When Luana Bumachar joined Solo Brands as its Chief Marketing Officer earlier this year, there was a big debate permeating the industry: did Solo Brand’s viral campaign with Snoop Dogg actually work, or did it all that time and money go up in smoke?
Industry practitioners and pundits believed that while renowned cannabis user Snoop claiming he “gave up smoke” in exchange for a Solo Stove generated a lot of buzz, it didn’t drive tangible business results. That’s why Bumachar’s first item of business was to dig into the data and determine what to do next. Through this process, however, she was able to determine that the “Snoop Goes Smokeless” campaign did, in fact, drive meaningful outcomes for the business. For example, the brand saw a 2.5X increase in unaided brand awareness, a 22% reduction in customer acquisition cost (CAC), a 365% increase in email subscriptions, as well as an improvement in both Amazon (+195%) and Google (+167%) shopping search.
“The campaign was designed to build awareness and buzz to make Solo Stove a household name,” Bumachar said in an interview with Retail TouchPoints. “It did that, but it also drove the entire funnel, including purchase intent, which is what we call consideration…and it also drove sales.”
The CAC drop in particular reaffirmed to Bumachar that the partnership with Snoop worked — and that provided the motivation the team needed to revisit and expand its partnership with the cultural icon. In late August 2024, Solo Stove launched its newest campaign, “Blunt Marketing,” a campaign that puts Snoop Dogg and his natural bluntness to the forefront to drive “mental availability” so that customers actively try Solo Stove products as soon as they’re ready to buy.
For the new campaign, Snoop Dogg and longtime friend Warren G star in a series of videos and ad spots where they bluntly chat about Solo Stove merch, including three soon-to-be launched products that will round out Solo Stove’s outdoor living portfolio. Ads will be repurposed through digital, social audio, connected TV (CTV), search and retail, as well as through high-visibility programming like Thursday Night Football, NFL Ticket, and The Voice (a show in which Snoop will star as a Coach).
“We have more than 25 videos, and that’s just going to keep increasing as we go into peak season in November,” Bumachar said. “This campaign is built to drive consideration and conversion, but also entertain. We believe humor sells and is underestimated by a lot of brands. And we believe people have good times when they are around the fire, so we want to bring joy and entertainment, too.”
Bumachar shared more lessons from the campaign, including what worked, what didn’t and the new creative opportunities that will undoubtedly drive the success of “Blunt Marketing” through the end of 2024.
Lesson 1: A Commercially Led, Retail-Aware Plan is Key to Driving Performance
The success of the “Snoop Goes Smokeless” campaign “proves the point that brand and performance marketing can go hand in hand,” Bumachar explained. “But we also learned there were opportunities. For example, we didn’t connect all the dots [between brand and performance] that we could have.”
Solo Stove has a vast retail partner network that includes marketplaces like Amazon and retailers with significant brick-and-mortar reach such as Ace Hardware, Best Buy and Dick’s Sporting Goods. However, the brand didn’t align and collaborate with these retail partners to ensure they could keep pace with the possible surge in demand once the campaign was in the field. “We didn’t have a commercially led plan to support the campaign,” she said. “We lacked inventory among those key retail partners.”
Lesson 2: Align Your Campaign Timeline to Product Usage
Some products can be used year-round, but the Solo Stove’s “prime time” is in the warmer months and transitional seasons like the fall. Last year, the “Snoop Goes Smokeless” campaign launched in November, which gave Solo Stove minimal runway to amplify the campaign and reap the full-funnel benefits.
“We launched quite late in the season last year, but this year, we launched in August, so we are leveraging Snoop in the best way possible,” Bumachar said. Timing was also on Solo Stove’s side because the new campaign launched right after Snoop’s highly publicized presence at the Olympics, a moment that drove cultural relevance and resonance for the brand.
“You don’t think about a fire pit as a cultural product, but we believe that Solo Stove can claim a place in culture,” she noted. “Snoop was and is the right partner to help us do that.”
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Lesson 3: Tailor Messaging to Your Goals and Target Audience
In the early days of her tenure, Bumachar did foundational audience work to truly understand different consumer segments, including how they interacted with both the brand and Snoop. Through that analysis, she found that Solo Stove customers were actually “way more diverse” than she initially thought.
“Our audience over-indexes Black and Hispanic and is also a bit younger. They love entertainment and comedy,” she said. “We realized Snoop had so much more in common with the audience we are going after as a brand, so there was no question that we had to continue the partnership with him.”
However, Solo Stove also wanted to amplify its reach among a much larger customer set in order to scale and drive product trial. The direct messaging and execution of the ad spots help cut through the clutter and get to the heart of what the brand actually wants consumers to do: try Solo Stove products.
The tone “is witty, insightful and quite direct,” Bumachar noted. “We’re being very overt. We’re saying that Snoop is here because you’re more likely to buy more Solo Stoves if he’s in the commercial. And we know we can be that direct because we know our products deliver.”
Lesson 4: Let Snoop be Snoop
Snoop has a natural appeal and an overall resonance with consumers, especially Solo Stove’s target audience, that validated the idea that the brand had to let him take the creative lead.
“What is very unique about our relationship with Snoop is that we let Snoop be Snoop,” Bumachar explained. “We just write some lines and let him riff. And what we leverage in the commercial is basically a lot of what we riffed about throughout the night as we were shooting with him.”
Bumachar even admitted that Solo Stove ended up adjusting the media plan to what Snoop was saying during his riff session, adding, “we look at him not as an influencer but as a creator; we let him be himself and then we add to it in a way that makes sense to tell the story for the brand.”
This creator-led approach represented a big pivot for the Solo Stove team and its partner, The Martin Agency, but the results paid off, Bumachar concluded: “We’re so used to controlling the brand and the narrative that letting go is a bit harder. It requires a different way of working with the agency and requires a different level of partnership and trust, but in the end, it will come to life in a much stronger way.”
