Red Bull Case Study

Red bull mostly targeted the young people in where ever they might exist, the marketing strategy were always associated with energy, danger, and the youth culture. It heavily depended on the word of mouth. Therefore, they followed a strategy of five key features in customer segmentations: hot spots; clubs, and place which were popular with its in crowd. They approached key individuals like the DJs and the bar tenders by giving the DJ cans of Red Bull while mixing and leaving empty cans on tables in trendy bars and pubs, as well as garbage cans outside nightclubs. They targeted shops near the universities and gyms. From the case we can see that Red Bull followed. In general the segmentation strategy of the company was a success. Specially that the first market researches were not promising at all. However, through deploying a good branding and marketing segmentation strategy the company was voted as one of the top brands in Africa and Europe by 2001.

As the company tried always to be relevant to the youth culture by associating its brand with the danger and power also by sponsoring the extreme sports and pop music it developed a cult among marketing-wary generation who perceived it as anti-brand.

The company had to face a challenge of being in direct competition with other brand who took a big share from the company in different parts in the world, those challenges of influence its capabilities and resources to compete with the mainstream brads, which some of which tried to cultivate a similar anti-establishment brand image to Red Bull’s.

Another challenge to the youth culture strategy the company had was how to keep recruiting the new generation of young people (16 years old ) each year as its first generation of consumer is aged, the company wanted them to keep using the drink beyond their study years.

The company received a lot of criticism for using some mainstream marketing approaches. Following a random mainstream approach would affect the brand badly, specially that the brand depended heavily on the relation between the anti-brand establishment and the advertising-weary marketing , so it may lead to a big confusion in the customer mind about the brand and what is stands for and as a result to lose its “Mystique”.

As we stated before the marketing segmentation and the branding strategies were a success for the company, so it should keep it that way. However, a development in the products is essential in this regard, therefore, a new product should find its way to the market, for example: establishment of energy bars, gums, or energy shots.