Hyped beyond Belief The GoPro Story

Social Media Strategy Analysis
GoPro is renowned for using social media—in particular YouTube and Twitter—to draw attention to its cameras, especially its Hero brand digital video cameras. By using footage filmed by people who purchased the GoPro Hero camera, GoPro essentially obtained free advertising that was produced and driven by consumers, each wanting to join the growing list of video segments uploaded by the company to its YouTube page. This paper will analyze GoPro’s social media strategy and show how the company used social media to promote its Hero camera product and why this strategy was effective compared to other camera companies like Sony and Samsung whose strategy was less grassroots oriented and more traditional in its marketing orientation to getting product information before the public.
The customer segment for the GoPro Hero camera was young adults who enjoyed capturing events in the real world—whether it was hiking, kayaking, snowboarding, or rafting—the camera and the company appealed to people on the go who wanted a new way to capture their adventures and film their feats to share with others. Young families, travelers and action videographers were the primary customer segments for the camera, and in many cases these segments overlapped. The best way to describe this segment, however, is as the YouTube generation—a generation of young adults who had grown up along with YouTube and now wanted to share great moments from their own explorations and adventures with friends and followers and carve out a niche for themselves on the world’s most popular video streaming social media site.
The social media outlets used by GoPro to reach its customer segment were mainly YouTube and Twitter. As Devumi (2018) notes, GoPro gets a lot of attention for its YouTube strategy but its Twitter activity has also been important: “All of the media they tweet has been carefully chosen to cater to the specific audiences that follow the brand. Another key aspect of their Twitter success is their engaging captions.” By uniting video with great captions, GoPro used Twitter to get the message about its great product out to more people. But without YouTube, those videos would not have had a viewing platform in the first place. So YouTube was really where it all began—and the GoPro Hero was a product that was essentially made for the YouTube generation.
The elements of GoPro’s YouTube campaign was based on the customer segment’s needs and desires: the YouTube generation wanted to project themselves and their adventures whether in front of the camera or behind it onto the world. GoPro simply tapped into this desire and created a product that would help feed it—the Hero camera. GoPro Quik Stories and Hero cam footage served the interests of action camera consumers who wanted to shoot great footage and get it seen by others. The goal, all along, was for consumers to use the camera to create videos that would “go viral” on the Internet—i.e., rack up millions of views in a matter of days (Leonhardt, 2015). And that is just what many of the videos posted by GoPro to its YouTube page did—all videos shot on the GoPro camera by consumers. User-generated content thus helped to fuel the rise of GoPro, which became such a novelty that even professional surgeons were tapping into the experience to help educated students on what to expect on the operating table (Bizzotto, Sandri, Lavini, Dall’Oca & Regis, 2014). GoPro went public, meanwhile, and the stock price debuted at a stunning close of $35 per share in July of 2015. The stock rose up to nearly $100 per share as more and more videos went viral and GoPro became the tech darling of investors on Wall Street—until suddenly the sales of GoPro cameras stopped reflecting the euphoria that the Street was feeling. For that reason the marketing metric described by Kerin and Hartley (2016) did not really fit with GoPro in terms of seeing how its social media campaign helped the company. Social media helped hype the company—but it simply could not make the company as valuable as its competitor because it simply did not offer the same number of wide array of products. GoPro was a niche player from the beginning and nothing more.
GoPro continued to drive the action camera market—mainly because it was the action camera market—but the company was still burning cash in spite of having users generate much of its online marketing via social media (GoPro, 2018). So while the company’s social media campaign was successful, at least for early investors who were able to cash out during the heady days following the company’s IPO on the heals of its viral video campaign on YouTube, the company’s cash burn reflected a series of altogether unrelated problems. GoPro was the action camera to beat, and social media helped make it that. Financials were something else completely and were not necessarily a good measure of what YouTube had done for the company. The initial euphoric climb of the stock throughout 2015 was a much better indicator.
Compared to companies like Sony and Samsung, GoPro did very well in distinguishing itself—much like Red Bull did to distinguish itself from other soda brands when it first entered the market. By linking its brand with action scenes set outdoors, GoPro captured the action-oriented “selfie”-loving segment of consumers—and it made its name and built its brand on doing just this—something Sony and Samsung simply could not do. Those companies had many other products to sell: GoPro was very niche and was using its niche marketing campaign to drive sales. It could afford to be known for one thing and one thing only—being the go-to action camera company that put up great vids on YouTube. Sony and Samsung hard far too many more vested interests to attempt a similar stunt: they could never base their brands or images on one single product line built by and for the social media generation: GoPro could and did.
Two specific strategies for how the company could more effectively utilize social media to better target its customer segment and increase its competitive advantage in the market would be to promote more films like Hardcore Henry, shot entirely using GoPro cameras. By linking itself with indie film projects like this one, GoPro could expand its niche market to a more professional realm and begin to appeal beyond its core segment of YouTubers and draw professional filmmakers into its mix. Another strategy would be to invite customers to upload content to a channel made specifically for fan footage that would be controlled by fans. No matter what they shot, if they uploaded it, it would stay (barring, of course, content was that not safe for work). This strategy could help to make the company even more popular among YouTubers and help reach its segment and unite itself with them in an intimate way similar to what Apple has been able to achieve with its core customer base.
In conclusion, GoPro not only used social media to launch its product—the action camera Hero—it essentially created a product designed to appeal specifically to the YouTube generation. The Hero camera was designed to be an action camera that young people could use to film their adventures. GoPro simply gave these individuals the tools and platform to showcase their filmmaking skills. By selling them the camera and then sponsoring the YouTube campaign to get great looking videos uploaded by consumers, GoPro obtained user-generated content that created such a significant buzz around the company that its stock went vertical within weeks of its IPO in 2015. The actual company’s financials helped to quickly depress the stock—but the social media campaign did the initial job, as far as early investors were concerned: YouTubers made them a fortune. To keep the company going, all it now needs to do is keep it up.

References
Bizzotto, N., Sandri, A., Lavini, F., Dall’Oca, C., & Regis, D. (2014). Video in operating
room: GoPro HERO3 camera on surgeon’s head to film operations—a test. Surgical Innovation, 21(3), 338-340.
Devumi. (2018). Social media case study: GoPro. Retrieved from
https://devumi.com/2017/11/social-media-case-study-gopro-youtube-twitter-instagram/
GoPro. (2018). Fourth quarter results. Retrieved from
https://investor.gopro.com/press-releases/press-release-details/2018/GoPro-Announces-Fourth-Quarter-and-Full-Year-2017-Results/default.aspx
Kerin, R. A., & Hartley, S. W. (2016). Marketing: The core (6th ed.). Boston, MA:
McGraw-Hill.
Leonhardt, J. (2015). Going viral on YouTube. Journal of digital & Social Media
Marketing, 3(1), 21-30.