I know I’m slightly behind the curve on this one as the site was launched on March 2 (old news in the digital world). It’s a good story though, so better late than never.
Rather than your standard corporate website, skittles.com offers complete user engagement, as it is comprised almost entirely of it’s social networking profiles. The current homepage is actually it’s YouTube video channel, while clicking chatter takes you to Twitter search results for skittles. Friends leads you to Facebook and pics goes to Flickr.
This was a brave move from the Mars owned brand and I believe, despite some controversy, a successful one. It was no huge surprise to anyone, including Skittles, that certain ‘intelligent’ users took the opportunity to post crude tweets about Skittles on Twitter and hijacked the Wikipedia page (which was temporarily used as the homepage). Nevertheless, these silly comments reflected more negatively on the user posting them than on the Skittles brand and such a brave and complete venture into social media was bound to generate some childish behaviour from a minority of users.
At the end of the day, love it or hate it, the new site created a huge online media buzz and search trends for Skittles soared as a result. There is no doubt that thousands of people, who may not have even thought of skittles in years, suddenly found themselves tempted by the little colourful treats the next time they were buying the paper. As an impulse buy, awareness means everything and Mars’ PR manager Ryan Bowling said of their objectives ‘We’re looking at top of mind awareness’. One thing this marketing campaign certainly achieved, was putting the brand right into people’s consciousness.
