Kidnapping the Cap'n: Guerrilla 'Success' for Cap'n Crunch

Resistant Marketers Still Focused on Numbers, not Relationships — and These Numbers Are Small

By: Bob Garfield Published: March 07, 2011

With Frienders like this, who needs enemies?

Michael Gutweiler and Cory Smale, two Chicago 20-somethings trying to get attention for their new social-media boutique, hit on a clever idea. They found a large, iconic brand that inexplicably had no presence on social media and decided, with no permission much less a contract from the marketer, to establish that presence themselves.

Thus, two months back, the “Where’s the Cap’n?” campaign was born.

Yes, the two pirates stealthily boarded Quaker Oats’ ship and shanghaied Cap’n Crunch, the seafaring breakfast-candy trademark. Then they created a Facebook page for him, and a Twitter feed, and an online petition — all to pressure Quaker into bringing the skipper from the seven seas to the digital space.

Pretty good idea, no? Cap’N Crunch! It’s like kidnapping Frank Sinatra Jr. (which, in 1963, somebody did, gaining $240,000 in ransom, tons of attention and only four-and-a-half years in prison). Sure enough, here’s a two-man company, the Giant Steps, featured in Advertising Age, which is a lot more than most startups ever accomplish. They’ve done so thanks to an email declaring success: “… our campaign and the voice of our movement has been heard — the Cap’n is now coming to Twitter.”

Quaker has informed them of its plans to formalize the Twitter presence some time in 2011.

“It’s a win for us,” Gutweiler told me. “We’re the new players in the league. We have strong beliefs and we’re gonna live by them. … We were able to create the most-visited, the most-mentioned cereal page on Twitter within the past two months — and they’re not an official account.”

So, once again, excellent little guerrilla-marketing gimmick for Gutweiler and (no relation to P&G’s John) Smale. The problem is, should this exercise land them in any corporate conference rooms to pitch, the brand-evangelism message they’re conveying is not the one that will be heard. What skeptical marketers will home in on is the metric the ill-named Giant Steps uses to document its success.

“Within the first week,” says Gutweiler in recounting the triumph, “we had more than 420-430 [Twitter] followers.” Then, when the pace began to slow, they announced they would give away a Flip camera for every 1,000 followers they accumulated, and 72 hours later they were at 1,100.

Continues at: Guerrilla ‘Success’ for Cap’n Crunch Does Social-Media Proponents No Favors | Bob Garfield – Advertising Age.