La Croix and Social Networks
https://guff.com/how-the-hell-did-la-croix-become-so-popular
In this article, Jesus Garay examines the rise of the popular drink La Croix. The drink itself is not really anything special, being a lightly flavored sparkling water and not really bringing anything new to the table. However, even with it being a standard sparkling water drink something about La Croix had been picked up by the public, and the drink quickly rose to popularity even to the point of becoming a meme. The article examines the potential reasons for this popularity that has bewildered many who might see La Croix as a simple fizzy drink. According to the article, the rise of La Croix has come with the rise of the importance people place personal health as La Croix is a healthier alternative to the other well known sodas like Cola. La Croix also focuses more on a physical approach to marketing where La Croix is displayed in many areas in contrast to the more common use of commercials and traditional advertising. Reading the article, one could say that La Croix seems to know the receptivity of the audience of social media savvy youth and capitalized greatly on it.
Social media is a big tool for advertisers and La Croix made great use of it through joining social media and working the brand into lifestyle content with subtlety. Examining networks, or more specifically Granovetter’s Strong Triadic Closure Theory, we can see that the more strong connections there are, the more connected a network is as according to the theory, if person A has strong ties to person B and C, then B and C probably have some sort of tie as well. Even weak ties and connections of connections are valuable in the spread of ideas (Granovetter’s “strength of weak ties”). La Croix made use of this knowledge by targeting influencers and people who would have many connections like writers and those in the entertainment industry especially in LA. According to the article, “LaCroix also created a paid campaign to the writers of fitness-minded, motherhood blogs for positive posts on LaCroix”. The targeting of people who have an audience, and relatively large amount of connections allowed for these ideas to spread far and quickly within the social networks online and in real life.