GoPro Be a HERO

GoPro: Be a HERO An ever-growing army of GoPro customers are now strapping amazing little GoPro cameras to their bodies or mounting them on anything from the front bumpers of racing cars to the heels of skydiving boots in order to capture the extreme moments of their lives and lifestyles. Then they can’t wait to share those emotion-packed GoPro moments with friends. In fact, the chances are good that you’ve seen many GoPro-created videos on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram, or even on TV. Maybe it’s the video shot by the skier who sets off an avalanche in the Swiss Alps and escapes by parachuting off a cliff – that amateur video received 2.6 million YouTube views in nine months. Or maybe you saw the one where a seagull picks up a tourist’s camera and takes off with it, capturing a bird’s-eye view of a castle in Cannes, France (3 million views in seven months). Or what about the video of the mountain biker in Africa who is ambushed by a full-grown gazelle (more than 13 million views in four months)? One video, in which a tech-challenged Irishman used his son’s GoPro to capture his entire trip to Las Vegas with the camera mistakenly pointed at himself instead of the sights, snared 6.9 million views in only six days. GoPro’s avid customers have become evangelists for the brand. GoPro holds a 47.5 per cent share of the action camera market. Its sales soared to more than £1 billion with a fivefold increase in only four years. What makes GoPro so successful? Part of the formula is the physical product itself: GoPro cameras are marvels of technology, especially given their affordable starting price of less than £200 for an entry-level model. A GoPro HD video camera looks like little more than a small grey box. But the lightweight, wearable or mountable GoPro is extremely versatile, and it packs amazing power for capturing stunning HD-quality video. A removable housing makes GoPro cameras waterproof to depths of 130 feet. And GoPro cameras are drop-proof from 3,000 feet (so claims one skydiver). But GoPro knows that it sells much more than just a small metal box that takes action videos. GoPro users – whether extreme sports enthusiasts or just everyday video buffs – don’t just want to take videos. More than that, they want to tell the stories and share the emotions and moments in their lives. ‘Enabling you to share your life through incredible photos and video is what we do’, says GoPro. We ‘help people capture and share their lives’ most meaningful experiences with others – to celebrate them together’. When people view a stunning GoPro video clip – like the one of New Zealand’s Jed Mildon landing the first-ever BMX triple backflip captured by his helmet camera – to some degree, they experience what the subject experiences. They feel the passion and adrenaline. And when that happens, GoPro creates an emotional connection between the GoPro storyteller and the audience. Thus, making good cameras is only the start of GoPro’s success. GoPro founder Nick Woodman, himself an extreme sports junkie, talks about helping customers through four essential steps in their storytelling and emotion-sharing journeys: capture, creation, broadcast and recognition. Capture is what the cameras do – shooting pictures and videos. Creation is the editing and production process that turns raw footage into compelling videos. Broadcast involves distributing the video content to an audience. Recognition is the payoff for the content creator. Recognition might come in the form of YouTube views or Likes and Shares on Facebook. More probably, it’s the enthusiastic oohs and ahhs that their videos evoke from friends and family. The company’s slogan sums up what it’s really selling: ‘GoPro: Be a HERO.’ Initially, GoPro focused primarily on the capture step of the customer storytelling experience. It offers a seemingly endless supply of rigs, mounts, harnesses, straps and other accessories that make GoPro cameras wearable or mountable just about anywhere. Users can strap the little cameras to their wrists or mount them on helmets. They can attach them to the tip of a snow ski, the bottom of a skateboard, or the underside of a radio-controlled helicopter. The handy M08 Principles of Marketing 69566.indd 231 03/10/2019 19:00 Part 3 Designing a customer value-driven strategy and mix GoPro’s amazing little cameras let even the most rank video amateurs take stunning videos, giving them a way to celebrate the action-charged moments and emotions of their lives with others. Source: Nrqemi/Shutterstock little GoPro lets even the most rank video amateur capture some pretty incredible footage. But to fuel continuing growth, GoPro has broadened its offer to address the full range of customer needs and motivations – not just capture but also creation, broadcast and recognition. For example, on the creation side, GoPro offers free GoPro Studio software that makes it easier for users to create professional-quality videos from their GoPro content. With the GoPro App, users can ‘Control. View. Share.’ – using their phones, tablets or Apple Watches to control their GoPros remotely, trim and edit images, and share their favourites wirelessly with friends by text or post or on the GoPro Channel, which is already distributed though social media platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Vimeo, Pinterest and GoPro.com/Channels. As for recognition, GoPro now airs TV commercials created from the best videos submitted by customers at its website. GoPro’s future lies in enabling and integrating the full user experience, from capturing video to sharing stories and life’s emotions with others. GoPro’s rich understanding of what product it’s really selling is serving the company well. Its enthusiastic customers are among the most loyal and engaged of any brand. For example, GoPro’s Facebook fan base is more than 9.2 million and growing fast. To put that in perspective, much larger Canon USA has only 1.1 million Facebook followers. Beyond uploading nearly half a million videos a year, GoPro fans interact heavily across a broad range of social media. For example, the GoPro hashtag is used more than 45,000 times daily across major social networks. ‘I think we have the most socially engaged online audience of any consumer brand in the world’, claims Woodman. All that customer engagement and enthusiasm have made GoPro the world’s fastest-growing camera company. Today GoPro cameras are available in more than 40,000 stores in more than 100 countries. GoPro’s remarkable little cameras have also spread beyond amateurs. They have become standard equipment for many professional filmmakers – whether it’s the Discovery Channel or a news show team filming rescues, wildlife and storms or the production crews of hit reality-TV shows such as Deadliest Catch taking pictures of underwater crab pots or the sides of ships in heavy seas. When stuntman Felix Baumgartner made his breathtaking 128,000-foot jump from the edge of space, he was wearing five GoPros. The use of GoPro equipment by professionals lends credibility that fuels even greater consumer demand. The moral of this story: GoPro knows that it doesn’t just sell cameras. More than that, it enables customers to share important moments and emotions. Says Woodman: ‘We spent a lot of time recently thinking about, What are we really doing here? We know that our cameras are arguably the most socially networked consumer devices of our time, so it’s clear we’re not just building hardware.’ The company sums it up this way: ‘Dream it. Do it. Capture it with your GoPro. Capture and share your world.’1 As the GoPro story shows, in their quest to create customer relationships, marketers must build and manage products and brands that connect with customers. This chapter begins with a deceptively simple question: What is a product? After addressing this question, we look at ways to classify products in consumer and business markets. Then we discuss the important decisions that marketers make regarding individual products, product lines and product mixes. Next, we examine the characteristics and marketing requirements of a special form of product – services. Finally, we look into the critically important issue of how marketers build and manage product and service brands. M08 Principles of Marketing 69566.indd 232 03/10/2019 19:00