Case study: How Mr Beast positioned Feastables against Hershey’s

Jimmy Donaldson (Mr Beast – the world’s largest YouTuber) is playing an age-old marketing principle – “picking your enemy” – and taking it to the next level. It’s fascinating to see. Here’s the story: 🌎 Context – Feastable launches: In January 2022, Jimmy launched a chocolate brand – Feastables. He regularly uses his YouTube videos, which […]
mr beast feastables

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Jimmy Donaldson (Mr Beast – the world’s largest YouTuber) is playing an age-old marketing principle – “picking your enemy” – and taking it to the next level. It’s fascinating to see. Here’s the story:

🌎 Context – Feastable launches:

In January 2022, Jimmy launched a chocolate brand – Feastables. He regularly uses his YouTube videos, which reach 10s of millions of folks, to promote the chocolate.

🍫 The original application of ‘picking your enemy’:

Jimmy has gone after the incumbent, Hershey’s Chocolate, hard. Regularly calling them out for having chocolate that doesn’t taste good.

Hershey’s share is around 33.5% of the US chocolate market (Statista). By positioning against the biggest brand, he set his sights on taking over the largest company in the market – directly positioning himself next to them.

As a marketing principle – this is helpful for smaller, newer brands, as it sets the customer’s mind to compare one brand against another, even if the smaller brand doesn’t have the heritage or market share of the other.

💥 The new application and results:

Then, last week, the below video dropped. Instead of just positioning against Hershey’s – Jimmy positioned Feastables against ‘THE WHOLE WORLD’.

“I realised tasting better than Hershey’s wasn’t so special… Doesn’t EVERYTHING taste better than Hershey’s?”

All of a sudden, instead of the enemy being Hershey’s – the ‘enemy’ was much bigger – being better than anything on Earth.

For my money, this is interesting because it’s less specific of someone to go against, but a mic drop moment landed against the bigger brand.

Reportedly, Feastables is on track to become a $200 million brand while Hershey’s stock price is dropping.

(Note: the video is shockingly devoid of women which sucks and should have been done better)

🎓 What can we learn?

Two things:

– Positioning yourself against the bigger brand can be powerful as a tool, particularly as you are gaining market share.

– It’s also possible to change who you position yourself against with decent comms. Of course, Mr Beast is one of the best at this.

But a word of warning: personally I wouldn’t go after this approach on such an open level for The Marketing Meetup because that’s just not how I want the community to be seen.

Our enemy is more likely to be ‘horrible networking’ than it is a specific brand. Know the tools, but also when to apply them!