Of relevance in branding
On 6 July 2010, 5 days before the conclusion of the 2010 Fifa Soccer World Cup here in beautiful South Africa (country of my birth), American electronics manufacturer Blendtec (a division of K-TEC, Inc) launched another successful instalment to their series of videos marketing their superb blenders. The video series, which is made for Youtube, is titled “Will it Blend?”
In the series they have blended a golfball, an iPhone, and iPad and even a camcorder.
So what’s next?
The next item to meet its maker at the “hand” of the blender could not have been better timed and could not have been more relevant from a brand-building point of view. Foreigners attending Fifa Soccer World Cup games have – at that point – just about had enough of the vuvuzela – a plastic trumpet-like horn that makes a horrible noise when blown and is used to cheer at soccer games. The vuvuzela has – prior to the World Cup – only been known in South Africa and to South Africans. With the slew of internationals that arrived to watch World Cup soccer games, the noise the vuvuzela makes just became too much for the foreigners and most of them complained like mad.. and so the next item to be blended was the vuvuzela.
I mean c’mon.. you can probably set a vuvuzela alight with one match stick, or chew it to bits if you had the time. There’s so nothing spectacular about putting a vuvuzela in a blender (it does blend it very fine though). But what’s brilliant about this video is that it was well-timed, well contextualised and the video went live just a few days before the World Cup ended. Now that is branding.
No related posts.
Subscribe
If you enjoyed this article, subscribe to receive more just like it.
Arthur Charles Van Wyk is the CEO of Fluence New Marketing, a digital ad agency based in Durban, South Africa. He is also a brand evangelist, speaker, digital marketing consultant and impassioned spokesperson for internet-enabled marketing. 
Comments