Tasting the Interweb Rainbow: Skittles.com

I recently stumbled upon Skittles.com, the official website for those brightly colored ‘taste the rainbow’ candies I’m sure almost all of us have tasted at some point.

The most interesting, perhaps groundbreaking,  aspect about this site is Skittle’s decision to almost totally relinquish and hand content ownership over to its customers, by leveraging third-party, social media –driven websites. I’ve never seen anyone else embrace “turning the brand over to the customers” so deeply.

The Skittles.com homepage loads the product’s Wiki entry (update: the site no longer does this, and instead loads their YouTube page), with a Skittles-branded floating window. Clicking on Media (Video or Pics) brings up the respective YouTube or Flickr pages, and Chatter takes you to their Twitter site. In all of these examples, the only Skittles brand indicator that ties these together is a floating navigation menu that sits on top of everything.

The only content branded in the traditional sense is the Product and Contact areas, as well as a bit of customization on the YouTube page, which incorporates the Skittles visual brand identity.

So – from a brand and user perspective, is this a good or bad thing? And more importantly, does it even matter?

Embracing the Now

First, let’s look at what’s cool about this:

1. Skittles knows these sites are hot right now, and are part of today’s consumer culture. Their target audience visits these sites often, so why not take advantage of this in an authentic way? Rather than pay to build yet another Facebook app (ie - Facebook as a marketing channel, which misses the point), Skittle’s becomes a part of the community and gains credibility, demonstrating that they ‘get it’ (well, perhaps with the exception of their use of Twitter, see below).

Doing this also lets them indirectly align themselves with these ‘cool’ new brands, positioning them positively with little effort (or investment) on their part. And by using these sites the way they are intended, they don’t need to worry about being perceived as buying their way in.

2. Genuine (as opposed to paid) user-generated content and word-of-mouth will always be more believable than anything a company can say themselves. Not only that, it also tends to be more interesting and engaging – just check out the Flickr pictures of the things people do with Skittles. There’s a creativity here that most ad agencies don’t even come close to matching, and it’s certainly a lot more believable and fun.

3. It’s different, unique, and quite cheap to build compared to what a more common brand website would look like. In general, it’s not often you can use the words ‘different’, ‘unique’ and ‘cheap’ in the same sentence.

Excuse Me, But Who Are You?

Of course, there are also a few challenges too:

1. Where’s the brand? Who is Skittles? Where’s the personality, and what are they about? While I admire letting the community at large do the talking, it’s communication through proxy, and impersonal at that. I can’t help but feel that they couldn’t be bothered to share or say something relevant in a direct, honest way. Where’s the fun and spirit they put into the commercials?

2. By relying on other brands to do the talking, the Skittles brand doesn’t connect directly. If you surf around for a while – it rapidly dilutes due to the lack of visual consistency and focus. Related to my first point, who is the hero brand? While the content itself is about Skittles, when I’m on a YouTube or Flickr page, those brands compete for my attention. In fact, as I can click around and search those sites, the floating Skittles menubar doesn’t go away – because you technically haven’t left the site – and suddenly it feels like one of those obnoxious spam windows that won’t go away.In addition, jumping from area to another can be jarring as suddenly different interfaces are presented; (Flickr and YouTube, for example) – which can add to the confusion.

3. Um, I didn’t know Skittles could be used like that. While I didn’t come across any intentional brand sabotage per se (we are talking about candy after all), if you surf around more deeply or read the Twitters you’ll find some surprising and less pleasing – depending on your point of view – content that uses the Skittles name (e.g. vulgarity, low brow humor, sexual references, etc).

Tapping in too deeply into the stream of consciousness of the public might not be a good thing, so be careful what you wish for.

If Skittles Were a frog Client…

What Skittles has done is certainly very interesting and forward-looking, and I’m willing to bet getting internal buy-in was not a trivial undertaking. (Then again, this also feels more like an experiment than an attempt at creating a true online platform for the brand)

Regardless of your opinion as to whether or not this works in favor of or against the brand – they are being talked about, and as the famous saying goes in Hollywood, ‘any publicity is good publicity’ (to which I counter, ‘Gigli’) . You cannot deny the boldness and desire of attempting to do something different – especially when the move is aligned with your brand values and tone.

While I applaud the effort, there is clearly room for improvement from a brand strategy perspective.

1. Twitter should not be used to just ‘listen in’ on how people are talking about your brand; frankly, if I were a Skittles fan I really wouldn’t care what the general public is saying, as opposed other fans. Furthermore, I’d probably love a chance to connect with other people who care about the same quirky brand that I do. While using Twitter for its true purpose – as a communication channel – requires more investment than just presenting search results, the payoff can be tremendous from a brand perspective. Just look at Comcast.

2. Take the opportunity to reach out directly, so that a 1:1 relationship can be established. Like dating, the first step to building a relationship is to share who you are and what you are about. As presented, the site doesn’t do this; it doesn’t celebrate who Skittles is, and merely presents access to other platforms that showcase it as a candy in various media. For example, with such evocative names like Skittles ‘Crazy Cores’, there’s great potential for the Product description page to deliver more than packaging specifications and nutritional data.

3. Provide something people can easily latch onto and participate in. Related to the second point, how the social media sites are used on Skittles.com is akin to looking at a group of people having a good time through a window. You’re not really a part of it. This is not to say we should shun these tools, but rather, re-contextualize and leverage them better so that equity is driven back to the brand – not away from it.

What this suggests is taking back more ownership and responsibility for the brand, which could mean anything from creating additional, customized opportunities for fans to engage (something as simple as a user forum, as Dell has done with Ideastorm) to closer visual integration of the social media tools in the user experience as a whole.

by Albert Tan, Senior Brand Strategist