Nine Ladies Dancing!

It’s Day 9 of the 12 Days of Branding. If you missed any of the series thus far, you can find them here. In today’s installment I’ve got 9 great videos for you. These are excellent examples of how you can use the strategy of “edutainment” to market your brand.

That’s Edutainment!

We may not have called it “edutainment” when we were huddled around the prehistoric campfire re-enacting the last mastodon hunt, but that’s exactly what it was. We were teaching (and learning) valuable life lessons.

Officially, it seems, the Disney folks were the first to coin the term. In 1948, they used it to describe their True Life Adventures series. Then there’s edutainment marketing — the strategy of entertaining your target market (using a story, video, etc.) in order to teach them something about your brand.

The idea is simple, but the implementation takes some work. We know that in order to be good marketers, we’ve got to be good teachers. But how do we actually pull it off?

Tell a great story. Be inspirational. Use humor. And when all else fails, just teach us how to use your thing.

In all of these videos, the idea was to entertain while educating an audience about a brand. Some brands are more front and center than others. But all of these were highly successful. The key? They entertained someone so they got shared. See if any of these inspires you to show off your product or service in an edutaining way!

Teach Something Useful

I’ve used this one in several classes when I’m trying to show how important it is to have consistent branding. The folks who made the video give themselves a small plug in the ending credits.

This one by the Dachis Group (formerly XPLANE) is one of several they’ve made that’s fun to watch, informative and shows off their skills:

Be Inspirational

This is another one I like to use in class — again, the idea being that folks like to share things with their friends and colleagues that are inspirational:

Branding through Humor

This one by the Ojai Taxidermy company was created as a TV commercial and then went viral. In this case, their only point is to create awareness:

Or, you could film something funny like Carlsberg beer did:

Demonstrate Your Product

This one shows off what you might be able to do with a Nokia smartphone:

A great product demo by DermaBlend that also gets you to think about how you view the world:

Then there’s the infamous Orabrush series (hint: click on their YouTube user name to see the entire channel of awesomeness — they’ve had more than 44.5 million views!):

And of course there’s the BlendTec series (they’ve got 116 of them!). This is the one with the most views to date:

Let me know which one(s) you like best. And if you’ve ever done something like this yourself, or you’ve seen one that you’d like to share, leave us a link so we can check it out.

Image Credit: prayitno