The capsule door slides open, revealing the Earth as a sphere – the curve of the horizon bending dramatically around the planet, the sky above almost black. A man in a full space suit steps out onto a small platform and secures his footing. Then, with a quick salute to the camera, he jumps. A NASA test? No. It’s the latest promotional effort from Red Bull – another extreme stunt designed to evoke reac-tions of shock and awe while driving home the now famous slogan, “Red Bull gives you wings”. (Kotler, Armstrong, Harris ; Piercy. 2016. 429)
Red Bull is broadcasting their message far and wide with their army of celebrity endorsers as well as sponsoring events in sport, music and entertainment indus-tries. They own professional teams in football, ice hockey and even in Formula 1, this is something their competitors cannot replicate, while their competitors try to compete with Red Bull in sponsorships, they cannot go as far as Red Bull can. Red Bull is not the most conventional marketer to say the least. They spread their brands message across a wide mix of promotional efforts while mainly avoiding traditional media.
When Red Bull started to promote their brand they didn’t go about it in the most conventional way. Red Bull’s army of marketers tossed out free cans of Red Bull from a fleet of shiny logo-bearing off-roaders with giant cans attached to the trunk and thus word-of-mouth took care of the rest. You can still see Red Bull doing this to this day, it’s simply a great way to promote their brand. This way Red Bull in-troduces themselves to the masses and built a brand image for next to nothing.
As stated before, they own teams in professional sports, they sponsor lots of ath-letes and events and then they like to pull of marketing stunts such as “The World’s Biggest Jump”, in October 2012, over 10 million people watched Felix Baumgartner rise for more than 38 kilometers above the New Mexico desert in the “Red Bull Stratos” balloon, jump off and fall for 9 minutes. Felix Baumgartner set records for both the height of the jump and the speed of the descent. Since then, the video of the jump has over 44 million views on YouTube (link for the jump: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHtvDA0W34I).
