The first post of my Holy Technology series this week only!
I heard on one my favorite blogs Nerve's Scanner that Skittles has fully jumped on board with this whole social networking thing. On the "chatter" portion of their website for example, there is a feed that displays every time someone twitters (or tweets) with the word "skittles" in it. (To get past liabilities of potentially racy content, you have to enter your birthdate and aknowledge Skittles' lack of responsibility for content before entering the website.)
I mean the landing page for skittles.com is a Wikipedia page. At first I thought I typed it wrong but then I realized that they did this on purpose. Interesting. You can read all the social networking details here.
So on one hand it's a great idea. Skittles gets a bunch of overly connected people like myself to mention this on blogs and websites and gets me to tweet to my network of followers. But aside from being an interesting concept…Will anyone visit the site more than once? Will this translate into increased sales or is this just a brand building project for Skittles? And is anyone even going to be talking about this next week?
It's certainly hard to tell. Mars is a privately held company so we can't look at the stock ticker to see if Skittle's value has gone up or down recently. Evidence would be purely anecdotal.
So what do you think of this marketing plan? Great idea or just something that'll pass? As socially networked as I am, I find myself moderately annoyed with this campaign.
All in all, as viral as everything thing is now, I can’t say I blame them. I don’t think it will cause a big stir or anything, but it will beef traffic for awhile. But, it’s just like anything else out there. It stays popular for a few days and then interest wanes.
If they really want to make a splash, then need to get more marketing out there – more than just tweets. TV ads are still the best advertisement out there, according to a recent study I read. Online is fast gaining, but it’s not there just yet. Ads. And if those ads include suggestive material, well then, they’re likely to sell more. Just a fact in ad sales. Sex sells.
I wasn’t even aware of this until I read your post. Skittles is a pretty exclusive type of candy in the candy world. It doesn’t have many competitors that offer the same product for less. Unlike chocolate where there is an abundance of similar products at various price points. However, they do have a lot of substitutes that people could use if they suddenly didn’t want skittles but another cheaper fruity flavor. With all that said, I think the point of the campaign is to get people to talk about and therefore make the connection with a candy craving to Skittles.
dude — it’s candy. why do they need to work on social networking?