Garbage Can Marketing, Blockbuster and 1 thing?

Okay, a great story of marketing brilliance for you today, but before I talk about that, I need to remind you about the audio book I am promoting right now by Sally Miller titled...

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Now…

A quick story I wanted to tell you about.  

This one is about thinking outside the box (lateral thinking.)  

That’s valuable if you are going to be working with artificial intelligence because AI is not very good at it.

Anyways, back in 1994, Red Bull wanted to launch its brand of energy drink in London. 

However, the market was extremely saturated with similar drinks such as Gatorade and Lucozade Energy.

Now…there are lots of ways to stand out in a saturated market, but they all have one thing in

common.  

Finding a way to create impact and get attention on you.

So how did Red Bull do it?

They secretly sent teams in the dead of night to fill up trash cans with empty Red Bull cans!  

They literally took thousands of empty cans of their energy drink and crushed them before intelligently placing them in selected garbage bins throughout London.

The cans were deliberately positioned to be visible to pedestrians passing by.

Red Bull didn’t stop there, though.  

They also began offering free samples to club owners and DJs, and placing piles of empty, crushed cans outside of clubs and restaurants.

Under a veil of secrecy, they distributed these cans throughout various high-traffic locations

around London, such as footpaths, outside of stations and near the entrances of colleges, schools, and universities, where they would be seen by local residents during the day.

Did it work?  

Absolutely!

Each day, Londoners woke up to the sight of Red Bull's empty, crushed cans scattered throughout the city's high-traffic areas.

This strategic placement created a subtle, subliminal impression that everyone was drinking Red Bull.

This basically made those who hadn’t tried it yet feel as though they were being left out.  

This is FOMO - (fear of missing out, right? lol)

Sneaky but clever. Lol!

Anyways,

They were using psychology and consumer behavior to create this “illusion of popularity.”

There were two key marketing concepts involved here:

One) Attention Economics - the study of how people allocate their limited attentional resources to various stimuli in their environment.

In other words, it recognizes that humans have a finite capacity for attention and that there is an overwhelming amount of information and stimuli in the world that compete for that attention.

Two) Social Proof Marketing - a strategy that leverages the power of social influence to persuade potential customers to take a desired action.

It involves using various types of social proof, such as customer reviews, endorsements from influencers, and social media engagement metrics, to demonstrate to prospective customers that others have already found value in a product or service.

So Red Bull basically combined these two concepts and leveraged the power of FOMO! Lol.

Maybe they came up with something new?  

Garbage Can Marketing? Lol.  

Anyways…

It was very creative and very effective.  

And listen, these are the kinds of shots you have to take to get people’s attention today as well.  

YOu have to remember…

That happened like 30 years ago!  

Can you imagine how much more people’s attention is stretched today?  

When Red Bull did that, we didn’t have smartphones or self-driving cars.  

We still went to Blockbuster to rent our movies and…

…by the way did you know that the most popular movie in 1994 was The Lion King?  

Yup.  It’s true…

But some other popular movies from that year if you are still reading with me and just hit this strange side quest down memory lane, were:

    The Shawshank Redemption

    Pulp Fiction

    The Professional

    True Lies

    Forrest Gump

    Natural Born Killers

And out of all of those, I’d have to say that Pulp Fiction is my absolute favorite but The Professional and Forrest Gump were also pretty damn good.  

Anyways…what the heck was I talking about?

Oh yeah  Garbage Can Marketing and Red Bull…

Listen…

It’s about thinking outside the box and doing things a little differently than everybody else to get people's attention.  

That hasn’t changed.

It was true in 1994 and it’s still true today.

Now, I would go into how to do that…but to be fair this newsletter is getting pretty long, so I am done...

Kam Fatz [Epic Marketing]

Edited by C A Williams