Buying In - (Page vi) vi rob walker Back then, the proceedings made no sense to me at all. The marketing stunt involved a small group of extreme-sports enthusiasts who were planning to ride wind-powered kiteboards eighty-eight miles from Key West to Varadero, Cuba. I was living in New Orleans at the time, and I’d just started to see Red Bull popping up in bars in the French Quarter. So what was this stuff, and who was it supposed to be for—athletes or barflies? Why weren’t there any ads making the answer clear? To compound the weirdness, even this kiteboarding exercise, which I had assumed was designed to attract maximum free publicity, seemed instead to be happening in a void: I was the only journalist on hand, and there were no spectators or even a sign to attract them. It seemed to me that the whole idea of selling a product involved making a case to the public about why we should buy it—why this was the stuff to quench our thirst. In contrast, Red Bull’s marketing seemed so murky that I made up a word to describe it: murketing. It turned out that the murketing of Red Bull worked. In the years since my trip to Miami Beach, the stuff has gone mainstream: Previously unknown in the United States, energy drinks are now a $3.7 billion category with hundreds of competitors, led by Red Bull. How did that happen? I don’t mean in the descriptive sense of a brand’s or a product’s movement from one group of consumers to another, until it becomes familiar to almost everybody. I mean on an individual level. We all have our thirsts—real and metaphorical. How do we decide what will quench them and what won’t? How are those decisions affected by the commercial persuasion industry and the billions it spends to influence us? And how is the relationship between us and those “branding” professionals different now from, say, in the days before we knew what Red Bull was?
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