By now, most people have heard of Blendtech’s Viral Marketing campaign. Willitblend was a  phenomenon that experienced nearly instant success on Digg.com and their series of YouTube videos got over 100 million views. The videos show the company’s CEO blending different objects, the most popular of which was the iPhone shown above.

The campaign can be considered a success by any measure: sales of their blenders have increased 5x to numbers reaching the millions; they have reached a number of traditional media outlets such as The Tonight Show with Jay Leno; in September 2007 and the videos earned the second highest annual payout of about $15,000 from the video hosting service, Revver - a marketing campaign as a profit center - what a concept!

Josh Bernoff from Forrester Research writes about some of the strengths of Blendtech’s campaign and what other companies can learn from it:

1. It’s funny. It’s visually arresting. It’s
   short. These are three qualities your videos must possess. Here’s
   another company that also succeeded with a visually arresting video: Ray-Ban.
2. It’s authentic. These guys are geeks. Wright told
   me the CEO — Tom Dickson, who’s featured in the video — is an
   engineer. It comes across. This stuff ain’t slick, folks, and if it
   were it wouldn’t work. (I love the proud and cheesy smile while he
   watches his company’s blender reduce some object to dust.)
3. It’s original. Figure out what your unique value is. Then film it and put it up there. Don’t copy Blendtec, or Ray-Ban, or Dove. This may be the hardest part.
4. It actually connects to the value of the product. You
   see these videos and you can’t help saying “Can that blender really do
   that? Maybe I should get one.” And many people do. You could be a hit
   on YouTube with a video that doesn’t connect to the value of your
   product, but that will help your ego a lot more than your sales.

What I liked about this campaign is that it is a true reflection of what was going on inside the company. Insiders at Blendtech say that “extreme blending” was a regular occurrence there. So - although some might find the idea of blending different objects silly, it was silliness that is authentically them.

Jackie Peters from Mashable makes the following good point:

What we are seeing now in online communities is a shift toward
humanness. It’s no longer acceptable to the Internet savvy individuals
to interface with a faceless corporation. Social tools like blogs,
messaging services and community sites have broken down barriers
between individuals and also between brands and consumers. The “Will It
Blend” story comes from a place of authenticity, it lends a face to
Blendtec and makes them approachable.

A final proof of the popularity of this campaign: it is the one of the most popular search terms for reaching Seth Godin’s blog. It is a great success, for taking an impossibly practical and traditional product to the web. I wonder how many more Blendtechs there are out there?

Leave a Reply