Blendtec Strategic

PlanBy Nicholas Ballard

The Situation:

Blendtec has been one of two major manufactures of professional grade blenders since their inception in 1987. Blendtec was at the innovative forefront when it came to the use of its viral video marketing campaign. The company first launched its “Will it Blend?” campaign in November of 2006, just a little over a year after the actual founding of the social media site YouTube. With the company’s founder Tom Dickson demonstrating just how powerful a Blendtec blender is with his blending of bizarre things like apples iPhone, and even a rake handle.

The Problem:

Initial success of the campaign was huge with a 400 percent increase in sales of their blenders and at the time having one of the most subscribed to channels on YouTube. The issue that is facing the company now is whether to keep the Will it Blend campaign going. With the announced departure of company founder and CEO Tom Dixon, and the nature of the internet to quickly move on to the next thing it is important to take a serious look at the future of the “Will it Blend?” campaign and the future of Blendtec’s marketing initiatives.

The Opportunity

With Blendtec taking a proactive approach to their social media campaign and consumer relations it prevents the company from having to make hasty decisions that have potential for reflecting poorly on them in the future. The use of an outside public relations firm allows a fresh look at the company’s marketing strategy and can both explore strengths and weaknesses of the current “Will it Blend?” promotion and determine if it’s the right decision to move in a different direction.

S.W.O.T. Analysis

Strengths

The use of the viral videos showed just how powerful the Blendtec blender was.

o Before the will it blend series Blendtec was a little known blender corporation. A blender with a $400 price tag is a hard pill to swallow and even harder if you can’t justify that kind of price. The Will It Blend campaign showed just how easily the blender would blend things you wouldn’t think it could blend. By doing this Blendtec gave people a reason to spend that kind of money on a seemingly simple thing like a blender.

It put a face to the company.o The videos featuring Tom Dickson put a face to the corporation.

His personality was charismatic and engaging creating a sense of what the brand represents. According to Fleck, Michel, and Zeitoun the idea of a brand is purely conceptual and a spokesperson helps to put an image to that brand it is something for people to associate the brand with. “A spokesperson can give a face and a voice to the brand, thus humanizing it.” Allowing the CEO or founder of the corporation also places a sense of credibility to the brand which is an important principle within communication.

It encouraged two-way communication. o The sheer format by which the Will It Blend campaign shared its

videos allowed for two-way communication between the company and consumers. According to impact branding and design the use of two-way communication in your marketing allows for the development of a relationship with your customers. It brings in a human element to the marketing to where it doesn’t feel like you’re just being talked to.

Weaknesses

Has the potential for negative press. o The great thing about social media is that you do have that two

way communication. People who like your product can immediately go online and tell everyone how much they like your product. However the same is true for negative press. For example in 2006 General Motors tried to engage in two-way communication and held an online competition to see who could generate the best ad for their new Chevy Tahoe. They received several submissions that blamed GM for global warming, and reflected bad on the company as a whole. So two-way communication in a sense is a double edge sword, It has the potential to be either really great, or can be really bad.

Easily imitatedo One of the issues with the Will It Blend campaign it can be easily

imitated by their competitors. In fact it has been. There is really only one major competitor in the marketplace when it comes to high end blenders, and that company is Vitamix. Vitamix has in a sense imitated the why in which Blendtec shows the strength of their blenders by putting strange items in them. In December of 2013 Vitamix released a video to the Bloomberg BusinessWeek showing the blender destroying a Rubiks Cube.

Opportunities

Can lead to other products.

o One of the great things about the Will it blend campaign is it lead to the development of other products that aligned with the campaign. One such product was the Tom Dickson is my homeboy T-shirt which the company was able to market and sale.

Customers can tell you what they wanto With channels such as YouTube it encourages communication

within the comments section. By doing this it allows for your customers to really tell you what they want. The will it blend campaign owes a lot of its success to the audience recommendations for what would be blended. It also allows for people to tell you what they may like or do not like in the product itself.

Threats

Tom Dickson is the main face of the companyo Although Tom Dickson is a charismatic and engaging person, no

one is perfect all the time. While there is benefit derived from having your founder and CEO as spokesperson for the company there is also a threat to it. On the negative side of business is that anything Tom Dickson does with in his personal life reflects poorly on the corporation as a whole. For example when Chick-Fil-A CEO Dan Cathy spoke out about his beliefs on same sex marriage it reflected poorly on the company as a whole. The same risk is there with Mr. Dickson if he by mistake made some comment that is not in line with the values of the company that could come back and reflect badly on Blendtec.

The failure of a blender in a live demonstrationo When going on to the social media website YouTube you can

easily find videos of times when the Blendtec blender did not perform in a manner that is representative of what the Will It Blend campaign shows the blender capable of. One such video showed Tom Dickson trying to blend a rack handle which is one of the items he blends in his videos with ease. The video is footage from a personal video camera of an attendee at a convention. While trying to feed the rack handle into the blender the blender fails and just shuts off. He tries several times and can’t get the handle to blend.

Target Audience:

Primary Audience:

The primary audience in this of this campaign is that of families. The ideal family for a Blendtec blender would be those of an annual income over $100,000 annually. According to the consumer expenditure survey which is published by the bureau of labor and statics the average amount of money spent on household furnishings and equipment by households that earn more than $100,000 annually is $3,404. This is more than 3X the amount that is spent by those who make under $70,000 annually. With the average price of the Blendtec blender being around $400-$500 this expenditure makes over 50 percent of the annual household equipment expenses for those making under $70,000 while only accounting for 14 percent of the annual household equipment expenditures for those making over $100,000 annually. Judging from this data it makes sense to target those individuals with an annual income $100,000 or more, based on their ability to easily attain a blender at its suggested retail price.

