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When This Company Followed The Same Simple Marketing Strategy As Amazon And Apple, It Beat The Odds

This article is more than 8 years old.

Comfortable times are often the best times to shift marketing tactics. Great organizations that do this on a regular basis are Amazon, Samsung, and Apple . They understand the need to dip into record revenues to bet on risky new ideas to keep their brand and products fresh. Their people with ideas are always asking: What can I do to reach my target audience in new and innovative ways?

So what can smaller brands learn from their approach? One example I like to cite is from a 20 year-old company called Dice which has an established online platform for its users to find and hire qualified candidates.

For them, recreating an original brand is difficult work especially when the company has been around since the birth of the Internet and little had been done to evolve with changes in the workforce. It was a challenge they were up to, but needed a new leader to drive that change through the organization and roll the dice a few times.

And they got it. After turning heads and blowing up headlines (and almost causing collisions on the freeway), Dice’s new VP of Marketing, Natasha Raja came out with an innovative campaign that put programmers in their underwear on billboards. Think Calvin Klein but with humorous geeky types.

“This isn’t for the faint of heart,” Raja told me, “We had to get people’s attention, we wanted to push the envelope and shake it up.” Attention they got, driving over 100 million impressions, receiving an Obie Award, and blowing up major news headlines including NBC, Bloomberg , Washington Post, ABC, and PBS.

So why did they receive all of the attention around Dice’s latest marketing venture? Raja and her team took advantage of old school billboard marketing to display a mash-up of content from one industry with another to revamp their image from a legacy brand to a disruptive industry leader. She understood that the combination of spoof fashion content with real geeky looking guys would cause a lot of discussions amongst their target audience.

Dice marketing also realized that on average, their target market spends upwards of 20 hours and travels more than 200 miles per week. Furthermore, according to the Arbitron National In-Car Study, 2009 edition, 71% of us, “often look at the messages on roadside billboards (traditional and digital combined),” 56% of viewers talked about something funny they saw on a roadside billboard, 72% shopped on their way home from work, and 68% made shopping decisions while in the car.

To change the face of a company in our over-stimulated digital world, a campaign must spark an emotional connection that creates a dialogue within its target audience. Raja and Terry Starr, Head of Social Media and Voice of Customer, knew that keeping their loyal user-base while engaging new audiences meant letting their current customers create marketing content. So they decided to keep the discussion going online as well.

According to DemandGen, 72% of B2B buyers use social media to research a purchase and 53% rely on trusted reviews for their buying decisions. When I caught up with Starr, she shared, “I knew the “Plaid-Clad” boxer’s campaign was going to get people’s attention, but hard to imagine the long-tail effect it would have on social media. I don’t think a day’s gone by since launch day that we haven’t seen significant online chatter.” Starr also told me their well-developed Brand Ambassador army was used to ignite the social-sphere and it helped spark the campaign to go viral.

Reputations aren’t built overnight and Dice recognizes that it takes more than one campaign to create a prevailing rebrand. But it’s a huge start, and if they follow in the footsteps of companies like Amazon, Samsung and Apple, odds are they’ll be top of mind with their target market and less likely to surrender the results to chance.

I’ll take those odds.