Mele’s Musings

The Big Skittles Social Experiment

Skittles is getting a lot of chatter regarding its decision to make its web site simply a portal to social media.  It’s bold, but is it smart?

Excerpt: Many marketers are applauding Skittles’s groundbreaking decision to turn its site into little more than a channel to point visitors to buzz and information about the brand on consumer-generated media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube and Wikipedia. Instead of corporate-produced content, visitors to skittles.com see one of these areas (the landing page is being rotated) with two overlays. One overlay requires them to register their age and agree to terms of service stating that they are clicking into non-Skittles-controlled outside site content. The other is navigational. Clicking “chatter” takes visitors into Twitter and the thread of tweets about Skittles (bad words and all); clicking “media” takes them into Skittles videos and photos on YouTube and Flickr; and clicking “friends” takes them into the brand’s Facebook area. Only the “products,” “contact” and “other gobbledygook” (nutrition info) links connect into corporate brand content. The rest: mediapost.

My sense is that some people will like this idea simply because it is different and bold.  Which is fine.  But if we can get past the fact that they are the first ones to come up with this concept, my question becomes more about whether or not this is something that reinforces them as a brand and company or not.

I will give them credit for doing something that builds buzz and chatter - which is something that is generally worthwhile, and hard to do.

And, to be quite honest, many websites, particularly in CPG companies, are so over-marketed that they offer very little value to consumers.

But Skittles experiement to me feels like it is a cool tactic looking for a strategy.  Are people talking about it?  Yes.  Have they collected a massive number of friends?  Yes.  But I am not sure what it does for them over the long run.

I guess I don’t necessarily see this experiment being about Skittles.  You could do this very thing for almost any brand.  Strategically, I am not sure how it fits in with what they are offering to consumers.  They make fun candy that people like to eat.  User control, a liquid brand identity, etc. are not really part of the value they give to consumers.

Let’s say that they believe they are a “fun snack” company, and what they are doing is offering consumers a digital version of fun snacks.  Ok, I can almost buy that.  Except that it is still not differentiated for them as a brand.  There are lots of brands that can do the same thing.  And, arguably, there are lots of brands that could do this and have much more interesting consumer generated content.

Don’t get me wrong.  I think what they are doing is clever.  And I do think it’s ground breaking.  I am anxious to see if they can make it long-lasting.  Right now it is an interesting experiment.  Whether it has legs for the brand over the long-run has yet to be proven.  I am excited to see where this goes next.

Some good posts about it: 

Digital Outlook

Snoo.ws

Hummingbird604

Venture Beat

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