Advisory Board, The I Institute
Gorillas of Guerrilla Marketing
Have you ever come across social media videos of blenders obliterating iPhones, golf balls, and other solid objects?
If you have, you’ve probably seen this brand’s clever ads.
We’re talking about…
Blendtec!
Photo from Kickstart Side Hustle
Blendtec specializes in manufacturing high-performance blenders. The company was founded in 1975 by Tom Dickson, an American inventor and entrepreneur, and is headquartered in Orem, Utah. Blendtec blenders are known for their robust design, powerful blending capabilities, and innovative features.
How powerful, you might ask?
To answer that question, let’s get into Blendtec’s “destructively entertaining” guerrilla marketing strategy…
The “Will It Blend?” Campaign
To further showcase its high-quality and powerful blenders, Blendtec launched its “Will It Blend?” campaign on October 30, 2006. The first video from the campaign only had a budget of USD 50, which featured marbles getting pulverized inside one of Blendtec’s blenders.
With such a small budget, it’s impressive that the video gained numerous positive feedback from the viewers. As user @jhhwild on YouTube put it:
“This is what I call good advertising. Even though these videos are basically ads for this blender product it manages to be entertaining and leaves you wanting more. I want to see what he blends next…”
This was an indication that Blendtec’s campaign was off to a good start.
Blendtec also featured a variety of objects in its succeeding campaign videos. Aside from iPhones and golf balls, other notable examples included rake handles, paintballs, and magnets.
The title “Will It Blend?” perfectly summed up the anticipation viewers got each time the video series featured a new object to blend. With Dickson himself as the host, the videos were short but enough to demonstrate the Blendtec blenders’ impressive capacity.
The idea of taking everyday, seemingly indestructible objects and transforming them into fine powder or shattered remains was irresistibly mind-blowing.
In fact, the video releases were science, comedy, and kitchen gadgetry all rolled into one!
BOOM!
The campaign continued to gain popularity over the years from 2006 to 2020.
Was Blendtec’s “Will It Blend?” campaign effective?
The campaign not only generated positive feedback and hype online but also managed to drive tangible results in terms of sales and recognition in the marketing field. Currently, Blendtec is one of the prominent players in the blender market, with an annual revenue of USD 56 Million.
Here’s how the “Will It Blend?” campaign helped the company reach this level of success:
| – | The campaign’s YouTube videos went viral shortly after they were released online, with some of them garnering as high as 19 million views on social media. To date, Blendtec’s YouTube channel for “Will It Blend?” has more than 800k subscribers. |
| – | Blendtec reported a 43% online sales increase for their blenders from October 2006 to October 2007. Moreover, the iPhone video in particular sold USD 5 million worth of blenders in a span of 30 days after it was uploaded. |
| – | The campaign garnered various accolades in the marketing industry, including the 2007 YouTube award nomination for Best Series, Net Magazine’s 2007 Viral Video Campaign of the Year Award, and the 2008 Clio Award for Viral Video. |
Clearly, these results show that the “Will It Blend?” campaign was successful not just in capturing customers’ attention but also in boosting Blendtec’s sales. Kudos to the brand’s marketing team for effectively pulling off an iconic and impressive marketing stunt!
Let’s give them a round of applause!
—
There are two things we can learn from Blendtec’s campaign:
First, you can pique your target market’s attention and curiosity through unexpected and entertaining approaches.
By blending everyday objects in a humorous yet informative manner, Blendtec created a memorable and enjoyable viewing experience that resonated with consumers. This creativity not only strengthened the brand’s identity as a high-performance blender provider but also set them apart in a competitive market.
Second, the campaign’s low-cost video production shows that impactful marketing doesn’t always demand a large budget.
Despite starting with a USD 50 budget for a single video, which is relatively small compared to how much advertisements usually cost, Blendtec still managed to generate buzz and market the product well. This shows it’s not the financials that guarantee success for a particular marketing campaign but the creativity, uniqueness, and impact.
We hope you enjoyed and learned something from today’s guerrilla marketing topic!
As a marketer, identify what entertains your target audience and strategize on how you can get your product into the picture. Who knows? Just like Blendtec, you can also pull off your own clever marketing stunt and effectively sell your product without breaking the bank.
Stay tuned for next week’s “Gorillas of Guerrilla Marketing” article!
(This article is from The Business Builder Daily, a newsletter by The I Institute in collaboration with MBO Partners.)
About The Dynamic Marketing Communiqué’s
“Thursdays: Gorillas of Guerrilla Marketing”
Jay Conrad Levinson (1984) said that Guerrilla Marketing “works because it’s simple to appreciate, easy to execute, and inexpensive.”
Guerrilla Marketing is unconventional.
Looking beyond the traditional ways of advertising, marketers, and advertisers need to spice things up in order for their brand to have campaigns that not only make an impact but also stick to their target market’s mind.
Guerrilla Marketing usually aims to have direct contact with consumers.
This type of direct contact should spark an emotional reaction that leads to consumers effectively remembering the brand.
It’s about making a big impression and making that impression last a long time (if not forever).
Guerrilla Marketing can be inexpensive.
The effect of this is being able to create a buzz around the brand, and the strategy used to market it. Almost everything is passed around through word-of-mouth.
Word-of-mouth is one of the greatest outcomes and it usually doesn’t cost anything.
This is every business’ or brand’s dream!
Every Thursday, we publish tips, examples, and other useful content on unconventional ways of marketing and promotion.
Learn more about how to grab your target market’s attention and make an amazing first and lasting impression without having to spend a lot of money.
Businesses don’t really need to spend much for a guerrilla campaign. You do not need a big budget to be successful. You just need creativity and a good imagination.
Hope you’ve found this week’s guerrilla marketing insight interesting and helpful.
Stay tuned for next Thursday’s Gorillas of Guerrilla Marketing!
Cheers,
Kyle Yu
Head of Marketing
Valens Dynamic Marketing Capabilities
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