No, Solo Stove’s CEO Didn’t Get Fired for a Marketing ‘Miss’

When your friends, neighbors, and family are all talking about Snoop Dog ‘going smokeless’, as if that’s earth-shattering news, and they come to find out it’s a Marketing campaign for Solo Stove, and then proceed to laugh about it and say ‘hey, that was pretty clever’, and move on with their lives, the Marketing team did their job amazingly well. No question about it, they didn’t hit a home run with this campaign, they hit a grand slam. And now…the CEO is being S-canned…due to its lack of conversions from Brand Awareness to DTC Sales…?

In short. No. But that’s exactly how this story is being interpreted. The Daily Outdoor Retailer has even gone as far to label these Marketing efforts as a ‘Whiff’ (see their original URL slug, which was then rethought and relabelled as a ‘Miss’). Let’s say this one more time for the record: this campaign drove massive Brand Awareness for Solo Stove and was the talk of both the Marketing world and the general public for weeks. Grand slam.

So what? The rub is that the story is not only wrong about the CEO, it’s wrong about the function and place of Marketing in general. When a CEO departs an organization, it’s almost never one-dimensional. It’s beyond comprehension that the equation is ‘Marketing campaign didn’t yield increase in consumer sales of our product = CEO is fired’. The second, and more egregious part of this piece is… that’s not how Marketing works. It’s true, there have been national Advertising campaigns that have directly impacted a sales bump immediately after the campaign has aired, but they are few and far between. In fact, 60-80% of all Super Bowl Ads do not increase sales of the products they promote. The fact that their CFO doesn’t comprehend this concept seems concerning.

So why participate in this type of Marketing if it doesn’t yield more sales? Well…it does. It just takes more time. The goal is Brand Awareness. Yes, those two words placed next to one another tend to cause different reactions from people with differing world views. Why? Probably because the word ‘Brand’ is one of the most misunderstood and misinterpreted in the vocabulary of Marketers, their clients, and in turn, their audiences. I saw this graphic on LinkedIn below. It’s not what I would consider a perfect model of ‘Branding’, but it’s pretty good and makes a very good point in only a few words (unlike this written piece, sorry).

Using this ‘to-the-point’ graphic, what were they trying to with the campaign? They were Branding. They were trying to make as many people as possible know about Solo Stove and the key differentiator between it and a traditional fire pit: it makes no smoke when you use it. They were 100% successful in achieving this goal as evidenced by the buzz the campaign created.

Typically, nothing good is found in the Comments section on Social Media, except for LinkedIn. (I think that might say something about their Brand…). Will Poskett below is correct.

The list goes on…and on…and on. The problem we see with this article is it oversimplifies a complex topic and misappropriates the function of Marketing.

For once, the comment section was right.