Is this what consumer product web sites have come to?
Skittles is making serious waves with the guru class for its new site, which essentially hijacks Facebook, Flickr, Twitter and so on by simply floating a navigation widget over Skittles pages on these external sites.
"Home" is the Skittles Facebook Page. "Chatter" is the Skittles Twitter page. "Products" points you to the associated Wikipedia page(s). "Friends" points you to Skittles' Facebook Friends. And "Videos" sends you to Skittles' YouTube page.
Dang: What a nice way to save on site maintenance and updates.
And it's kind of cool. But I have to say the experience is less than ideal on a laptop, as the nav widget obscures key real estate.
And so far, the friends and wall messages are all people opining about how this is the right strategy for the category, or about how Modernista did this a long time ago.
In other words, there's not a consumer in sight - or site - as far as I can tell.
Is this marketing for marketers? Or will it resonate with the brand's presumably young-ish, teen-ish, female-ish audience? Or is this taking candy a little too seriously? Do teenagers really want a personal relationship with Skittles, or hang out with people who do?
If we're going to go all soc net about it, I may as well ask: What's your opinion?
Taste the rainbow here and come back and share your thoughts.
Or not.
Quick Links:
BRANDING UNBOUND The Blog
BRANDING UNBOUND The Book
ADWEEK Magazines Excerpt
Rick Mathieson.com
I think people are missing the point here. The Twitter feed was a short-term stunt -- designed to get us all talking. And now they've made the switch to Facebook at the perfect time -- while we were all still paying attention. If they had waited more than another day, this buzz would have been over. Instead, they get an entire second news cycle out of this. And that translates to new "friends" on their Facebook page, which is monetizeable in a very real way.
Zach
Posted by: Zach | March 04, 2009 at 01:36 PM