Being Blonde

We’ve just launched the all new IRN-BRU brand website. The launch coincides with that of the new “IF” TV commercial, which, not surprisingly, features prominently on the site.

But there’s a lot more to it than that.

There is other advertising based content, housed in two sections named Favourite Ads (ads that did run) and Ads That Never Ran (ads that didn’t - in case that isn’t clear from the title). These sections will be the subject of separate posts.

From a digital strategy point of view the most interesting section is one that we’ve called the Community Centre. The idea behind this is to give a platform to the healthy number of consumer fan clubs and IRN-BRU communities that exist in social media. They are doing a good job of spreading the word about the brand. Now, via the Community Centre, the brand can return the favour by spreading the word about them.

Fan club and brand group administrators can upload details of what they stand for, a link to their site or page and a representative visual. The result is the digital equivalent of a customer ad display in a newsagent window.

We’ve also provided access to a range of visual assets that can be downloaded and used on these sites.

So, rather than jumping in feet first and setting up official brand spaces on the likes of Bebo, Facebook and Myspace, we’re hoping to help grow the membership of unofficial communities. These have more credibility and tend to express their pro-brand views in forthright ways that would make even a brand like IRN-BRU blush.

As well as there being a lot of active IRN-BRU communities out there, there is plenty of IRN-BRU news and chat, not to mention a good smattering of colourful interesting blog posts. Via a Google News feed we’re pulling this news into the site. It’s a good way to introduce dynamic content on a daily basis, and it confirms the impression of IRN-BRU as a talked about, happening brand. The vast majority of comment is positive.

Watch this space for news on results.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 10th, 2008 at 7:58 pm and is filed under Design, IRN-BRU, Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.