 Aw, what's up everybody? Once again, it's Brain Man Sean and we're back with another episode of Culture Shock where we talk music, business, and pop culture from a different perspective, because you know, it's all the same, but not really. And the topic for the day is pop eyes and how they use rapper's marketing strategies, troll marketing to go viral, move these chicken sandwiches off the shelves. And we know troll marketing has been a huge interest over the last few years because of how so many people have leveraged it. So by the end of this video, we're really gonna touch on not only how pop eyes leveraged troll marketing successfully, but also how to use it possibly for your own company or as an artist and the difference between using it to drive product consumption and actual sales, using it for PR, and using it for branding. So how did we get here? Well, it all started on August 12th, 2019 when Popeye seemingly came out of nowhere and dropped a chicken sandwich, right? Years being one of the top chicken chains, but they didn't have chicken sandwiches. And when they did this, it really didn't have that much upward though. That wasn't that much conversation around it. However, a few weeks later on August 19th of 2019, Chick-fil-A made a post. They posted on Instagram bun plus chicken plus pickles equals love. Just talking about their original chicken sandwich, not even mentioning Popeyes, but Popeyes responds, y'all good? And that set an uproar amongst all types of communities on Twitter, quick Twitter got a hold of it, where you start to have all types of memes created. Y'all are familiar with internet culture. People start doing meme comparisons of Chick-fil-A and Popeyes, especially a lot of them around customer service, where you have someone in customer service saying my pleasure because they're Chick-fil-A and then someone on the other end just saying, I bet at Popeyes. And so many other iterations and examples of that. And then Chick-fil-A and Popeyes started to continue to fulfill this themselves. For example, one Popeyes actually posted on their sign, FYI, people need to eat on Sundays, right? Which Chick-fil-A later responded to with one location saying FYI, we don't run out of chicken sandwiches, which leads us back to why we're here. Wall Street Journal reported that a chicken supply that was intended to last three months, ran out in just two weeks. Popeyes went far more viral than they themselves expected. So first to even understand how Popeyes was able to have such a strong impact with their troll campaign, we actually have to acknowledge the fact that Chick-fil-A has built a lot of brand equity as a restaurant over the last, I don't know, however many years, right? Since they've been a company, but not only that, they have a specific brand equity in the chicken sandwich space. They have this whole chicken sandwich game monopolized. So when we wanna think about conflict and trolling, then we have to remember that specificity really allows for stronger impact in the first place. So there's a difference between going against something general, like an overall restaurant or an overall industry or something that could be abstract versus going against something very specific, like not only Chick-fil-A, an entire brand, but a specific thing that they have at that company, it's one thing to say I'm against rappers or hip-hop, and it's another thing to say, my name is 50 Cent and I'm going against Ja Rule. There's the equivalent right there, because people are able to visualize in it, they are able to participate and they're able to actively judge in a way that they wouldn't have been able to before. And we'll get deeper into that later, but that specificity, that specific product that people were able to judge against had a huge impact on people's ability to create certain memes, ideas, and other content that was inspired around it. This specificity allows you to drive consumption to that specific thing. As a matter of fact, another good example is Blue Face the Rapper, how so many people were actually talking about the fact that he was rapping off beat and it started to become a meme in itself and it started to become a whole thing that people talked about, but when you consider the fact that to make fun of Blue Face being off beat, you have to go hear his music, that type of trolling meme led directly back to his music or product being consumed in the same way that to judge whether Popeyes was better than Chick-fil-A led back to people having to consume the product to actually judge for themselves, right? It even creates a little bit of curiosity first for them to have to go judge afterwards. Now, a different example would be more of a PR thing where it creates a lot of energy, you get a lot of names, people talk about you, but it doesn't necessarily drive sales directly. Now, Wendy's is the perfect representation of this. As a matter of fact, they're essentially the OG when it comes to trolling as a fast food restaurant train. For example, you can look at this one tweet where someone said, Wendy's, can you find me the nearest McDonald's? And Wendy's responds with a picture of a trashcan, right? That's simple, but they also had so much attitude and sarcasm when they responded to customers, other people that were coming at them, people were asking to be roasted by Wendy's literally and Wendy's even literally dropped a mixtape where they were doing diss tracks of Burger King, McDonald's and other types of restaurant. When I say mixtape, I mean actually making songs and rapping on a mixtape, songs on a mixtape. I'll put a link to that in the description for those of you guys who are interested in actually checking that out. But the thing to consider about this is once again, it's just Wendy's as a whole where people are attracted to the personality, people would literally