Red Bull innovation strategy to serve brand marketing

By starting investing and develop brand content years ago, Red Bull has, little by little, moved from a simple marketing strategy to concrete innovative models into sports field. The energy drink brand started by the want of creating added value to their advertising by entertaining people through sport stories and associate them to their primary product. As time goes, Red Bull started to invest increasingly into content marketing.

First, Red Bull have found new sources of supply to feed their marketing investments out of the traditional sports to advertise to the world. They have been present since time in adventure and 'new-age' sports, sponsoring and heavily branding action sports events and athletes (ski, free-runners, sky-divers, car-drivers).

This has led the winged brand to strengthen their position and reputation by creating new sports and events. Red Bull Crashed Ice, a combination of hockey, downhill skiing and boardercross; Red Bull Caisse à Savon, a handcraft kart race; Wings for Life World Run, a worldwide race started at the same time. Those sporting events that Red Bull has seek, are used as means to reach its target market and promoting the image of the brand.  Those creations represent new innovative products and services that Red Bull built as branded marketing strategy first but reached further purposes.

The gradual, calculated expansion of Red Bull into new markets has underlined the company's early success, and its presence in sport has been no different. Red Bull recognized a potential niche market that had not been exploited before. The organization designed and introduced the concept of Air Racing in 2001 and spend few years to develop the race as a challenge for the best pilots to test their skills and compete through a series of obstacle. This new Red Bull sport achieved to gather a large media portfolio across the world and has been used by the brand to reach new markets to introduce the brand and the beverage. Using sports as a gate to enter new successfully new markets has been use also through the purchase of lower echelons football an ice hockey teams in their respective countries. And directly rebranding them such as (Red Bull Salzbourg, New York Red Bull, RB Leipzig).

Finally, Red Bull also introduced as entrepreneurship strategy, new forms of organization by suggesting capitalizing into F1 industry. When they got deeply into F1 by purchasing Jaguar Racing from Ford and rebranding it Red Bull Racing. Even if they were already sponsoring some drivers and established successful Junior Driver program sponsoring, their true innovation in F1 has been the creation of a second team by acquiring Minardi, an Italian racing team competing in F1 and F2. Red Bull decided then, to set a secondary role to this second acquisition. The newly team renamed Scuderia Toro Rosso, would become a farm team and developmental team with a primary goal to provide trained and experience young drivers to support the first team, Red Bull Racing. Also, this venture would be used to test engines in each car to select the most powerful ones to use for the first team. This organization has been a beneficial work for Red Bull and it has proven that success can be built organically with a front idea that remains brand marketing.

Thus, Red Bull has been one of the first brand among sport drinks and brands in general, to develop and enhance their brand marketing as far as they went to extend the core product and not just associate it. The brand now dominates adventurous sports industry and assert their positioning, values through the channels and models presented above. As a result, this strategy delivers added value to consumers by entertaining them through storytelling and the visibility of the events. Thereby, the brand content strategy is successfully executed in an innovative way by Red Bull and serves, since few years, as an example for the competitors (Monster) that try to catch up the empire built.

As a conclusion, Red Bull shows that content still king. It's clear that while a successful content marketing strategy relies on effective distribution, the content itself remains king. The media has long maintained that information should inform, educate or, for instance, entertain.

Yoann Quardel