Marketing Campaign Review: Stuck At Prom Contest from Duck Tape®

Prom season comes around every year, and though the fashion might change, many teens have the same concern year after year: "what if someone wears the same thing as me?" Since 2001, Duck® brand, producer of a popular line of colored/printed heavy duty tape, has awarded the creative high schoolers who use its product -- yes, duct tape -- to make their one-of-a-kind outfits for the dance. Known as the Stuck At Prom contest, Duck® encourages teens to wear their duct tape creations to the prom and enter their pics and videos to win scholarships (and bragging rights for, like, ever) in this highly publicized contest. In this marketing campaign review, we'll discuss what marketing strategies make the Stuck At Prom Contest such an enduring success as well as how it brings attention and recognition to the Duck® brand year after year.

Stuck At Prom: Main Marketing Strategies

1. The spirit of competition: While Duck® could choose to simply promote the idea of making prom outfits from tape using a hashtag or the like, turning the promotion into a contest with big prizes encourages more engagement and participation than a simple challenge might. The chance to win $20,000 in scholarships as well as the recognition and bragging rights of being one of the winners gets high schoolers excited about participating. The fact that they're competing against their peers to win gets entrants to be as creative as possible, meaning that the brand and product often receives more media coverage and publicity from news outlets around the country.
   
   
2. A dedicated landing page on the Duck® website: Another great strategy that Duck® uses to create such a successful yearly promotion is creating a unique landing page specifically for the contest on its website. On the landing page, anyone can find all the information they might need if they're interested in entering the contest and more. The landing page also provides a wealth of inspiration to help teens get started on their duct tape designs. On the landing page, Duck® provides as many resources as possible in one place to make entering the contest easy. The Stuck At Prom contest even has its own branding in terms of colors and a logo, showing the effort that Duck® puts in to make the promotion special.
   
   
3. User-generated social promotion: While the finalists of the contest are selected by a panel of judges based on creativity, workmanship, and more, the grand prize winners and runner-ups in both the dress and tux categories are chosen are determined by a public vote. That means that finalists, their friends, families, and sometimes even their entire communities, get involved in campaigning for votes, largely on social media (as well as through traditional media outlets, like local news broadcasts and newspapers). By promoting their creation while campaigning for votes to win the scholarship, Duck® brand enjoys the exposure gained through this user-generated social buzz. Each year, these social posts and campaigns reiterate what the Duck® brand products can do -- as well as showcasing the creative talents of the nation's high schoolers.

Creating a Legacy with Duck® Brand Tape

On one level, of course: promotion this contest can potentially help Duck® Brand boost sales of their duct tape every year, as thousands of contestants from around the nation need to purchase dozens of their own rolls of tape to build their prom attire. While this might represent a small piece of the pie to Duck®, we would argue that the impact and legacy of the Stuck At Prom contest is a much more significant outcome in terms of marketing power, perhaps more so than the brand ever imagined back in 2001. The idea of a duct tape prom dress, though somewhat eccentric, has become a novelty that most people have come across at one point or another in the past few decades.

With the Stuck At Prom contest, Duck® Brand has created an event that people look forward to every year. I remember a high school classmate of mine who talked for years about entering the contest when we got old enough to go to prom (it turns out, she wasn't even the only person at my high school who did). Because Duck® has built such a strong tradition with the Stuck At Prom contest, folks have come to expect it and look forward to seeing the results every year.

Beyond building anticipation, the contest has also given Duck® a huge opportunity to build its voice and persona as a brand that both encourages creativity and gives back to the community through its scholarships. To achieve a reputation built on fun and creativity when the product you sell is something as common as simple duct tape, albeit in a variety of colors and patterns, is a pretty impressive feat. I think we can be safe in assuming we'll be seeing more duct tape prom creations for years to come.