Week 2 Part A - Blog Post

     Week 2 Part A: Communication Between Business & Consumer 

     Company 1: Red Bull.

 One of the mottos of Red Bull is an “entertaining way of life” and an identity of energy, motion, adrenaline, movement, and boldness. “Red Bull gives you wings” is their core message and they build their brand around this message as being both stimulating and reviving. They don’t just promote their product, they promote a way of life. On YouTube Red Bull put forward experiences rather than products and have positioned themselves in a way to provide content that mirrors that. The videos they put up are mostly sport oriented and are most always about some adrenaline inducing activity such as sky diving, mountain biking, large stunt jumps, and much more. The content revolves around the sports and events that they sponsor and put audience and branding at the center of their digital strategy. Rather than pushing sales they are focused on giving value to their customers. 

    All of their content is exciting, current, and trendy. Some of the benefits they are gaining by their social media strategy and posting on social media is developing a loyal community, improving brand image, expanding sales and reaching new audiences. One way Red Bull has developed a loyal community is by posting exciting and engaging content which revolves around their sponsors on the world's most popular video-sharing website YouTube. One example is their cliff-diving series which are exciting and adrenaline inducing clips that allow their viewers and followers to create a community and engage with the brand and share content. They have created a strong online community and they are very dedicated to being immersed in conversations with their community in addition to increasing their engagement. On social media they reply to their followers and create conversations. One example of how they do this is when responding to individuals in their community they portray a fun and engaging portrait of themselves and respond in a non-robotic and unconstricted way.

Company 2: Monster Energy

     I believe that the brand identity of Monster Energy is an extreme, dynamic, and fun one that portrays sincerity, excitement, sophistication, and ruggedness where they bring a sort of aggressive and rebellious/edgy personality to life. Overall I think they are a fun, exciting, dynamic, and trendy brand. For example when a consumer drinks Monster they would like them to give the impression that they are socially involved. They are portraying their brand identity very well in their social media posts, for example they use Facebook and fill it with videos and pictures of extreme sports and events sponsored by them which is a major part of their marketing strategy. What Monster gains by posting on social media is developing a loyal community, boosting traffic and search engine rating, maintaining top of mind awareness, and more. On Facebook they regularly post videos and pictures of “extreme” events or activities, many of which they sponsor. By doing this they constantly gain a large amount of likes and comments when compared to competitors in their sector and even other large brands in other industries. 

    Their level of involvement in extreme sports has gained them a huge following of interest since consumers follow them as a means of getting closer to their favorite extreme events or sports and their sporting heroes. One example of what they post is: A picture of a colorful and extreme rally car in midair shooting flames out of its tailpipe, with a huge amount of likes and comments which involves developing and maintaining a loyal community while boosting traffic and search engine rating as well as showing expertise and product quality. They post premium content such as skateboarding, NASCAR, and mountain biking. One of their twitter posts is a sponsored tweet aiming to attract consumers and fans to their “drift” series which is an example of quality content and expands their promotional activities to a larger audience.

Social media makes it much much easier to get noticed and allows for a vastly and exponentially larger amount of views, clicks, comments, interactions, etc. Social media is connected to a vast number of individuals and even if only a couple of people see a social media post, each of those people know hundreds of people, and each of those people know hundreds, and so on and so on. Communication with businesses in the past would be difficult if not impossible, you would have to go far out of your way to give a positive comment or complain and probably have to send a letter or email, depending on how far back. If I was on social media I would have the social media expert in charge of the social media account(s) reply to positive comments in a warm and thankful way, but never monotonous. I would have them respond to negative comments in a respectful and completely non-confrontational, "the customer is always right" way. 

I put comments on both of these brands with an image of one of their products, I have yet to get a reply but hopefully I will soon. I posted an image of a new redbull flavor in my hand (watermelon) while walking, commenting that "I absolutely love the new flavors you are putting out and I cannot wait for the next season of flavors, I have tried almost all of the new flavors" For monster I posted a picture of myself at my computer desk with a "Java Monster coffee + energy" saying "This is one of my go-to drinks when studying, they taste amazing and really get the job done and help me get my work done."