Marketing 12th Edition by Charles Lamb,Charles Lamb,Joe Hair

Exercise 11

Gatorade is one of the best known marketers in the world. As the producers of sports drinks and one of the first companies to make widespread use of athletes to endorse its products, Gatorade is best known for its creative television commercials. However, they also recognize the impact of social media on their brand and have done more than most brands to put that in the center of its marketing efforts.

Enter the Gatorade Mission Control Center in Chicago. This room sits literally in the middle of the marketing department and can be considered a war room for monitoring the brand's performance using real-time social media. The room features monitors that tap into services like Radian6 which turns data into visual meaning. For example, Gatorade's marketing team can use the data from Twitter to track sentiment about the brand, its competitors and its athlete partners. Gatorade can also monitor similar information found on blogs and social networks in order to portray a complete brand picture.
Senior Marketing Director, Consumer Shopper Engagement Carla Hassan stated that Mission Control has been used to develop its "Gatorade has evolved" campaign. They also use this information for more conventional tactics-such as optimizing landing pages and increasing consumer engagement.
Do you think that social media will be this important to most brands in the near future? Why or why not?