COACHILLIN' :: LIFE AT THE RESQHOUSE

By Bobby Hundreds Apr 14, 2014

This isn’t a write-up about Coachella. This isn’t an offsite pool party recap. This is a story about Marketing. How to shape and sculpt it to fit your product, how to best speak to your community, and how efficiently to communicate your message.

A few years back, Troy Michels continued on from his prior Lifestyle Marketing position at Target, and co-Founded RESQWATER, the anti-hangover drink. Now automatically, that’ll raise an eyebrow – it sounds weird, it sounds gimmicky – so Troy and his team realized that the best way to actually evangelize the RESQ gospel was by word of mouth, through the voices and personalities of people you trust.

In my opinion, there are two things going on in marketing a drink like RESQWATER. First, there’s the education process. The bottle is filled with ingredients to help metabolize acetaldehyde, “the compound that makes you feel lousy after drinking.” And secondly, there’s the doubt barrier. Sounds like voodoo or a medicine man roadshow. But all it takes is a friend of yours to say, “That shit actually works” (which should be RESQWATER’s tagline at this point) for you to clear that hurdle.

So what would be better, hard-selling through TV campaigns and billboards or building a trustful community amongst friends and family – with their own sizable niche audiences – to tell the RESQWATER story organically?

Every year, Troy’s crew organizes a comfortable retreat literally down the street from Coachella. He invites his friends who just so happen to dominate all cultural corners: Street, Skate, Sport, Nightlife, Music, Entertainment, Fashion, etc. to relax, bond, and put RESQWATER to the test (if ya know what I mean) with the objective that they would then become true brand ambassadors and spread the word amongst their communities. As far as I know, RESQWATER does very scant marketing beyond this – this is one of their biggest pushes of the year.

The point of the story is that your Marketing must fit your product. It must reflect the ethos of your brand. How you tell your story, and how you sell your idea, are just as important as the product itself. It can be argued that it’s even greater.

Today, most larger corporations – or brands that just don’t get it – think the blanket marketing solution is social media. Or the Internet. Or celebrities. Whatever. But the brands that win are the ones who consider their customer first, and proceed to speak their language.

This was my weekend:

Zach Neminsky (RVCA) and surfer Luke Davis welcome you to the house:

ResQHouse, Luke Davis, Surfer Luke Davis, RVCA, coachella, RESQ

What happens in the ResQHouse? Lots of this. Pow-wowwing, building, whatever you wanna call it. Good conversation amongst friends you trust, greased by gourmet food, drinks, and music. And bikinis.