From Red Bull’s record-breaking sky diver to Ikea’s tiny metro station apartments, these strokes of marketing genius got our attention.
On the morning of Oct. 14, 2012, Austrian sky diver Felix Baumgartner strapped himself to a helium balloon that carried him 24 miles above Roswell, N.M., to the edge of space. Then, with just a spacesuit and parachute, he made a nine-minute, supersonic jump that catapulted him into history books as the first person to break the speed of sound in free fall-at 833.9 mph, or Mach 1.24-without mechanical intervention.
This multimillion-dollar stunt wasn’t funded by NASA or SpaceX. No, this spectacle, seven years in the making, was the work of Red Bull. The energy-drink giant’s “Stratos” campaign resulted in the most-watched YouTube live stream of all time (8 million concurrent views), a global broadcast seen in more than 50 countries and a documentary, Space Dive, produced by Red Bull with National Geographic Channel and the BBC.
But marketing efforts don’t need to change history to be effective. The most innovative campaigns push boundaries in simple yet clever ways that can captivate audiences-consumers, the media and competitors alike-and change the way they think about a brand or concept. With that in mind, Entrepreneur searched for the most brilliant strategies from startups, corporations and charities in 2012, and asked experts to identify what made them so great. Here are our favorites.
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