Sarah Morgan
So today Twitter is in an uproar because the www.skittles.com website has been redesigned.
Without getting too technical (mainly because I’d probably explain it incorrectly anyway) – it isn’t a standard website anymore. It’s a small but multi-functional pop-up widget laid over a variety of different social media conversations about Skittles on different sites (Twitter, Youtube, etc.)Ad Age has a great article about it.
It’s utter genius. What better way to get word of mouth than to show it? Peer pressure makes the world go round. You see what everyone else is saying about Skittles – makes you start thinking about the brand more, doesn’t it? It might even make you start wanting to talk about it yourself.
@lahne asked me if this would really increase sales. And that’s the age-old PR question. No, it doesn’t increase immediate sales the way a point-of-purchase display or a free sample does. But it makes the brand top-of-mind. How many of us have thought more about Skittles today than we have in years? And that is going to translate into long-term sales.
As the CMO of Y&R said about a similar site design – it’s brilliant. “Not brilliant because it’s based on an amazing piece of technology, design, etc. Brilliant because they had the balls to do it.” And that much ballsier for a consumer product to do it.
Skittles gets that we don’t want branded brochureware anymore. It’s not how we think. Here it is in a nutshell: We don’t care what YOU say about your brand. We care what WE say about it.
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