Red Bull Experiential Marketing Project
An experiential marketing master plan (not just one single campaign design, rather broad overarching theme exploration)
Part of the University of Southern California Annenberg School’s CMGT 599 (Strategic Storytelling & Experiential Marketing) coursework.
Instructor:
Dr. Anne (Mayanna) Framroze
Team Members:
Taylor May, University of Southern California, Master of Communication Management candidate. LinkedIn.
Chang Wen, University of Southern California, Master of Communication Management, Class of 2020. LinkedIn.
Sissi Yi Hu, University of Southern California, Master of Communication Management candidate. LinkedIn.
Me, Yu-Cheng (Wallis) Lien, University of Southern California, Master of Science in Digital Social Media candidate.
My role within the team: Producer, I originally came up our final idea of combining mental health issues and hip-hop music. Project Manger, throughout the process, I organized team communication and ensured deadlines are met. Served as key decision maker.
Moderators:
Kastner Los Angeles
Brandon Rochon, North American CEO/COO. LinkedIn.
Emily Palmer, Brand Director/ Red Bull NA Account Lead. LinkedIn.
Jeff Erin, Creative Director. LinkedIn.
They piloted and navigated us throughout the entire project. They were extremely supportive and warmhearted. I thank them for their incredible assistance and guidance.
Key Facts:
Assignment
How does Red Bull establish an authentic connection to hip hop music and own it over the next 20 years.
Deliverable
Develop a fully integrated philosophy and behavior of Red Bull would do this.
Key Fact
Following years of successfully building credibility in the music scene through various owned events (i.e. Red Bull Music Festival, Red Bull Music Presents) and third party event support, Red Bull will continue its’ effort to build relevance in music through a full slate of events and programming in 2020.
The primary objective is to win more users within the hip-hop music audience by building brand love, relevance, and connection within these communities through Red Bull’s involvement in music.
Tools used:
Qualtrics
Designed two surveys used in our primary research.
Amazon Turk
Used to recruit survey participants that better represented our target audience.
IBM SPSS
Analyzed data collected from surveys. Yielded quantitative results.
Adobe Photoshop
Created the project logo and various other visual elements for both the written report and the presentation.
Canva
Created the presentation slides with it.
Squarespace
Created the demo website that hosted all the elements.
End Products:
Project OVR by Red Bull
Website of the project can be found here.
Mental Health + Hip Hop
Physical venues worldwide (for live performances, events, exhibitions, and a community center)
Multimedia Content: utilizing the already influential and prevalent Red Bull media powerhouse, to talk about the mental health issues in our society and within the hip-hop community. If no one else will have the audacity to take it seriously and talk about it, Red Bull will. Features edutainment videos, hip-hop documentaries, interviews, music videos, and more.
Report:
A full version of written report is available here.
Note: the report is collectively owned by the team members listed above. © 2020 Taylor May, Chang Wen, Sissi Yi Hu, Wallis Lien. All rights reserved.
Introduction
Rejecting traditional marketing and advertising tactics, Red Bull takes an unorthodox approach and focuses on lifestyle and their connection to consumers. As a drink that energizes the consumer, Red Bull focuses on providing adventurers, thrill-seekers and risk-takers the extra lift they need to get through their day.
To establish their connection, Red Bull focused on becoming a part of the sports industry rather than marketing the sports. For example, Red Bull has hosted entire sporting events, created sports teams, built stadiums, sponsored athletes and streamed events live via Red Bull TV (Few & Payne, 2019).
This tactic suggested the brand aimed to give genuine support towards the sports and athletes that had often been overlooked by other brands. Sticking true to their slogan, Red Bull identifies the talented underdog and gives them wings, meaning they lift up an undiscovered extraordinaire and support them through a journey into world discovery, providing these people with the right help and assistance.
Task & Challenge
Although many of our first instincts were to think of a straight-forward marketing campaign, Red Bull urged us to dig deeper and think of a long-term strategy. Their brand aims for lasting and quality relationships in the cultures they market to, which is all the more important today where attention span is low amongst the target audience, and consumers are overwhelmed in a stream of influencer endorsements and sponsored content.
Breakthrough: Hip-hop & Mental Health
Self-expression and freedom of thought is an omnipresent underlying subject amongst the people in the hip-hop industry. They create music as a form of self-expression and speech, however the topic of mental health has yet to have taken even a sliver of the hip-hop stage. Considered widely – in the music industry – as a taboo topic (Fitzgerald, 2020), we believe that with the recent wave of artist documentaries that talk about mental health issues, such as Amy Winehouse’s Amy and most recently Taylor Swift’s Miss Americana, there is a gap in the market which Red Bull is able to fill.
Characterized as a brand that gives wings, we have revolved this project on how Red Bull might be able to give wings to both the voices of undiscovered rappers and the topic of mental health in the music industry. In a report called The 73 Percent by Record Union (2019), they stated that more than 73 percent of independent music makers had experiences negative emotions whilst creating music and suffered from mental health issues such as stress, anxiety and depression.
Considering this, we find that if Red Bull were to create a safe space where rappers, known as the artists of self-expression, are able to freely discuss the topic and participate in events revolving around mental health, the subject may become less taboo.
