The demise of the brand site was predicted back when MySpace was still a thing. Few brands have gone through with it, however, settling instead on a brand site complemented with social presences.
Tofu brand WestSoy is an outlier, beginning the process scrapping its tofu site in favor of a presence on Tumblr, where it’s sharing celebrity GIFs and anti-genetically modified food infographics. WestSoy is in the midst moving over some brand site features, like its recipe finder, to complement the more light-hearted Tumblr fare. Once the migration is complete, WestSoy will pull the plug on its brand site, www.westsoytofu.com.
“There’s a huge community of vegetarians and vegans as well as a large overall food community on Tumblr interested in culinary trends,” said Michael Goose, who heads up WestSoy’s marketing.
WestSoy is unique in another way: You won’t find it on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram or any other social platform. With Tumblr, the brand hopes to reach a younger, college-aged user base — which, as it happens, describes 46 percent of Tumblr users, who are between 16 and 24.
Ad position: web_incontent_pos1
“The bigger brands are on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram,” said Leslie Hall, president at ICED Media, which is working with WestSoy on the move. “We have an opportunity to be a bit more savvy and conversational within a specific target audience.”
And Goose isn’t worried about not having Twitter and Facebook to promote and spread content. “We didn’t want to be another ‘liked’ brand,” he said. “We wanted to be something that people find on their own. When you type in ‘tofu recipes’ or ‘vegetarian recipes,’ you’d search and maybe land on our page. We wanted people to have an adventure finding us.”
The brand will also be using Tumblr influencers to help spread the word. For its Tumblr launch, WestSoy partnered with a popular vegan blogger, Brittany of Garden-of-Vegan to post recipes during the month of December. So far, the first sponsored recipe post (which WestSoy reblogged) has more than 1,300 Tumblr notes. WestSoy’s own Tumblr posts have only a few notes, by contrast, though the page is only a little over a week old.
More in Marketing
In the marketing world, anime is following in the footsteps of gaming
As marketers look to take advantage of anime’s entry into the zeitgeist, they might be wise to observe the parallels between the evolution of anime as a marketing channel and the ways brands have learned to better leverage gaming in recent years.
With the introduction of video ads and e-commerce, Roblox looks to attain platform status
Roblox is expanding into more areas than just ads in 2024. Much like platforms such as Amazon and Facebook have transcended their origins to evolve from their origins as online marketplaces and social media channels, Roblox is in the midst of a transformation into a platform for all elements of users’ virtual lives.
PepsiCo wants to remain a ‘driver of culture’ as it turns to influencers and activations amid rebrand
The soda-maker says it can translate cultural relevance into sales volume.
Ad position: web_bfu