Solo Stove had a marketing campaign towards the end of last year that succeeded in going viral. Snoop Dogg said on social media that he was giving up smoke only to reveal days later that he meant fire pit smoke, revealing his affinity for the Solo Stove fire pit.
The marketing campaign received tons of engagement on social media and coverage from many media outlets. Total success, right?
It turned out not to be because the CEO of Solo Brands, the Solo Stove parent company, was ousted partly due to marketing spend not converting into sales. The result was a confusing turn of events because a collaboration with Snoop Dogg should clearly be considered a brand awareness campaign, rather than one to push conversions.
Solo Brands’ new CEO, Chris Metz, commented on the matter in their earnings call today. He’s an industry veteran, and a sharp guy. He cleared-up that the campaign indeed wasn’t a failure, it was Solo Stove’s strategy around it that was.
It’s something that we studied very deeply. And what I can tell you about the fourth quarter is that the efforts that you’re talking about, the marketing efforts, did go viral. And we got a lot of brand awareness. And it’s what I would call top-of-the-funnel marketing, right? So we’re really showing our brand to new consumers for the first time. What happens is, in key selling seasons like Q4, you want to be spending more of your marketing dollars towards the bottom of the funnel. So think of the top of the funnel as brand awareness, the middle of the funnel as kind of brand consideration. And as you work down to the bottom of the funnel, it’s brand conversion. And so you want to be spending across the full funnel throughout the entire year, but you really want to be converting in key selling season. So although we created brand awareness with that campaign, it wasn’t linked in any way to our website. So if you went to our website, you wouldn’t see any connection to it. We didn’t have a full product offering that connected back to that campaign. We didn’t roll it as much into our email and re-marketing efforts. So I think the learning is that great creative, great brand awareness.
Chris Metz, CEO of Solo Brands