Skullcandy will refresh its look every month for the next year to illustrate how music makes you feel. The campaign, called “12 Moods,” includes daily original content in addition to monthly themes and is such a large undertaking that Skullcandy brought its entire marketing team in-house.
“12 Moods” launched Wednesday with “Bold,” represented by the color tangerine. Each month, the campaign focuses on a different mood, artist, athlete and color with limited-edition product drops that represents the theme.
“We chose Bold for the month of March which also happens to be National Women’s Month,” Skullcandy chief marketing officer Jessica Klodnicki told AList. “We intentionally chose two very bold women with the rapper Rico Nasty and the athlete Jenn Soto.”
Rico Nasty recorded an exclusive music video for Skullcandy’s YouTube channel and participated in a new series called “Feel It/Don’t Feel It,” where each month’s spokesperson will be asked how they feel about certain topics. Skateboarder Jenn Soto received her own video featurette that explored her background and why she is an example of boldness.
While the campaign will run across all of Skullcandy’s channels, Klodnicki said they are prioritizing Instagram and YouTube for this campaign. In fact, the team deleted everything on Skullcandy’s Instagram account two days ago and started fresh. Skullcandy is also enlisting the help of social media influencers—12 per month—that will aid the brand in expressing each respective theme.
“Social media is a very hungry beast,” said Klodnicki. “We wanted something that would guide us so we’d be able to publish fresh content every single day. We will have a monthly cadence and daily cadence for 365 days.”
To accomplish this, Klodnicki and the team decided it was time to bring every aspect of marketing in-house from social media to production and even media buying.
“We decided that we needed to rapidly build an agency team so we can be extremely agile and nimble on this program,” explained Klodnicki. “We’ve brought a number of agency folks in-house that are working on a brand for the first time. They’re loving it. The kinds of conversations that would normally take hours to set up meetings and make decisions amongst a client and agency? We get to walk down the hall and make those decisions on the fly. It’s what has allowed us to create this incredible amount of quality content… and we have to do it 11 more times!”
So far, so good. Within a few hours of Wednesday’s launch, 10 percent of the limited-edition gear had sold out.
Klodnicki joined Skullcandy in late 2017 and made it her mission to reset the brand’s “North Star.” That, she determined, was a return to the brand’s roots in music and color, summed up as “Music You Can Feel.”
A major part of the “12 Moods” campaign relies on Skullcandy’s music streaming partners. YouTube Music is hosting a monthly playlist based on “Bold” and subsequent themes as part of a wider beta test. YouTube hopes to launch a “Tastemakers” program that allows celebrities to curate playlists on the platform.
