Will It Blend?

In late 2006, Utah-based Blendtec spent around $50 to launch a series of videos in which the company CEO, Tom Dickson, does a simple product demonstration of the Blendtec brand home and commercial blenders. He uses their blenders to grind everyday household objects including golf balls, soft drink cans, a Hannah Montana doll and an iPhone.

Within 5 days, over 6 million visitors had landed on the company’s website.

“Lately, I’ve been feeling a need to get back to my manly roots,” Dickson says in the opening of one of the videos at the WillItBlend.com micro-site for Blendtec. “So I decided to build myself a man cave to relax and unwind,” he adds.

Next, Dickson takes a collection of objects that just don’t fit in a man cave and tosses them into the 1500 watt blender. Moments later, he has blended a mixture of a lava lamp, a Hannah Montana doll, a raspberry wine cooler bottle and a serving of quiche.

It’s a stunt that would make Ron Popeil jealous and Tim “The Tool Man” Taylor proud.

The short, quirky videos are entertaining and fun. And also a powerful demonstration of the product. In fact, the videos have contributed to a 6x increase in sales as of August 2008, thanks mostly to millions of viewings at YouTube.

In addition to gaining pop-culture celebrity status over the Internet, Dickson has even appeared as a guest on The Today Show and The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.

While my suspicions are that the man cave video segment may have required some special editing to actually blend all of the ingredients, it is apparent from some of the other videos that these are heavy duty blenders. In other words, if a Blendtec blender can’t blend it, you’d don’t need to drink it

I Love Dairy Queen!

Originally uploaded by Jim the Corsair

To promote the DQ Sweet Deals, the fast food chain recently offered free $5 gift cards to the first 250 bloggers who would “Write a blog post (or leave a comment) about what deal you’d make with us to try our Sweet Deals for free.”

Sure enough, they got their 250 bloggers in just a matter of days.

In fact, they got a whole lot more blogging conversation from bloggers simply blogging about the promotion. Many other news outlets picked up the story as well.

Dairy Queen also got a fair amount of buzz also on Twitter and in other social media communities.

As for the comments and blog posts from DQ fans telling what they’d do for the sweet deals, here are a couple of my fav’s:

“I would read every page of the stimulus package. Sweet!” – Kelly

“I would jump up on a table in the biggest Dairy Queen center around, and woot like a gorilla while pointing at my mouth like i’m hungry!!” – Julia Stowe

So what happened here? DQ got at least 250 people to comment/blog about the brand. And that likely started hundreds more conversations, i.e. people telling their friends about how they just tried to win the DQ promo.

It also started several conversations among bloggers on Twitter who blog about social media (myself included). Although a twitter search for DQ does also yield a lot of results for the acronym for “disqualified.”

Someone has questioned if the marketers’ paid-for posts could result in Google slapping Dairy Queen for some kind of link scam. DQ’s a no-follow tag so as not to fool the Google spider that crawls the blogs for ranking purposes.

However, Adam Singer Digital Strategist for Pierson Grant Public Relations (the PR agency of record for DQ) made a good defense for the practice saying that bloggers were free to use a no-follow and that the links were simply there to track buzz and share stories. No Google rules broken.

All in all, I think this DQ blogging promo was very progressive in terms of leveraging so much digital word-of-mouth among DQ fans and the social media community in general.

–Kevin McIntosh

Kevin McIntosh has 20 years experience in marketing and branding. He has worked on the marketing campaigns of over a hundred brands including over a dozen Fortune 500 brands. He shows businesses how to differentiate from their competition through a combination of traditional and new media channels.