Event Marketing - the Lessons from Red Bull Strategy

There are few brands that can offer more lessons in how to approach the next generation of marketing than Red Bull. Focusing their strategy on earned media, cultural integration and value creation, Red Bull’s approach is pioneering, and a template that many brands would love to follow.

However it’s also proven a difficult strategy to replicate, specifically because just how different it is from the traditional marketing model. It’s definitely not just about sponsoring a couple of youth events and calling it a day. The scale of Red Bull’s commitment to non-traditional marketing is unprecedented. As far back as a decade ago, Red Bull was spending more than 80% of their significant marketing budget on non-measured media. That’s completely inverse to the traditional marketing formula of focusing on packaged communication messages and the broadcast media to spread them.
Core to Red Bull’s success has been their unique strategy of focusing on brand-owned events. It struck me that one of the best ways to make the point about what it takes to seriously succeed at their level and at this game was to show the scale they are operating on.

Creating vs sponsoring After sponsoring a handful of existing events early in the brand’s history, Red Bull made a strategic decision to create their own events and have followed this direction consistently ever since.
This is a hugely important differentiator for them, and sets them a league apart from sponsor brands
:
1. Early investment becomes equity
As a sponsor brand, the more important and popular the event becomes, the more it costs. However Red Bull’s initial investment in creating the event quickly starts paying compound interest, and as the event grows in stature they reap all of the rewards while costing them only the maintenance of re-running the event.
2. Sole-branding
Most big events have their platinum, gold and silver sponsors. How much are brands really getting out of these sponsorships? And if you want