Red Bull U By Sara Kennedy

Red Bull has a branch of employees called Student Brand Managers, these employees consist of college students all over the nation who work to plan events on their campus that promote Red Bull. The overall objective? To create a brand loyalty to Red Bull. The job is a mix between marketing and public relations, and like I said, the students have the freedom to think up ANYWAY to promote Red Bull on their campus, all they need to do is run the idea past their boss, get the materials/resources, and then go ahead with their plan.

The SBM's have a website, kind of a mix between Facebook and a resource page, called RedBullU where they can access blogs, message boards, "best practices", profiles of the other SBM's, a resource page, and a reporting page to report their weekly progress to their boss. The blog is a place for the students to post their ideas and ask for further help to expand the idea, or to post their mistakes and successes. The message board is more of a social network tab where the students are usually posting conversations about Red Bull videos on YouTube to post to their Facebook, or anything. The best practices is controlled by Headquarters, they chose some of the best practices of Red Bull promotion done around the nation by SBM's in order for all the SBM's to use at some point along their yearly plans.

The 3000+ SBM's work together on this site to help think of creative ways to promote not only Red Bull the product, but also the many other events and experiences Red Bull provides. Such as Red Bull First Person, FlugTag, BC One, New Years Parties, etc. Red Bull thought of this idea in order to target their main audience: College Students. College students are the ones who barely sleep, too busy partying, or too busy studying during final week. It is almost guaranteed that if a student doesn't have Dunkin Donuts or Starbucks in their hand they have a Red Bull or Monster. However, in order to beat out their competition Red Bull created SBM's to help promote the main detail about Red Bull: it doesn't stop with the drink. You can see Red Bull on many stations such as MTV, MTV2, MTVU, ESPN, etc; taking part mostly in extreme sports.

Personally, I think Red Bull's tactic of using SBM's is a very good one because it gets Red Bull right into the campus' by using some of the people they're trying to target the most. The SBM's are able to think of ways that will get everyone interested because they are able to think like almost everyone on their campus: providing the students with what they would want to see, and providing it by the only brand that's willing to do it for them: Red Bull.