start following Wendy's just so they could see their responses and started to interact with their social media. So it is keeping the brand top of mind so it isn't directly pushing people to go consume a specific product. However, of course, once again, it's keeping them top of mind so maybe they'll be more likely to try Wendy's and some people were actually attracted to the personality that they saw aligned to the point where they said, yo, this makes me want to try Wendy's. So there is that indirect benefit. So the music equivalent of using trolling just to get awareness, general awareness, stay top of mind and not directly lead people to consuming product but still making it more likely that people might consume your product would actually be Takashi69, right? He created Beats and came at a lot of people for a lot of different reasons if you go back throughout that history, but a lot of times for the most part, actually, it was not drawn towards a specific song. So it didn't lead you directly, it just made you want to follow him to see what he was up to and what he was going to do as an artist in the same way Wendy's was the equivalent of that artist, right? We're interested in that restaurant and their personality, not necessarily a specific product but of course your consumption of the product might be a byproduct of your consumption of the brand overall. All right, so so far we've discussed using troll marketing to drive brand and product consumption and then secondly we use troll marketing for PR purposes. But now let's get to number three which is the impact and how to use troll marketing for branding purposes. And to start this off, let's watch this old Apple commercial. Hello, I'm a Mac. And I'm a PC. You know, we use a lot of the same kinds of programs. Yeah, like Microsoft Office. But we retain a lot of what makes us us. You should see what this guy can do with a spreadsheet. It's insane. Shucks. Yeah, and he knows that I'm better at life stuff like music, pictures, movies, stuff like that. Whoa, what exactly do you mean by better? By better, I mean, making a website or photo book is easy for me and for you, it's not. Oh, that kind of better. Yeah. I was thinking of the other kind. What other kind? All right, so this is an example of how you can use troll marketing or troll branding I guess to define the actual value system, the personality and culture that you want to attract with this trolling. Because just supposing your brand against another brand is the perfect opportunity to show whose side you're on and better yet, give other people an opportunity to pick a side, right? You can show that culture in a different way. And as a matter of fact, a lot of people did this in the Chick-fil-A versus Popeyes argument. You saw a lot of people show Chick-fil-A as the more clean cut side and Popeyes as the more culturally cool or the really black culture brand in a lot of ways, whether it was them showing somebody with glasses on one end and somebody with a durag on the other. Popeyes versus Kirk Franklin, Jesus versus Beyonce and so many other popular representations of culture that gave people an opportunity to pick which side that they want to be on. Which side do they identify with? So again, when you troll, it can be the perfect opportunity to show your brand values. You can show the type of customer that you want to attract in a very clear way visually in a way that they already resonate with personally because of the type of things that they consume in other types of culture. Even when you look at the movie Bring It On that somebody used for a meme and they show the two cheerleading squads and obviously those two cheerleading squads very vividly represented two different types of people and what they liked. So now with those three things in mind in terms of how you can leverage trolling, it's up to you to decide how you would want to apply it. Are you using it for PR right now? Are you using it for product consumption? Or are you using it for branding purposes? Of course, a lot of those other two would become indirect in how people start to leverage it or you can push one at a time throughout an entire process but understand a lot of these things might start to happen once the trolling happens. And when I say throughout the process, I want to be clear that you can actually start by using it as PR and getting the name out there and then later start to control some type of juxtaposition that happens in terms of branding purposes or later roll out a specific product. Now that you created this PR awareness and now start to push and do memes and do trolling that does directly line up with a specific consumption of a specific product. All these things can be used as an overall campaign over time. So don't think you have to focus on one or the other. They will naturally happen in some ways but you also can control it because of course my whole thing is never leave virally to change. So never leave any of these marketing outcomes that you want for yourself to change especially if you have the opportunity to control them. And that's it for this episode of Culture Shock. Now, this is technically the first episode, right? There's been a few other that I recorded in this series but this is the first time I'm actually giving it a name. So if you're consuming this on YouTube definitely make a recommendation in the comment section below or if you're listening via podcast and you can tweet me at brandmanshawn B-R-A-N-D-M-A-N-S-E-A-N Other than that, again, for you guys who are on YouTube go ahead, hit the like button. If you like it, you might as well share it and please, please, please really do share this thing so we can know if people like it make sure y'all put the comments, all that good stuff and of course, if you're not subscribed you know what to do, hit that subscribe button.