What's Your Digital iQ

About the speaker:

Randall Brown has been bring innovation in marketing to Gatorade for nearly 10 years now. Today, as Senior Brand Manager for digital, social and marketing innovation, Randall leads Gatorade brand strategy and planning across all digital and online platforms including advertising, branded & custom content, social media, search & SEO, measurement & analytics and gaming.

Follow Randall on Twitter: @RandallB3

In 2010, 500K consumers were connected with the Gatorade brand. Unfortunately, these were not their core audience. More times than not, the conversation happening in social media around Gatorade looked something like: “Ahhh…it’s Monday and I’m hungover. Orange Gatorade, please.” <– Not Ideal!

Today, the Gatorade brand is connected with nearly 5M people…many of which are core athletes that use their products everyday. How did Gatorade in such a short period of time use social media to grow their brand? It was a very purposeful effort with a few key stages:

Define Social Purpose & Brand Behaviors

Your social purpose must equal your brand purpose. What is it that your brand is about and how can the brand portray that purpose? At Gatorade, their purpose is to drive athletic performance from the inside out. That means helping their core audience understand what should be put into their body, why, and the effect it will have on their performance.

The rest is simple…Brand Purpose = Social Purpose.

Living Your Ethos Daily

How does the brand’s social team go about planning and executing a systematic approach to engagement? What actions must happen everyday to live the brand. As individuals, when we wake up each morning we know what we are going to do. It’s intuitive whether it is scheduled out or not. The brand purpose must be that intuitive. From there, brand managers must figure out how to scale and operationalize the brand’s social acitivities?

Purposeful Experimentation & Measurement

Remember 6th grade science? Remember the scientific method?

1. Form hypothesis
2. Define your variable
3. Test and experiment

Social media works the same way. We can formulate hypothesis about how consumers will respond to specific brand behaviors, define variables that could alter actions, and then continue to test and experiment to optimize the results.

Randall shared the 2-pronged approach Gatorade uses to track brand behaviors:

1) Tracking your inputs

Quantify the scale and qulaity of your behaviors in the social landscape.

2) Tracking your outcomes

Quantify the scale and quality of your outomces impact with customers.

From there, we can understand the value and ROI from a multi-dimensional perspective:

• as “media”
• as an insights tool
• as a brand equity builder
• as a sales tool

Final Thought

Social media is indeed a new place. But, people haven’t evolved over the last 50 years, we are all fundamentally the same over time. If you are able define your brand’s purpose while still keeping the same understanding of people, everything else falls into place.