Reebok : marketing viral

Résumé du document

After being the global leader as designer, marketer, and distributor of sports, fitness and lifestyle products in the ninetieth century, Reebok now has to face its main competitors, Nike and Adidas. Indeed, the competitive and consumer landscape has changed dramatically since the year 2000 and Reebok, the third market leader has to turn its advertising strategy into new market opportunities. For Reebok, television was the primary communication medium. Subsequently, Reebok had to move resources away from magazines and newspapers to online and mobile advertising still including sporting events, sponsorship of athletes and sports league, in keeping with market changes. However, consumer saturation arrived quicker than expected and those investments did not do enough to reach their objectives. Potential customers spend more time on Internet than on TV. Since it noticed no increase in sale, Reebok had to concentrate on a new target; the most important people segment called Generation X", those between the ages of twenty five and forty.

Extraits

[...] Some viral marketing strategies work better than others but only few works well. One thing is sure, thanks to Internet, that kind of marketing is much more susceptible to touch a larger population than traditional media such as television, billboards or others. Now a day, Gen X members spent a lot of time in front of their computer and are comfortable with e-commerce. We will examine later what are the elements we have to take into consideration to set up an effective viral marketing strategy. [...]

[...] According to Dr. Ralph. Wilson (E-Commerce Consultant), five basic elements should be including in a viral marketing strategy. It does not need to contain all the six elements but the more it embraces, the more powerful the results are likely to be. Here they are: Give away products or services, provide for effortless transfer to others, exploit common motivations and behaviours, utilize existing communication network and, take advantage of others' resources. Let's see how Reebok respected these rules and how it did not respect it. [...]

[...] First of all, let's have a look to the manner it has been created. The aim was to target Generation X speaking about funny working area (noticing that they were worried about their future; they were not able to feel really good in their colleague's relationship, because of the competition). So it is clear that this marketing strategy touched the target quit well, but what did not Reebok do to know a long term success in sales? According to the text, the failure reason is that the symbols of Reebok were not sufficiently mentioned in the ads. [...]

[...] After few days the series were launched, Micky Pant (Chief marketing officer at Reebok) said brand is looking better and enjoying significant growth, and our product line has improved dramatically. So if you put money behind advertising, it's worth Micky Pant was speaking about a special web page the company created from which visitors could download a four minute video segment on Terry Tate. Is that enough? Do the purpose was to focus only on Terry Tate? Here may be the main problem. Indeed, such an investment must be accurately defined in order to avoid that kind of problem. [...]

[...] The viral marketing used was a really cool thing. Besides, instead of spending a huge amount of money on newspapers ads, television commercials or banner ads, you just spend nothing and let your fans do all the work for you thanks to the world of mouth. Reebok made people feel something, creating a very strong emotion with humour; they did something unexpected and different. Moreover, they were not considered as selfish because they did not only show how good Reebok's products are. [...]