Red Bull Gives You Wings, Even If You Don't Realize It

Could simply seeing the logo for a product that purports to give consumers energy, speed, and the ability to take more risks actually make them behave in riskier ways?

If that logo is for the energy drink Red Bull, the answer is probably yes.

According to a new study, two Boston College professors found Red Bull’s edgy marketing efforts have sold a heavy dose of attitude to consumers. Even if those consumers didn't realize it.

The researchers, S. Adam Brasel and James Gips of the Boston College Carroll School of Management, put the study participants at the controls of a car racing video game.

Both cars were identical in functionality, but each was decorated with a different brand logo and associated color schemes including prominent brands like Guinness, Tropicana, Coca Cola, and of course, Red Bull.

Players put in control of the Red Bull car, decked out in blue and silver with accompanying red and gold logo, displayed the characteristics often attributed to the brand: speed, power, aggressiveness, and risk-taking.

The results were both positive and negative, said Brasel and Gips.

In some cases, the drivers sped around the game course. In others, their recklessness caused them to crash and lose valuable time.

“In a performance context, what we see is that people racing the Red Bull car race faster and more aggressively, sometimes recklessly, and they either do very, very well or they push themselves too far and crash,” said Brasel, an assistant professor of marketing.  

Brasel said the participants tended to either do great or do terribly -- there was little middle ground.

And, all this took place without the consumers being aware of their own behavior, said Brasel.

Brand priming 

These changes are a result of "non-conscious brand priming," according to Brasel and Gips. It appears that the personality of a brand can non-consciously "push" or "nudge" a consumer to act in ways consistent with that personality when exposed to brand imagery.

The study shows that this priming affect can extend beyond how we think into areas of actual consumer performance, with both positive and negative consequences.

In a world where ambient advertising swaddles buses in wrap-around billboards and product placements in TV, movies, Internet, videogames and other media topped $3.6 billion last year, the Red Bull effect shows advertising and marketing programs can push beyond simply making a sale. They can have a behavioral influence that consumers don’t expect.

Red Bull has built their brand identity by sponsoring promotions such as street luge contests, airplane races, and a full-contact ice-skating obstacle course known as "Crashed Ice."

At the website brandtags.net, where users enter words or phrases they associate with brands, words like "speed," "power," "risk-taking," and "recklessness" occur ten times more frequently for RedBull than the other 14 most common drink brands.

So while the research subjects knew the cars were identical in performance and differed only in paint jobs, Red Bull's brand identity of speed, power, and recklessness worked both for and against the players.

"This highlights some unintended consequences of ambient advertising and product placement," said Brasel. "It’s an effect that we as advertisers have not been aware of or have been ignoring. All of these brands that surround us are probably having a greater effect on our behavior than most of us realize."

The study appears in the current edition of the Journal of Consumer Psychology.