Case Study: Skittle’s Internet Marketing Campaign

I can’t remember the last time I had Skittles, the rainbow-colored sweet and sour candy.  I had all but forgotten about it until I saw mention of it on Twitter.  And then I saw it on YouTube, then Wikipedia and then Facebook.  Then I heard about it on Twitter again.  Finally, it was picked up on the Wall Street Journal, Forbes and the rest was history.

Skittles made waves in the online marketing community early last month when it decided to relaunch their website.  What was special about the website was that it was in fact a collage of different websites.  It had an “about us” section that was pulled from Wikipedia, videos from YouTube, a “chatter” section that pulled posts (tweets) from Twitter, among other user-created content from various Web 2.0 properties.  By leveraging on these social media properties all at once, the Internet community was suddenly hit from multiple channels about Skittles.  What quickly ensued was a sharp spike in buzz around the brand.

Within 48 hours, everyone from blog owners to internet marketers were discussing Skittles.  So were spammers and pranksters.  The internet marketing campaign soon started a negative downward spiral.  Users exploited the twitter-skittles “hack” and started to post comments ranging from the purely unrelated to profanities about the candy.  Skittles eventually took down the Twitter portion of the site.  Even then, the Skittles campaign had already achieved text-book case-study status.

Skittles is a generally well-known brand.  If a lesser-known brand were to pull off the same tactic, it may not have suffered/enjoyed the same results.  What Skittles managed to do, was to gain critical mass for its campaign within an extremely short period of time, a feat that is crucial to internet marketing.

Internet marketers have been taking both sides of the campaign.  Some think that Skittles’ courageous adoption of the web 2.0 properties paid off big-time, while others scoffed at giving too much freedom to consumers, a freedom which was eventually abused.

Personally, I feel that the outcome from the Skittles campaign was positive.  Prior to the campaign, there was little mention of the brand or even candy in general on the Internet.  Then suddenly, literally everyone was talking about  it.  Skittles could have spent half a million dollars on new tvcs yet not come close to this level of buzz around its brands.  Indeed, there were some nasty comments left on its website, but I am sure a majority of visitors to the site realized that this was the work of immature pranksters, something bound to happen in today’s social web environment.  These visitors would normally not have even thought of dropping by the site.

The lesson we take away from this campaign:  we see the potential of using web 2.0 as a marketing channel but at the same time realize that it is a raw and untamed force.  Study social media marketing and master it, because if you don’t, someone else will.