Elon Musk again did the unthinkable and again showed why he is a marketing genius
Elon’s SpaceX on Feb 6th Tuesday fired up the heaviest rocket in the world.Falcon Heavy is the most powerful operational rocket in the world by a factor of two, with the ability to lift into orbit nearly 64 metric tons (141,000 lb)–a mass greater than a 737 jetliner loaded with passengers, crew, luggage and fuel.
Suprising fact was not this. They needed to put something heavy into the orbit to test the rocket.That is where outlandish idea of putting a tesla into space occurred for Elon musk.On Dec 1 he tweeted about his plan of putting his tesla into space for billion years much to disbelief of many
Payload will be my midnight cherry Tesla Roadster playing Space Oddity. Destination is Mars orbit. Will be in deep space for a billion years or so if it doesn’t blow up on ascent.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 2, 2017
It was a very dramatic scene occurred about four minutes after liftoff: The second stage of the rocket, headed deeper into space, discarded the white nose cone at its tip.
It revealed SpaceX CEO Elon Musk’s cherry red sports car. Behind the wheel was a spacesuit-clad mannequin, named Starman. The car glided victoriously away from Earth as David Bowie’s “Life on Mars?” blared on SpaceX’s launch webcast.
Shortly after the launch, SpaceX posted a live feed of Starman’s journey. The images looked as if they were plucked from science fiction.
Live feed of the mission can be seen here
Now let’s look at numbers behind the launch
He spent a total of 90 million $ for this launch
SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy launch was YouTube’s second biggest live stream ever.
The event reached over 2.3 million concurrent views on YouTube, coming in second to the Red Bull Stratos jump, which racked in a ridiculous 8 million concurrent views back in 2012.
The amount of web traffic and consumer excitement from the images of the vehicle ascending and the amount of earned media he garnered from news all over the world will absolutely exceed the costs of the mission .The stock was up same day and the forecast is tremendously positive. This stunt will continue to pay dividends to Tesla for years to come
With this launch, Elon Musk used the platform to express his two flagship brands’ beliefs and values through clever narrative of car that went to space capturing audience’s imagination and imprinting on their hearts forever. Brand strategies like this highlight the magic of Tesla’s no-marketing’ marketing strategy that’s propelled them to brand leadership without investing significant dollars in advertising.
There has been lot of negative stories of tesla in recent times. The question remains of how safe Tesla car factories are for employees and how effectively and fairly the company handles the aftermath of on-the-job injuries.
And while Tesla’s stock was up by 3 percent on Wednesday morning ahead of the release of its 2017 fourth quarter earnings, the company is still dogged by not meeting its production goals for the Model 3, making only half the number of cars that it was expected to manufacture in December
But Elon has again made a masterstroke & his message of “DONT PANIC” on his redcherry is perhaps his way of telling his detractors that he will get it sorted
Whatever said & done, Elon musk’s roadster in my view will go down as one of best car advertisement of all times if not the best
What do you say?