Blundstone Bets Its Marketing Boots On Customers’ Stories
“When you’re 147 years old, you don’t make a brand up. You actually have to work very hard to capture the truth of it from a worldwide community of very loyal consumers and boot wearers,” said Adam Blake, global head of brand design and customer engagement at Blundstone Australia.
If you’ve grown up in Australia sometime since 1870, there’s every chance you’ve owned, or at least admired somebody else’s, Blundstone boots.
The thriving Tasmania-based company has cultivated a rich storytelling narrative around its products, which can be found anywhere from the cattle stations of the Australian Outback, to the trendy boutique clothing stores of Brooklyn, N.Y.
Blundstone’s foundations and connection to honest work has fostered a culture of authenticity that has bled into many of Blundstone’s marketing strategies.
“We ended up with our brand narrative, our tagline of ‘everywhere life takes me,’ because we felt that it was spoken in the consumer’s voice, not ours,” Blake said. “So it’s not us as a brand speaking at people; it’s our consumers and boot wearers speaking to the world.”
That has served the company particularly well on social media, where it has been able to acquire a wealth of user-generated content and enrich the brand’s narrative with new stories from across the world, he added.
“We’re not having to spend millions of dollars on content,” Blake said. “We’re getting lots of very genuine content. It’s not actors. It’s not talent. It’s real people doing real things. So we feel that’s very valuable.”
In this episode of the CMO Show, hosts Nicole Mankeltow and Mark Jones sit down with Blake to talk the convergence of storytelling and community in building your brand.