They leave you no choice, you MUST buy your spatulas from Spatula City!

My friend Paul shared this viral spoof all about Spatulas.  I had to share….

Sometimes the best method of marketing in a tough time is by poking fun at the situation.  Watch Blendtec’s Tom Dickson blend the latest Government bailout package in his tough Blendtec blender.

The beauty of these viral videos by Blendtec is their simplicity, relevancy and duration: These videos have dramatically and rapidly spread the word about Blendtec and their blender products.  Check out their youtube page for more ‘blending’ fun.

Seth Godin’s latest blog article, “Poisoning the well” rang home with me.  Everyday, we get invaded with email spam, spam phone calls, walking spam who try to sell us insurance products at our office: Then, when I go home, more of the same.  Spam in my physical mail box, spam on my front door advertising crummy pizza or home painting services. 

I’ve never asked for any of these annoyances, I’ve never opted in to hear your pitch.  When it comes to marketing, the new challenge is to figure out how NOT to market the way spammers market.  This means, don’t push your message down any one’s throat. 

The new challenge is to PULL people to you, establish a relationship and earn their trust. Your web site is a great tool to start pulling in prospects, write an amazing blog, provide a useful widget or tool, provide breakthrough customer service, be real.

Read Seth Godin’s latest blog here:  Poisoning The Well

Tom Dickson of Blendtec is up to blending more stuff: you have to love this series:  The simple beauty of this campaign: humour and destruction all at once.  This video series has yielded an enormous surge in Blendtec Sales: this video alone has had over 202,000 views!

This series is a success because it’s NOT the following:

A Tour Of Your Factory:
A Video your staff made while drunk on egg-nog
A Step by step video tutorial on how to program your latest product.
A Video About You and your trials and tribulations as a business owner.

I was strolling through Costco the other evening lugging 60 pound bags of diapers and baby formula when I encountered a gentleman producing smoothies with one of those Garth Brook type head sets on. He was VERY excited about the smoothies and natural vegetable drinks (which looks absolutely vial to me…) and was giving a presentation to several older folks in the store. I took a quick look at the rather impressive blender the guy was using and noticed it was a Blendtec model.

I’m not a huge connoisseur of blenders and am not totally privy to each make and model of specific blenders, but I can tell you this: If I had not seen the Will It Blend series of blender videos on YouTube, I would have NEVER recognized the brand name. Blendtec has created a household name for themselves by executing a viral YouTube video campaign. Tom Dickson is the host on each of the videos where he proceeds to DESTROY various household items like ‘guitar hero 3′, Chuck Norris, Golf Balls, Marbles, an IPHONE and all kinds of other fun stuff in the Blendtec blender. As a result of these ‘viral videos’, Blendtec has posted a 700 PERCENT increase in sales. Unreal.

A Viral video can work wonders, if you hit the right formula of authenticity and a broad appeal, you can brand your company name into a household name almost overnight. Is it easy to hit the mark? Not at all, but nothing that pays off is easy.

Here’s one of our favorites: