5 Marketing Lessons You Can Learn From Bluey

If you are a parent or even an animation lover, you have probably seen Bluey. This adorably animated hit tv series originated in Australia in 2018, and when it hit the shores of the United States it became unstoppable.

Bluey is a unique viewing experience both for parents and children, and the perspective on lessons that it often provides its viewers is unlike most anything we’ve seen in children’s animations preceding its launch.

If there is one thing we do here at The Less Than 1% Club it is finding the marketing in everything, so here are 5 critical marketing takeaways you can find in the children’s TV show Bluey.

Lesson #1: Positioning your product with a level of duality.

What makes Bluey so unique is its ability to provide the lessons we often see in children’s TV shows but with a level of duality. Bluey knows that its primary audience is indeed the children who watch the show, but they leverage an amazingly unique strategy of also catering their lessons to parents.

So if you are the parent who is sitting down with their child monitoring their TV consumption, and you end up watching Bluey alongside your child you will also receive tailored life lessons from the perspective of Bluey’s parents Chilli and Bandit.

This brings us to lesson 1, researching and breaking down who holds the approval for your audience. For children, this is often their parents or caregivers. For practitioners, this can be their direct managers or directors. How can you cater your materials to more deeply attract and commit your target audience by leveraging speaking directly to the gatekeeper of an approval?

Lesson #2: Giving the audience something to feel, not something to buy.

Appealing to the emotions of your audience is not a new concept, however, in the digital space, it becomes increasingly challenging to do so. Online audiences are inundated day in and day out with content, ads, infographics, swipe to see’s, and more. People now more than ever are seeking out from the digital space what is going to make them feel, and it is becoming harder and harder to find.

This is why we have seen recent trends of decline for celebrities and trends of increase for influencers. This is why Cat Janice a cancer patient who shared her goal of wanting to create a successful song in order to leave something behind for her son and family topped the billboard charts placing #1 ahead of high-performance artists all the way from Flo Milli to Coldplay. This brings us to lesson 2, Bluey’s team understands very deeply the problems that both children and adults are facing. They know how to neatly condense them into episodic lessons that can touch the hearts of parents and children alike.

The ability to do so has given them an unprecedented amount of influence over children’s media because they do not sugarcoat issues like heavily censored media or celebrities, they dig deep into our humility and our everyday problems, just like an influencer, and they give us something to feel.

Lesson #3: Short, sweet, and to the point.

The average episode of Bluey is between 7 and 9 minutes long. You may initially think to yourself, yea that sounds normal, but what if I told you that it is extremely rare to find other children’s shows, even ones featured on the same streaming service you find Bluey on, that are less than 10 minutes on episode length?

Mickey Mouse Clubhouse: 21-49 minutes.

PJ Masks: 24 Minutes

Even the closest contender I was able to find Rosie’s Rules still came in at 11 minutes.

It takes an extremely experienced screenwriting team to be able to provide such a quality story experience and to do so in about a 3rd of the time that it takes your average American children’s cartoon, and this isn’t just true for Bluey. This brings us to lesson 3, I can’t find a single marketer who hasn’t questioned lately how to properly formulate a short-form video, or how someone like Mr. Beast can get millions of views but their gold mine of information can only get 100.

What you are providing to your customers, viewers, and followers, is often way too long. Practice storytelling, practice brevity, and understand the true fears and nature of your audience, they don’t want to buy your product, they don’t even want to know what problems your product will solve for them, they want to address their pain, they want to feel, and they want to go through this process to get to the other side as quickly as possible.

Lesson #4: Auditory stimulation done RIGHT.

Bluey has created more than 15 unique jingles that have been featured in the show. They are brief, catchy, cohesive with each other, and very well constructed to align with the brand. Bluey’s songs are so popular in fact that they were able to release a full album. Has Mickey Mouse Clubhouse been able to do that?

People have been prioritizing the visual so heavily recently that they forget the power of auditory stimulation. There is a reason why you still remember that catchy insurance jingle from 2008, and sure you may be able to close your eyes and through the brain fog envision bits and pieces of the commercial itself, but you remember that jingle, word, for, word.

This brings us to lesson 4, people like Gary Vee and Steven Bartlett from The Diary of a CEO have done this with purpose and intention, and they have done it across both long and short-form media. When you are envisioning the brand, and you are identifying the colors, the icons, and the photography that will all make your brand what it is, do not forget audio. A consistent intro and outro, a jingle or phrase, whatever is going to suit your brand best that people can always anticipate hearing.

Lesson #5: Leveraging Honesty and Humility

Some of us are already “too big to fail” so poor marketing or not, the sales will come in even though they may fluctuate. But if you’re like me, and you work and operate with mostly small to mid-sized businesses you know how high the stakes can be when your marketing initiatives fail.

Marketers spend way too much time teaching brands how to be human. What it means to have a face that can be identified for your business. How your story, your passion, and your mission will ultimately impact how your marketing is created and therefore the amount of engagement you can anticipate.

Lesson 5, if you are a small or medium business and you are using a “too big to fail” as a frame of reference on how to create your marketing, you are much more likely to fail. Not only will your marketing be dull and swipeable, but your company culture will crumble. If you are questioning how transparent to be, you might as well be asking how human you would like to appear, and how cold you will look as a result of limiting your humility. There are thousands of children’s cartoons to choose from, so why is Bluey topping the charts for family animation picks? Why are parents resonating more with this cartoon than the majority of others? Humility, honesty in experience, emotional vulnerability. Learn it!

We hope you have enjoyed this brief marketing study on the amazing show Bluey, if you have yet to watch an episode we challenge you to go on Disney+ and give it a watch, just be sure to bring a box of tissues!

Until next time <1%-ers, continue to grow 1% greater each day.