#TikTokMadeMeBuyIt: Biz expert says Stanley unleashed 'perfect storm' of viral marketing for Quencher mugs

Published

10 months ago

January 19, 2024

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A major marketing expert claimed that Stanley unleashed a “perfect storm” of viral marketing with social media monolith TikTok to get consumers crazy for its 40 oz. Quencher mugs.

Victor Lee, the president of marketing consulting group Advantage Unified Commerce, recently spoke to Fox News Digital about how the company used the social media platform to snag the attention of millions of Americans and get them to buy its tumbler dubbed the “Stanley Cup” by fans.

The strategy netted the company ten times its usual annual profits in just a short period of time and made legions of consumers ravenous for the product.

The expert called Stanleys entrance into the viral marketing space “brilliant,” especially for being able to take something as innocuous as a water bottle and turn it into a must-have product.

The Stanley Cup craze has been in overdrive in recent months, evidenced in viral videos showing consumers buying up store shelves of the product within minutes, and weeping for joy after getting them for Christmas.

The craze has become so prevalent that headlines have been made aboutparents telling bulliesto lay off their kids for not having an official Stanley tumbler.

Lee began by discussing the current social media landscape and how the tumbler company was able to use it to its advantage.

The expert mentioned how the current way to win the social media race is by doing the best at leveraging the attention of the platform users for the company or influencers benefit.

“Your phone is now saying, if I have five minutes to your attention, where do you want to go? And wherever you tap to, that’s who wins,” he said. “And if they don’t give you enough good stuff to occupy five minutes, you know you’re shutting that app off or that site off, and you’re going to another button, and you’re hitting it. That’s the race.”

He noted, “Who wins the race is what they did with your attention. And I think this is where TikTok fell into” Stanleys plans.

The expert further detailed how TikTok, compared to other social media platforms, is best equipped to trigger audiences into a reaction, including buying products.

Providing an example, he said, “TikTok is very well known for, I’m going to throw a random challenge. Go do it. Go run and jump into that swimming pool. Go hop the fence or do this. And there’s a lot of other controversial stuff.”

He also referenced the growing “#TikTokMadeMeBuyIt” trend thats been sweeping the platform. The hashtag currently boasts 86.6 billion views and counting on all videos related to it. The trend involves users showing off the products theyve bought while scrolling the app, which seems to drive more marketing and sales for the products depicted.

This almost compulsive virality combined with product placement means “now there’s real business implications” for these social media platforms, Lee said, before adding that Stanley taking advantage of this dynamic “was the perfect storm.”

“I would say they absolutely defined a moment of time and succeeded in it,” the expert declared.

Explaining how the company did this specifically, Lee noted that Stanley relied on a mixture of factors, including TikToks platform, and Stanleys knowledge of its audience.

He said, “It’s not all luck, its not all strategy. Its a fine mix of it. But it’s also a conviction of knowing where an audience is, in this case social media and TikTok specifically, and then allowing multiple adjacencies.”

Providing examples, he continued, “Like you started innovative with an influencer, if you want to call it innovative, then you went into TikTok. Suddenly it’s like, Well, what’s the other adjacency? Well, is this audience also a Target audience? More Target than probably other retailers? Are they a Starbucks audience? More Starbucks than other coffee? Let’s go there.”

Stanley marketed its cups with both Target and Starbucks. The Target exclusive Stanley Quencher made news after viral video showed customers at a Target in El Paso allegedly buying up the stores entire stock within minutes. Lee said the brand partnership itself was a “traditional” strategy rather than “innovative” on its own, but then combined with the design of cups and TikTok marketing, thats where it become innovative.

He said, “But they struck it where it is innovative. It is the big Stanley Cup, giant one. It is colored. It is exclusive. It is that. So that’s their innovation, which fits.”

Continuing, Lee discussed how social media, particularly TikTok, has been utilized by Stanley and other companies to generate a connection between the consumer and the product they see on their favorite influencers’ channels for example.

Mentioning his experience as the head of Hasbros digital marketing, he said, “During that time the craze in our world was the unboxing of toys. Why would a five-year-old kid watch an hour of YouTube of somebody opening up a toy? And what we found out is there’s a psychological effect of surprise, I have something, and it’s open, and there’s a connection to like, Christmas, of opening something up. And that to them just captured their attention.”

He added that TikTok presents the current form of that. “Now you fast-forward it six, ten years later. What is that? Well, there’s entertainment value TikTok is a massive entertainment value of that.”

