What Went Wrong with Snoop’s Smoke?

On Friday, 17 November 2023, Snoop Dog, one of the world’s most beloved rappers and a weed enthusiast, shocked the world with an announcement on his social media account that he is ‘giving up smoke’.

On Tuesday, 21 November 2023, on the week of Black Friday, Solo Stove , a brand that specialises in designing and manufacturing outdoor stoves, dropped a video of Snoop making an announcement again that he is ‘giving up smoke’, only to reveal that Snoop’s statement is part of an ad, to sell you a smokeless fire pit.

If you’re a Snoop fan, you probably were shocked, found it funny that you were fooled, and praised the person and organisation behind such a humorous ad. Hell, it did make you feel something and remember.

Fast forward to Wednesday, 17th January 2024, Solo Brands , maker of Solo Stove, has sacked its CEO behind this campaign, claiming that it didn’t achieve a substantial revenue increase.

If you’re a Marketer, you probably would feel the pain. How could a company expect a significant increase in revenue in such a short amount of time? What went wrong there? Let’s have a look.

The Ad

Is the ad effective? I have two answers.

1. I don’t know. I’m not the customer. I’ll let the guys at System1 work it out.
2. It depends. James Hurman mentioned in the WARC ’s Master of Advertising Effectiveness course that effectiveness is decided on whether the campaign has achieved its objective. What was the agreed objective in this case? Which leads to the second point.

The Objective

I remembered the lesson well in the Marketing Week Mini MBA with Mark Ritson : A CMO who can’t balance the short-term sales activation and long-term brand-building investment well won’t last, because you need both.?

How would you balance it? It depends on your circumstances (as shown in The Long and the Short of It by Peter Field & Les Binet ). You invest in the short because you need to make money to survive tomorrow. As you grow, you invest in the long, or mass marketing to build mental availability (credit to Byron Sharp & Ehrenberg-Bass Institute ), to build the brand among your future buyers, because that’s how brand grows.?

Now, if we circle back to the ad, is it for the short or the long??

If I have to guess, the expectation was probably for the short, because it was launched on Black Friday week, when all other brands are discounting and going hard with their short-term sales activation ads. Also, because of the fact that the CEO was fired within two months of not meeting the commercial goal.

Yet, we could argue that the campaign is ‘effective’ in long-term brand building because it does reach and engage people, as the company's interim CFO Andrea Tarbox fully admitted that the campaign has... "raised brand awareness of Solo Stove to an expanded and new audience of consumers..." however "it did not lead to the sales lift that we had planned, which, combined with the increased marketing investments, negatively impacted our EBITDA,”.?

We saw a peak in branded search, which is a good predictor of future sales (see Les Binet’s share of search as a brand metric).

But again, I’ll let other people who can pull data judge this.

Does more brand awareness lead to more sales?

I’ll add another personal observation, where I’ve been seeing ‘building brand awareness’ as a part of the role’s responsibility advertised in the job ads. And I highly doubt if this ‘objective’ was based on brand tracking research.?

And without research and data about our brand, how can we make decisions to invest a huge amount of resources in it? Without knowing where in the funnel, or journey, our customers are falling off?

So the answer is - it depends on your funnel or pipeline.

There’s no point in advertising to build brand awareness, if the majority of those who are already aware and in the market aren’t buying or can’t buy for some reasons.

It's the same as there is no point pouring water or money into your pipe or funnel if it's leaking everywhere. You are not going to get a good return on investment.

You need to fix the bottom of the funnel, or its end, first before the top, because it’s closer to converting your result to commercial outcome.

If you don't, it’s like telling people to buy your product but they can’t find it in their local store.

Things about all the things that are stopping your customers from buying:

• What are other important attributes that may affect buying decisions? Can you address them??
• Do you have enough physical availability (credit to Byron Sharp & Ehrenberg-Bass Institute ) or distribution networks that make it easy for people to buy your product?
• People who shop during Black Friday are probably and mostly price-sensitive, is it the right time to talk about something else?

Although long-term brand building is important to a brand's growth and success in capturing future demands, it seems that Solo Brand was after quick cash in the short term, in this instance. The ad, unfortunately, did not achieve that objective.?

Brand building has gained recognition in the past few years. Most Marketers want to be a part of a recognised and awarded campaign because we’re all proud of our work. And it’s through an ad campaign that we can show our work to the public.

Nonetheless, we shouldn’t forget our primary role within organisations: making money, both in the long and short term.

Because if we don't, it will cost us.

We're right to applaud this campaign and the team behind it. They took the risk to create work that's beyond average, an ad that people actually talk about. However, in this case, it didn't work out as planned. But let's still hope that we can all learn from it.