In addition to the ideal income over $100,000 we would like to target those individuals between the ages of 30-55 with children in the house that are under the age of 18.

Objectives:

1. Increase awareness of Blendtec brand by 10 percent among target audience

o To do this I would recommend conducting pre campaign recognition surveys to see just how many people with in a sample of your target market recognize the Blendtec logo and associate it with the quality of excellence that is expected from your product.

2. Increase Use of #BlendtecStrong by 25 percent each month for first four months of campaign

o One of the things with using a social media campaign is you have to get the thing going. So we would like to see a steady increase in the #BlendtecStrong during the initial stages of the PR campaign

3. Combat sticker shock of the initial price of the unit.o One of the hardest things to overcome is the issue of the price.

Blendtec charges such a price for their blender because of the sheer capabilities of the blender compared to that of their competitors. You want people to understand what they are

paying for and not have the price be the reason they do not buy the product.

Strategy:

I think that it is time to retire the “Will It Blend?” campaign. The campaign has been running since 2006 and after 8 years it has lost the same impact that it once had. In 2012 PRdaily.com wrote an article about the audience attention span while giving a presentation. The same holds with your campaign. When you a presenting a public relations campaign you are essentially presenting an idea or a thought that you want your audience to listen to. Internet fads come and go and people will be quick to move on to the next item that sparks their curiosity.

Blendtec has a tradition of showing how powerful their blenders are and I think that this strategy is a good point of differentiation to separate them from companies that promote sole on health like their main competitor Vitamix. I would recommend adapting the campaign by including an actor to do YouTube videos instead of the CEO and also changing the way they do those videos. You do lose some credibility but you also lessen risk. It’ll be hard to find someone as charismatic as Tom Dickson but you can create the idea of the brand in an individual.

Use of Slogan “Blendtec Strong”o By the use of this slogan you emphasize the strength of your

blenders which is a point of differentiation between Blendtec and Vitamix.

Hire a spokesperson for the company.o I would recommend hiring a permanent host such that

represents the company in the way you want to be represented. Many companies have done this, whether it be Flo from the progressive commercials or any number of other companies. By doing this you address the issue of Tom Dickson stepping down and also put a face to the company that can stay with it indefinitely.

Use of blender in unconventional placeso Instead of having a set studio location to film your blenders at

work I would take to places you wouldn’t normally see a blender. Some ideas include construction work sites, fishing docks, daycares. The idea is to take the blender to a place that you normally wouldn’t have one and just see what all it can actually blend there. You could try to blend concrete at construction sites, or hard candy at day care centers. It gives more of a sense of credibility than just filming it in a studio.

Use of #BlendtecStrong in social media campaign

o Give individuals the opportunity to show how Blendtec helps make them strong. You can host competitions online for best recipe or you could even do a completion with regards to how it makes you a stronger person physically.

Create a cause partnership with “Share our Strength”o “Share Our Strength” is an initiative set forth by the charity

NoKidHungry to help provide meals to children in need during the times that they are away from school like the summer. I feel like this would be a good charity for Blendtec to align itself with because of many reasons

The charity is associated with food products in much the same way that Blendtec is associated with food products.

The name of the charity brings back that common use of strength that is throughout the campaign.

The Charity is associated with children and our target market is those with children so they can empathize what it would be like to have a child that doesn’t know where they are going to get their meal from.

The charity received a three star rating from charitynavigator.org and over half of the funds that they receive go to the benefit of children.

o The way in which I would recommend creating this cause partnership is maybe for each #BlendtecStrong that is sent the company would then donate a monetary amount to the charity. By doing this you get the metaphorical ball rolling on your social media campaign and get to help a great cause in the process.

Evaluation:

1. Increase recognition of Blendtec logo by 10 percent We would evaluate the recognition of the Blendtec Logo with pre

and post surveys among the target market with in a set period of time to see changes with in recognition. For example we would administer the photographic survey before the campaign was started and then again after a six month period and measure the change in percentage.

2. Increase use of #BlendtecStrong by 25 percent each month for the first four months

These figures can be ascertained through a variety of ways. For example www.hashtag.org is an analytical company that will gathers data on the use of hashtags throughout different social media platforms and gives you a report as to how much your particular hashtag is being used. Through companies like this we could get a physical measure of the use of the hashtag and see how much it increases each month of the beginning campaign.

3. Combat sticker shock of the initial price of the unit.

One of the ways in which we plan to do this is with the videos showing why the Blendtec blender is not your typical blender. By showing the true capabilities of the blender and blending things that would normally destroy another blender you show people the quality of your blender and assure them that it is worth the money.

Rationale

With Blendtec taking the initiative and to maintain a strong online media presence before they become irrelevant the corporation will be able to maintain a competitive edge in the market of high end blenders. By positioning itself as the strong blender you create a point of differentiation among your competitors whose primary focus is just on nutritional value of having a blender in your home. While there is no doubt that you can use a blender for health reasons and the campaign addresses that with its use of #BlendtecStrong, the blender is also a sense of pride and strength. For this reason I believe that the Blendtec Strong philosophy will strengthen the company for a future full of challenges