The Murketing of Red Bull
The day was so perfect, it looked just like a commercial. The skies were blue, the sand was white, and the temperature was in the low seventies. Among a handful of people milling around on a broad stretch of Miami Beach shorefront, three guys were fussing with kiteboards — contraptions that consist of large, crescent-shaped parachutes rigged atop miniature surfboards. Two members of the party wielded video cameras, and from a distance it all looked like a bunch of college kids in the process of documenting some silly and pointless stunt.
In fact, they were preparing to ride these wind-powered kite boards 88 miles from Key West to to Varadero, Cuba — a distance that would set a new world record for the emerging sport. They were not, however, college kids.
Several clutched little silver cans of Red Bull, the European "energy drink" that has become a phenomenon in the United States at least partly on the strength of incredibly shrewd marketing. Introduced here in 1997, Red Bull has spawned an entirely new category in the U.S. beverage business: Energy drinks accounted for $275 million in wholesale revenues last year, a whopping 65 percent of which went to Red Bull. Owners of the privately held Austrian company won't talk about its financials, but annual sales reportedly top $1 billion worldwide.
Red Bull is popular with college kids and nightclubbers, whom the company aggressively targets. But its most public tactic has been to wrap the drink in the sweaty mantle of extreme sports. To that end, Red Bull sponsors its own stunts and competitions in relatively obscure disciplines like street luge, waterfall kayaking, and free ...