It is a well-established lore of marketing that if you want to sell some stuff, just give Snoop Dogg a call and he’ll probably hawk it for you. At this point in his career, it’s hard to think of many products he hasn’t tried to sell - both his own brands and those of other companies.
Yeah, if you want something selling, Snoop Dogg is almost certainly willing and able. Everyone just knows that. Which must have made this week all the more difficult for John Merris.
But who is John Merris? Don’t worry, you can stop racking your brain trying to remember. You have absolutely no business knowing who John Merris is. I am going to tell you though.
Until Monday this week, he was CEO of Solo Brands - maker of outdoorsy things like camping stoves, portable fire pits, kayaks, paddle boards and men’s shorts. He joined as the boss of its Solo Stove brand in 2018, and became head of the entire group in 2021.
But now he’s gone. And it’s all Snoop Dogg’s fault.
See, as everyone knows, Snoop Dogg can sell anything. Anything at all. Anything, apparently, except portable fire pits. We have found Snoop Dogg’s achilles heel. He gave it a good go, but he just couldn’t do it.
It was all so meticulously planned too. What’s the other thing we all know about Snoop Dogg? That’s right, he loves smoking marijuana. And what do fire pits give off a lot of? Well, in the case of Solo Stove’s fire pits, not smoke. None at all.
Knowing all of these things, the Solo Stove team hatched a plan. They would get Snoop Dogg in and they would create a viral marketing plan so amazing, it would set the world of smokeless fire pits on, er, fire. It was almost too easy.
And so it was, in November last year, that Snoop Dogg put a post up on Instagram. Alongside a sombre looking picture of himself, he wrote: “After much consideration and conversation with my family, I’ve decided to give up smoke. Please respect my privacy at this time”.
Just that, nothing else. Except a caption that reiterated: “I’m giving up smoke”. Genius, huh? I don’t think it’s overstating it to say that every single human on planet Earth lost their fucking shit. This was momentous news. The world’s most famous dope smoker was giving it up. Why? What had led to this decision? There were so many questions.
Now, I think we can all see where this is going - you possibly even remember the outcome of all this. But at the time, it was largely taken at face value. News organisations reported the story just as it was presented. After decades of being pretty much constantly stoned, Snoop was stubbing out his last blunt.
Three days later came the big reveal - another Instagram post - in which he let everyone know that you’d all misunderstood what smoke it was that he was giving up. In a press release, the rapper announced that he had partnered with Solo Stove to become a ‘smokesman’ for the company and its smoke-free fire pits.
“I love a good fire outside but the smoke was too much”, he said in a statement. “Solo Stove fixed fire and took out the smoke. They changed the game and now I’m excited to spread the love and stay warm with my friends and family”.
With the world having had time to recover from the shock of Snoop’s previous statement, Solo Stove presumably hoped that there would be a similar reaction to the punchline of the joke. There was not. Most people, I think, shrugged and said something along the lines of “Oh. Right”. Then they got on with their day.
That’s not true of everyone. Some people did take a bit more interest. Solo Stove reported that it gained around 60,000 new social media followers as a result of the campaign. Ad Age also named it the eighteenth best advert of 2023. And these are all markers of success.
Not the key marker though. The key marker of success is sales. And that’s the one thing the campaign really did not deliver.
“While our unique marketing campaigns raised brand awareness of Solo Stove to an expanded and new audience of consumers, it did not lead to the sales lift that we had planned”, said interim CFO Andrea Tarbox in a statement. As a result, sales and revenues in the final quarter of last year were lower than had been projected.
The buck has to stop with someone, and unlucky for John Merris, the someone in this case is John Merris. And so, a statement from Solo Brands said last week, he and the company had decided to “mutually separate”. I guess, this having raised awareness of John Merris, he’ll be hoping that Snoop Dogg’s involvement might now sell him to a new employer.
If anyone is thinking of hiring Snoop Dogg to do a bit of marketing, my advice would be to not try to be too clever. Don't whip everyone into a frenzy and then annoy them with an unsatisfying reveal. Just get him to do something like record a dumb song. Or maybe… actually, no, just get him to record a dumb song.
When not pondering what went wrong with Snoop Dogg’s Solo Stove marketing campaign, we also warmed ourselves with more of this week’s most amusing news stories from the world of music…
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TMZ Staff