Mele’s Musings

The Skittles Experiment Ends

About a year ago, Skittles embarked on a very bold direction.  Embracing the chaos and conventional wisdom of the day, Skittles took the “you don’t own your brand, your customers do” creed to the ultimate end.  It killed its website and replaced it with feeds from social sites, blog postings, etc. 

And chaos indeed ensued.  The voice of the consumer became cacophony, pranksters made the candy brand X-rated, and all semblance of Skittles control was lost.  Was this the great promise of social media?  I think not.

Skittles.com

I never bought into the whole “you don’t own your brand” nonsense.  Of course companies own their brands.  Companies create the experiences that define their brands - through their products, stores, services, spokespeople, etc.  Whether the brands that are created match the desired brand the company wants to create is another story. 

And that is the truth behind the mis-guided concept of “not owning your brand.”  What they really mean is that you can’t make your brand something it is not just by clever marketing tactics.  A bad product is a bad product, poor service is poor service, great experiences are great experiences regardless of what the advertising tries to say.

But I digress.  Back to Skittles. 

I wrote about the Skittles experiment after they launched the new site, and I stick by my first impression.  Was it groundbreaking?  Yes.  Was it clever? Yes.  Was it meaningful?  I don’t think so.  From what I can tell, it didn’t do a ton for the brand, and it certainly didn’t give consumers any valuable reason to visit the site other than titillation or to see if their post about Skittles made it.  The free flowing Skittles commentary was actually already happening on their Facebook page.  The website added nothing to the conversation.

And so now Skittles has abandoned this bold concept, and replaced it with something more owned, although not any less random.  The new site is quite striking and bold in its own right  - it feels like a Skittles Modern Art Gallery.  But, for the life of me, I still can’t understand what Skittles is trying to do in its marketing.  I guess I’m not the target.

What the Skittles experiment shows most clearly is that transparency is simply a reality in this new world of social media, but transparency is not a brand attribute.  Open, honest, uninhibited - these are brand attributes.  Transparency is, well, nothing.  It just is.  Finding out what people think about a brand is pretty easy anymore.  But that is not the same as trying to manage what people think about your brand.

We have to be careful in this brave new world not to abandon brand ownership.  In fact, I would argue its more important than ever.  What it really means is that we have to pay attention to what people think about our brands and take a real careful look at ourselves to make sure that what we are saying about our brands is matching what people are experiencing.

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