Brand Narrative

Dairy Queen is perfect brand for creating media, social outreach and delivering a brand narrative. Eating ice cream is a social experience. Dairy Queen has been hosting family fun for 70 years. It’s a wholesome, weekend activity. We took a look at the company’s outreach activities. Here’s our verdict…

Live Events
The company is currently on a ‘party tour’, bringing a bus to towns and cities around the country, celebrating the 25th anniversary of its ‘Blizzard’ frozen treat. It’s introducing a smaller, lower cal version this summer, called the Mini-Blizzard. In the age of digital media, live events and tours are often forgotten, but getting a tasty treat into the hands of a consumer is the best way to sell ice cream, and no number of viral videos or  ‘engaging’ online polls can match the experience.

Facebook
Details of the tour are posted onto the company’s Facebook page (impressively, almost a million followers) and there are plenty of comments from fans asking questions, or expressing their approval of the tour. Unfortunately, most of he comments seem to be bitching about the tour not coming to their town.  There’s some customer-service type interaction between the brand and consumers. Updates are nothing special – tour details, reports from the tour, special offers. You can’t help feeling that most of the followers have registered for the generous coupon offers, but that’s no bad thing, again, for a company that’s keen to persuade people to sample its product.

YouTube
Speaking of viral videos, Dairy Queen has just launched a contest. You get to send in a one minute vid of you or a child or a pet or whatever singing Happy Birthday to an ice cream. It’s slightly cringe-worthy and very much in Dairy Queen’s brand identity – I’m thinking of a like-able, beaming, slightly over-weight middle American mom organizing a game in the garden. However, the prizes are crappy – $25 vouchers and a chance to have the winning video on a corporate website. The contest’s only just started, so it would be unfair to pass judgement. But we haven’t found any entrants on YouTube yet. My advice would be a much, much better prize, and maybe a few ‘example’ videos to get the ball rolling This feels like a good idea that’s just missing a few key elements, but we’ll see as the contest progresses. It runs into August, so plenty of time yet.

There are some films of the bus tour and interviews with the guys organizing the parties, which is a good way to reach out to anyone Googling the tour, and seeing if it’s right for their kids.

Twitter
Just over 6,000 followers, so clearly not a key platform. Generally lots of RTs that mention the brand, a few links to content associated with the tour. Dairy Queen is owned by investment guru Warren Buffett whose annual jamboree was held this week in Omaha. Warren gets no fewer than seven mentions on the first page. I’d be inclined to un-follow after the fifth. It seems unlikely that ice cream lovers are that interested in the sage of Omaha.

Blog
OK, so we love brands that produce their own daily news outlets, offering media content that fans and random browsers can enjoy. However, almost without exception, such efforts are miserable examples of marketers trying to be journalists; corny and irrelevant drivel dressed up as ‘content’.

Dairy Queen’s blog does offer some of this stuff, but on the whole it’s a pretty interesting read.  I really enjoyed today’s top story in which an employee talked about her relationship with the Blizzard and how it had changed over the years. This felt personal and authentic and emotionally real. By the end of it, I felt some familiarity with the product, and a kinship with the writer. Alas, she is only identified as ‘Lisa C’ so I don’t feel any context. Is she the CMO or a social marketing grunt? I guess I learned that blogs should show the people who are doing the writing as much as possible, a lesson we’ll be implementing on this blog in the weeks ahead.

There was also a story about ‘National Strawberry Month’ which offered some insight into some of the other goofy themed months we have in this country. Talking about ‘National Good Car Keeping Month’ doesn’t sell ice cream directly, but it makes me like and value this blog and therefore this brand. It’s okay to take the brand as a starting point and meander off a bit. That’s how conversations work. The best speakers do it all the time.

Dairy Queen isn’t just yapping on about how great its ice cream is, it’s trying to own the idea of ‘going out for a treat’ as a social and emotionally rewarding experience, a deeply embedded part of our culture.

I quite like a rolling Twitter feed update, which basically shows every Tweet mentioning Dairy Queen (possibly curated). It’s a good incentive to get people to talk about the brand, and it makes the blog page seem more dynamic.

Conclusion

On the whole, good work from Dairy Queen. It’s pressing a lot of different buttons, and making an effort to reach people where they actually are, while also trying to provide appropriate, contextual content. It feels true to the brand’s core story and its friendly, local personality. I’d say there’s a long way to go – the blog could be a lot better, the contest needs tweaking, the Twitter page is tokenistic – but as far as social marketing goes, these guys are way ahead of the curve