Essentially, this would weave all elements together: Red Bull giving wings to not only a taboo subject and increasing awareness of it in an industry plagued by it, but also giving wings to those rappers who are unafraid over a subject that is widely unspoken about.
Research
Survey
Firstly, our group created a survey on Qualtrics to ask the public about their perceptions of Red Bull and its brand, hip-hop music and mental health in the music industry. By using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, we recruited a total of 213 participants to our survey which was described on the page as a “music preference survey”.
All participants were paid 12 cents at the completion of the survey. In addition to approval rates on the website, we limited the participation of our survey to those aged between 18 and 29 years old in order to satisfy the brief’s target audience, and so that we would only collect data from the age group that matters to us the most. The survey was used to collect data from April 15th, 2020 until April 21st, 2020.
Individual Interviews
Six individual interviews with people aged from 20 to 24 years old were conducted that lasted around fifteen minutes each. From the six interviewees, two interviewees were male, while the other four were female. Most were either recent graduates or current university students from the United States, Canada and Portugal; whilst one female interviewee was a Junior Agent in a Communications PR Agency in London.
All interviews conducted consisted of three different sections: hip-hop music and the industry, mental health in hip-hop and the Red Bull brand. Our main goals with our selected questions were to figure out how the interviewees perceived the Red Bull brand and to find out how hip-hop music and the industry may evolve in the next decade. An example question for the first goal was “What do you know about Red Bull as a brand?”. Some example questions about the future evolution of hip-hop music were “How do you think hip-hop will change in the next decade?” and “What are some of the biggest influencers and influences of hip-hop right now?”.
Key Findings
Red Bull’s connection with the music industry was defined as mostly weak or moderate in both our survey and interviews. A potential reason behind this might be the fact that Red Bull’s strategy at entering the music industry was by exposing people to “electronic, DJ and experimental” music when they first created the Red Bull Music Academy (Hughes, 2014). Although founded in 1998, the Red Bull Music Academy reached its zenith of popularity a few years later, when it started growing in visibility and attention in the electronic, house and techno music scenes (Cliff, 2013). Perhaps their reason to enter the music industry via these strategies was because of the association between Red Bull, and parties and raves (Intarakomalyasut, 2003; Salkin, 2000), or could even possibly have been the other way around. Steven Retas, a DJ, commented in 2000 that it was a popular mixer, especially in New York’s cocktail culture (Salkin, 2000). Furthermore, in 2003, the Thai newspaper, Bangkok Post, had stated that Red Bull had repositioned itself as a mixer to attract a younger consumer audience (Intarakomalyasut, 2003).
Additionally, while articles and reports have been written about the existence of mental health issues in the hip-hop industry and the public is aware of it (Fitzgerald, 2020; Record Union, 2019), many have expressed interest in even more content on the subject, according to both our survey and interview responses. Reasoning behind this interest may have been because of the targeted audience in both research methods. While mental illnesses are common amongst many age ranges, mental issues occur most between those aged 18 to 25, with over 75% of mental health cases being established in the age range (Atkinson, 2018; Blears, 2017). As our target audience according to the brief falls exactly into that age category, it could mean that because of past experiences, the audience is interested in learning about others’ struggles as well, and possibly increasing the artist’s authenticity.
Cultural Analysis
Culture is the most relevant and precious type of data to any marketer. This is because, among the numerous aspects culture exerts influences on people, (purchasing) behavior is most noteworthy one.
Red Bull and the Hip-hop culture are inherently interrelated. This is because Red Bull’s vital brand narrative of being rebellious, anti-authoritative, and unapologetic correlates and corresponds to hip-hop’s critical ethos of being disobedient and dissentient.
The Hip-hop cultural milieu is predominately occupied by the millennials & the Gen Z. (And it will continue to be this way for years to come as they continue to fall into the 18-25 years old bracket.) This symbolizes four paramount attributions regarding such cultural environment:
1, Their seriously heightened awareness and consciousness of living in an overly-commodified world necessitates authenticity and sincerity.
2, Desensitization due to over-consumption of content call for empathetic approaches to evoke true emotions.
3, Their fervent pursuit of social justice means that Red Bull must participate/touch upon social justice discourses. Nevertheless, Red Bull should NEVER choose a side.
4, It’s time for RB to live up to the latter part of the slogan “vitalizes body and mind”. Within the cultural environment, People suffer from latent/implicit mental health conditions (depression, anxiety disorders) and in the U.S. the condition is worsening year over year. Thus, we think mental health would be the break-through point for RB to establish connection with the hip-hop music culture.
Solution
Based on our primary research and cultural analysis, we have produced a demo of the narrative solution.
Click on the image or here to see the website.
Achievements
This extensive project took roughly three months. The team was able to accomplish this in midst of an outbreak of the global pandemic: COVID-19. Halfway through the plan, we were forced to practice work from home. Nevertheless, we succeed in finishing it in time and aced the virtual presentation. All of the elements were original team efforts and under the guidance of the people listed above.
Again, you will find the link to the complete report here, where it contained additional detailed information such as the survey data and works cited.