Bravo, Skittles, bravo.

by jeffhilimire on March 2, 2009

I’m a HUGE fan of the new www.skittles.com website.  Essentially they’ve handed their web presence over to the fans.  Not their online brand.  That, like all brands, already belongs to the public.  But in this case, Skittles made the decision to hand over their website as well.  Personally I think its brilliant.

Want to hear about their products?  They pull up their Wikipedia listing.

Interested in pics, or video?  Where better to look than Flickr and YouTube.

Want to hear about the Skittles “chatter” on the web?  Twitter’s search results will do just fine.

Connect with other Skittles fans and make new friends?  Yep, you guessed it, takes you to Facebook.

It’s a very radical approach to being comfortable enough to allow the public to *officially* control your brand in the digital space.  Are they censoring it?  Nope, check out the Tweet I made to test that, looks like they are letting anything go, and good for them!

skittles

I’d love to know what YOU think about this.  Is it marketing genius at work, or a way of being extremely frugal with their marketing budget (or maybe a little of both)?

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Tagged as: skittles, social marketing

  • http://saab.com Johan Grundin

    Jeff, I think it is a great approach for a brand like Skittles! Interesting to see how a brand manager would be daring enough to let go of the one thing that the brand can control, its own domain… I like the many “embedded applications” – using social media and wiki is very clever. I gotta tell you, I have done my own fair share of thinking just how far one can go to let go of the strings online… In the current auto industry environment one must be daring and especially as a small brand. I can just say as much as be on the look out for Saab in the next few months. We are building a movement by just interacting with the enthusiasts already out there on sites such as saabsunited.com, turbonines.com and the many Facebook sites. The latest add to be totally transparent as a company is the cause started at Facebook – seek up “Join the Saab Movement” and enroll. Best, Johan

  • http://saab.com Johan Grundin

    Jeff, I think it is a great approach for a brand like Skittles! Interesting to see how a brand manager would be daring enough to let go of the one thing that the brand can control, its own domain… I like the many “embedded applications” – using social media and wiki is very clever. I gotta tell you, I have done my own fair share of thinking just how far one can go to let go of the strings online… In the current auto industry environment one must be daring and especially as a small brand. I can just say as much as be on the look out for Saab in the next few months. We are building a movement by just interacting with the enthusiasts already out there on sites such as saabsunited.com, turbonines.com and the many Facebook sites. The latest add to be totally transparent as a company is the cause started at Facebook – seek up “Join the Saab Movement” and enroll. Best, Johan

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