BRAND CAMPAIGN ANALYSIS AND DEVELOPMENT PROJECT Essay

Essays on Red Bull Attempting to Create a Culture for Its Brand Essay The paper "Red Bull Attempting to Create a Culture for Its Brand" is an outstanding example of an essay on marketing. Brands are collections of functional and emotional values that promise stakeholders unique experiences. A brand is a culture because the consumers who use a particular brand a number of times often identify themselves with that brand. Such consumers become a ‘cult’ as they cannot be separated from the brand which they have a deep association with. Therefore, a brand should have its own culture, from which every product derives (Kapferer, 2008, p. 184). This paper discusses the aspects of brand culture used to market Red Bull, an energy drink. In reference to Red Bull, the paper addresses how cult brands are created and developed through brand extensions, endorsements, and associations. To achieve this, the paper will investigate theories that try to explain how brands create experiential connections with brand users to generate loyalty and attachment.Red Bull has grown as one of the most popular drinks in the energy drinks category. Its history dates back to 1987 when Dietrich Mateschitz, a marketing executive at Unilever and Procter Gamble, introduced the energy drink in Austria. Mateschitz modified the ingredients of Red Bull to make it suit Western tastes like an energy drink on its own, and Europe thus becomes the mainstay of the brand although it had originated in Asia (Roll, 2006, p. 199). Although the drink faced some restrictions at the start in Austria due to its ingredients, it later spread quickly to neighboring countries such as Germany, Switzerland, Hungary and Slovenia (Dahlà ©n, Lange Smith, 2009, p. 315).One of the key reasons for the success of Red Bull has been its unconventional marketing communications that range from creating buzz, using word-of-mouth publicity to sponsoring extreme sports events (Roll, 2006, p. 199). The communications have been in synchrony with the overall brand personality of being a cool , hip and rebellious brand. The resistance that the drink faced when entering the market in France, Germany, and other key European countries may have been an obstacle to the brand’s success but it also helped to identify the product with its consumers when it eventfully entered these markets. As Temporal (2006, p. 12) notes, the market share of Red Bull has been growing at an annual rate of 15 to 25 percent. The brand is also popular in the United States with a 47 percent market share in 2006 and accounts for 70 percent of the global market share in terms of energy drinks (Temporal, 2006, p. 12).As mentioned above, the popularity of the Red Bull brand can largely be attributed to the brand’s marketing communications strategy. The company used a number of marketing strategies including word-of-mouth, sponsorships, athlete endorsers, sampling programs, point of purchase marketing and electronic media buys. However, word-of-mouth was the most preferred method because the company presumed that the best method was to get the consumers who used the product to give testaments to others.