Somewhere in the long history of appliance marketing, someone decided that the way to sell a blender was to show it blending. SharkNinja, the company behind Ninja and Shark products, appears to have concluded that this approach has run its course.
The company, which turned its Ninja Creami ice cream maker into an unlikely pandemic-era phenomenon through user-generated TikTok videos of protein-packed frozen treats, has now moved to a strategy that might be described as strategic self-effacement: paying comedy creators to tell their own stories, with SharkNinja products hovering somewhere in the background like a well-placed lamp.
"We could have gone after the same mix of health and low calorie and high protein," said Kaitlyn Hebert, global chief marketing officer of SharkNinja. "But we really wanted to bring something else into the category to change the conversation."
The execution involves two social media comedy franchises — Brooklyn Coffee Shop, a scripted satire created by the actress Pooja Tripathi, and the ick, which dramatizes dating disasters submitted by its audience. In both cases, the Creami or Ninja espresso machine simply exists within scenes about bad dates and surly baristas, rather than commanding center stage. (What, you were expecting the protagonist to pause mid-heartbreak and enumerate the product's features?)
Working with the consultancy IF7, SharkNinja gave the publishers three requirements: be funny, be relevant, and weave the product into the narrative rather than parking it in a spot any competitor could occupy.
The campaign represents an amplification of tendencies SharkNinja had already been cultivating. Ms. Hebert describes an internal structure of "pods" — integrated teams that follow a product from conception through performance analysis, with social media insights flowing upstream to inform positioning rather than downstream to merely distribute it.
"We started off being an infomercial brand where we'd spend 28 minutes and 30 seconds educating you on a vacuum or a blender," Ms. Hebert said. Television, she added, now serves as "a top-up" rather than the foundation.
Two weeks in, the campaign has generated 5.5 million views and 100,000 engagements — numbers that would have meant nothing to the Madison Avenue of three decades ago and now apparently mean everything.
Whether comedy can accomplish what earnestness could not remains, as these things always do, a question the spreadsheets will eventually answer.
Original story published in Digiday: "SharkNinja’s new growth strategy runs through comedy creators", by Seb Joseph