Red Bull no longer defines itself as the number 1 in energy drinks, nor as a lifestyle brand, but as a medium that produces and distributes content. Indeed, today, the Red Bull site,no longer presents the “drinks can” product confined to a secondary site but the various activities sponsored and produced by the brand: motor sports, biking, surfing, snowboarding, games, music, adventure, skateboarding. This extension of the domain of the brand, where the brand no longer communicates at all about its product but on a much larger and also much more buoyant territory is not without consequences.
Obviously, it is much easier communicate about extreme sports and music than about the benefits of an energy drink. There are more things to say, more news and more beautiful images to produce. By occupying this ground with the success that we know Red Bull takes the place of other players far removed from its industry. Indeed, Red Canadian Email List is attacking a medium such as Extrême TV, a cable and satellite channel specializing in extreme sports, but also indirectly attacks surfwear brands such as Quicksilver or Rip Curl, whose sales continue to decline. If the “surfer style is no longer popular” it's also because it no longer benefits from the same media exposure. Indeed, a media brand does not forge the same links with other brands as a traditional media does with its advertisers.
The media of a media brand above all at the service of its brand – it is tautological – it can sometimes practice co-branding such as the film co-produced by Red Bull and Quicksilver in 2008 but that's not the norm and that was 2008! Thus, Red Bull is today more of a competitor for Quicksilver than a partner or a player in a different industry, whereas these two industries, that of beverages on the one hand, and that of textiles on the other, are actually very far. This extension of the domain of the brand thus has a strong impact on the strategy of companies by completely shaking up their competitive territory and hardening it. The competition to occupy a promising communication territory such as sport, music, entertainment being much stronger than that to take market share in a single product segment. Brands must prepare for it now and if possible get ahead like Red Bull.