Ypulse Guest Post: Branding Lessons From Tony Hawk
Posted by meredith on 05-28-2009
Today’s Ypulse Guest Post is from Chad Kennedy, Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of Teen Scene Magazine. Chad recently flew out to California to be featured on an episode of Sprint’s Business Fantasy Camp on MSN and spent a day under the wing of action sports icon Tony Hawk. We asked him to share what he learned. If you work in youth media or marketing and have an idea for a guest post, feel free to email me.
Branding Lessons From Tony Hawk
Recently, I had the opportunity to hang out for a day with pro-skateboarder, Tony Hawk, at his offices in California. Skateboarding is a mainstream sport today, but it hasn’t always been. Tony Hawk can be credited for helping to transform skateboarding into a household sport. At 41 years old, Tony is now retired from competitive skateboarding, however you could say he’s bigger now than he ever has been before. He is the head of Tony Hawk Inc., which produces the Tony Hawk Pro Skater video game series, Tony Hawk clothing (available at Kohl’s), skate decks, ShredorDie.com, and more. Altogether the Tony Hawk brand is worth well over $1 billion and growing.
This brings me to the reason that I met with Tony. As the Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of Teen Scene Magazine, I have been looking for ways to develop and expand the Teen Scene brand. So, I entered a contest by Microsoft and Sprint called Business Fantasy Camp earlier this year and I was lucky enough to be chosen as a winner. The prize was an opportunity to be filmed for the Business Fantasy Camp web series and meet with Tony Hawk to get branding advice.
During my meeting with Tony on April 28th, he taught me many valuable lessons about branding. We spoke about the importance of knowing your audience and staying true to what they want. Whether you are developing a skateboarding video game like he is or producing an online teen magazine like we are at Teen Scene, it is key that you first know who your audience truly is. This doesn’t just mean knowing their gender or age, but knowing who they are as people, their likes and dislikes. Having a solid grasp of who the audience is will fuel everything going forward which is why it is such a key factor to brand success.
Next, staying true to what your audience wants is essential. Tony expressed that he wasn’t a fan of focus groups and neither am I. In order to ultimately understand what your audience wants and needs out of your product you must fully immerse yourself in their life and see things from their point of view. Tony does this through continuing to skateboard for fun at events across the country and always making time to meet with and talk to fellow skateboarders, as well as his fans who don’t skateboard. Tony further illustrated how he is staying true to his audience by showing me how he is reinventing his video game series to stay current. His new game is called, Ride, and it is pretty revolutionary in that Tony and his team along with Activision have developed a board similar to the Wii Balance Board, except that it is designed to look and function like a skate deck. The board takes the video game skateboarding experience to the next level. At Teen Scene staying true to our audience has been part of our core since the beginning as we are for teens and young adults, by teens and young adults.
The third lesson that I learned from Tony was to maintain control of your brand as it grows and expands. While his brand is wide reaching, he is still the one who makes the key decisions. While I was at his offices, he was regularly asked for his opinion on colors and designs for new products. He told me that this is equally as important as the other aspects of branding because if you lose control, your audience will see right through whatever you are pushing to them.
About Chad Kennedy
In May 2000 at just 13 years old, Chad Kennedy started Teen Scene Magazine. Since then he has worked with Hollywood’s hottest celebrities, including Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake, and 50 Cent. He also regularly works with brands, such as Ford, Toyota, and Sony, on how they can better reach out to teens/young adults. In his free time you can find Chad giving his opinions on everything from Hollywood to politics on Twitter (@chadkennedy)
For more coverage of youth marketing, go to the Ypulse Youth Marketing Channel sponsored by Youth Marketing Connection.
Categorized under: Youth Marketing