Lee added that TikTok is having a “double effect” on users. “Were we interesting? And did you do something? And I think that’s the magic intersection that people aren’t talking a lot about,” he said.

Noting how marketing products benefits from this connection established between users and social media, he said, “Social media was always passive. I get to watch something, I get to engage, I get to feel that if there’s a celebrity involved, that I am closer to them than if I see them in their natural environment, on TV or in a movie. And social allows me a glimpse of their real life. Now, if I happened to start buying something from them, it makes me a tighter connection.”

“Because social feels more intimate and I’m closer to you and if I trust you it’s a perfect storm, is whats happening.”

World

At least 10 dead after fire rips through retirement home in Spain

Published

1 hour ago

November 15, 2024

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At least 10 dead after fire rips through retirement home in Spain

At least 10 people have been killed after a fire broke out at a retirement home in northern Spain in the early hours of this morning, officials have said.

A further two people were seriously injured in the blaze at the residence in the town of Villafranca de Ebro in Zaragoza, according to the Spanish news website Diario Sur.

They remain in a critical condition, while several others received treatment for smoke inhalation.

Firefighters were alerted to the blaze at the residence – the Jardines de Villafranca – at 5am (4am UK time) on Friday.

Those who were killed in the fire died from smoke inhalation, Spanish newspaper Heraldo reported.

The residence is home to 82 elderly residents.

The blaze started in one of the rooms, Fernando Beltran, the national government’s top official in the region, told reporters.

All of the victims were elderly residents, he added.

Fire crews, paramedics and police officers remain on site, said a spokesperson for the regional government of Aragon who confirmed the fatalities.

It took firefighters several hours to extinguish the blaze, they said.

The cause of the fire is unknown and is being investigated.

UK

UK economy grows by 0.1% between July and September – slower than expected

Published

1 hour ago

November 15, 2024

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UK economy grows by 0.1% between July and September - slower than expected

The UK economy grew by 0.1% between July and September, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

However, despite the small positive GDP growth recorded in the third quarter, the economy shrank by 0.1% in September, dragging down overall growth for the quarter.

The growth was also slower than what had been expected by experts and a drop from the 0.5% growth between April and June, the ONS said.

Economists polled by Reuters and the Bank of England had forecast an expansion of 0.2%, slowing from the rapid growth seen over the first half of 2024 when the economy was rebounding from last year’s shallow recession.

And the metric that Labour has said it is most focused on – the GDP per capita, or the economic output divided by the number of people in the country – also fell by 0.1%.

Reacting to the figures, Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves said: “Improving economic growth is at the heart of everything I am seeking to achieve, which is why I am not satisfied with these numbers.

“At my budget, I took the difficult choices to fix the foundations and stabilise our public finances.

“Now we are going to deliver growth through investment and reform to create more jobs and more money in people’s pockets, get the NHS back on its feet, rebuild Britain and secure our borders in a decade of national renewal,” Ms Reeves added.

The sluggish services sector – which makes up the bulk of the British economy – was a particular drag on growth over the past three months. It expanded by 0.1%, cancelling out the 0.8% growth in the construction sector.

The UK’s GDP for the most recent quarter is lower than the 0.7% growth in the US and 0.4% in the Eurozone.

The figures have pushed the UK towards the bottom of the G7 growth table for the third quarter of the year.

It was expected to meet the same 0.2% growth figures reported in Germany and Japan – but fell below that after a slow September.

The pound remained stable following the news, hovering around $1.267. The FTSE 100, meanwhile, opened the day down by 0.4%.

The Bank of England last week predicted that Ms Reeves’s first budget as chancellor will increase inflation by up to half a percentage point over the next two years, contributing to a slower decline in interest rates than previously thought.

Announcing a widely anticipated 0.25 percentage point cut in the base rate to 4.75%, the Bank’s Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) forecast that inflation will return “sustainably” to its target of 2% in the first half of 2027, a year later than at its last meeting.

The Bank’s quarterly report found Ms Reeves’s £70bn package of tax and borrowing measures will place upward pressure on prices, as well as delivering a three-quarter point increase to GDP next year.

UK

Meeting the deeply radical anti-tax group that is ‘growing in popularity’

Published

1 hour ago

November 15, 2024

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Meeting the deeply radical anti-tax group that is 'growing in popularity'

“If you are a member of something, it means you’ve accepted membership. Anything with ‘ship’ on the end, it’s giving you a clue: it’s telling you that’s maritime law. That means you’ve entered into a contract.”

This isn’t your standard legal argument and it is becoming clear that I am dealing with an unusual way of looking at the world.

I’m in the library of a hotel in Leicestershire, a wood-panelled room with warm lighting, and Pete Stone, better known as Sovereign Pete, is explaining how “the system” works. Mr Stone is in his mid-50, bald with a goatee beard and wearing, as he always does for public appearances, a black T-shirt and black jeans.

With us are six other people, mainly dressed in neat jumpers. They’re members of the Sovereign Project (SP), an organisation Mr Stone founded in 2020, which, he says, now has more than 20,000 paying members.

As arcane as this may sound, it represents a worldview that is becoming more influential – and causing problems for authorities. Loosely, they’re defined as “sovereign citizens” or “freemen on the land”.

Their fundamental point is that nobody is required to obey laws they have not specifically consented to – especially when it comes to tax. They have hundreds of thousands of followers in the UK across platforms including YouTube, Facebook and Telegram.

Increasingly, they are coming into conflict with governments and the law. Sovereign citizens have ended up in the High Court in recent months, challenging the legalities of tax bills and losing on both occasions.

In October, four people were sentenced to prison for the attempted kidnapping of an Essex coroner, who they saw as acting unlawfully. The self-appointed “sheriffs” attempted to force entry to the court, one of them demanding: “You guys have been practising fraud!”

The Sovereign Project is not connected to any of those cases, nor does it promote any sort of political action, let alone violence.

Instead, they are focused on issues like questioning the obligation to pay taxes, as Mr Stone explains, referencing the feudal system that operated in the Middle Ages.

“Do you know about the feudal system when people were slaves and were forced to pay tax?” he asks.

“Now, unless the feudal system still operates today, and we still have serfs and slaves, then the only way that you can pay taxes is to have a contract, you have to agree to it and consent to it.”

Another member, Karl Deans, a 43-year-old property developer who runs the SP’s social media, says: “We’re not here to dodge tax.”

Local government tends to be a target beyond just demands for tax. Mr Stone speaks of “council employee crimes”.

I ask whether, considering the attempted kidnapping in Essex, there is a danger that people will listen to these accusations of crimes by councils and act on them.

“Well that’s proved,” Mr Stone says. “We only deal with facts.”

Evidence suggests this approach is becoming an issue for councils across the UK, as people search online for ways to avoid paying tax.

Sky News analysis shows that out of 374 council websites covering Great Britain, at least 172 (46%) have pages responding to sovereign citizen arguments around avoiding paying council tax. They point out that liability for council tax is not dependent on consent, or a contract, and instead relies on the Local Government Finance Act 1992, voted on by Parliament.

But the Sovereign Project’s worldview extends beyond council tax. It is deeply anti-establishment, at times conspiratorial. Stone suggests the summer riots may have been organised by the government.

“The sovereign fraternity operates above all of this,” he says. “We look down at the world like a chessboard. We see what’s going on.”

He explains that, really, the UK government isn’t actually in control: there is a shadow government above them.

“These are the people who control government,” he explains.

“A lot of people say this could be the crown council of 13, this could be a series of Italian families.”

Professor Christine Sarteschi, an expert in sovereign citizens at Chatham University, Pittsburgh, says she’s worried about the threat sovereign citizens may pose to the rule of law, especially in the US where guns are readily available.

“The movement is growing and that’s evidenced by seeing it in different countries and hearing about different cases. The concern is that they will become emboldened and commit acts of violence,” she says.

“Because sovereigns truly believe in their ideas and if they feel very aggrieved by, you know, the government or whomever they think is oppressing them or controlling them… they can become emotionally involved.

“That emotional involvement sometimes leads to violence in some cases, or the belief that they have the power to attempt to overthrow a government in some capacity.”

Much of this seems to be based on an underlying and familiar frustration at the state of this country and of the world.

Mr Stone echoes some of the characteristic arguments also made by the right, that there is “two-tier policing”, that refugees arriving in the UK are “young men of fighting age”, that the government is using “forced immigration to destroy the country”.

Another SP member, retired investment banker David Hopgood, 61, says: “I firmly believe it is the true Englishman – and woman – of this country – that has the power to unlock this madness that’s happening in the West.

“We’ve got the Magna Carta – all these checks and balances. We just need to pack up, go down to Parliament and say: It’s time to dismiss you. You’re not fit for purpose.”

The members of the Sovereign Project are unfailingly patient and polite in explaining their understanding of the world.

But there is no doubt they hold a deeply radical view, one that is apparently growing in popularity.