BUSINESS REFLECTION: Loaded for Bear: Red Bull snarled Sandton traffic in a marketing own goal

Red Bull this week had Sandton commuters seeing red, providing a salient lesson in Marketing 101 – if you want to promote your brand, don’t piss off and inconvenience thousands of people the day after your big event.

To wit, Red Bull – which makes energy drinks that allegedly “give you wings” – held a Box Cart Race on Sandton Drive on Sunday, 4 October.

There is nothing wrong with staging such an affair on a Sunday when the roads are relatively quiet. And I am sure it was good fun, if that is your kind of thing.

But holding it in the heart of Joburg’s busy financial district, which has had mounting traffic congestion for years because of shoddy city planning and the business stampede from the old downtown core, meant that the organisers should have made a plan to have everything cleared away on Sunday night.

They did not, and the result on Monday morning was gridlock, chaos and road rage.

Part-time commuter

I work from home and seldom travel to the Sandton CBD during peak traffic times, but happened to have a meeting there on Monday morning. My Uber, at one point, moved about 20 metres in the space of 15 minutes. I was almost tempted to get out and walk.

Horns were blaring and middle fingers were waved with abandon as vehicles jumped queues and faced oncoming traffic – such snags do not bring out the best in Joburg drivers who are an unruly lot at the best of times.

Joburg traffic jams of course are not news – such bottlenecks are often the fate of Johannesburg residents who have to navigate dysfunctional traffic lights, ill-timed road blocks, blue-light brigades, the odd cash-in-transit heist and other obstacles on their way to work on a daily basis.

But by all accounts this was far worse than usual, and the point is that it was surely a foreseeable consequence of the aftermath of Red Bull’s race. And yet, there was clearly no plan to remove the mess before the mad Monday morning rush.

My community WhatsApp group was full of enraged commentary.

“People are wild, trying to skip the queue and creating double lanes on the opposite lane,” was one comment.

Pointedly, another person said: “I will never buy a Red Bull again.”

In short, a marketing own goal and flop of note. As a brand, Red Bull in the eyes of many Sandton commuters is now on a par with the rand.

What really grinds my gears about this fiasco is the complete disregard shown for other people’s time, and, for that matter, money.

Most of the people who travel to Sandton for work on a regular basis are low-wage workers paid by the hour who have a long and arduous commute to begin with from places such as Diepsloot and Soweto.

How many of them lost wages because they were late for work this week through no fault of their own? My guess would be quite a few.

And while the carts in the race were powered by gravity alone with no motors – so it was a “green event” with no direct carbon emissions from the race itself – a lot more carbon was emitted from Sandton traffic on Monday than would have typically been the case because of the gridlock.

This would have also negatively affected fuel consumption for South African motorists before the stout fuel price hike on Wednesday to record highs.

A different lens

One prism through which to regard this clusterf**k is that of state failure, past and present. Many of Johannesburg’s traffic woes reflect the apartheid past and the lack of investment in proper public transport. They also speak to the pothole-riddled disaster of subsequent municipal governance with its lack of planning and inability to maintain traffic lights.

But this was caused by a company in the private sector at a time when business on many other fronts has been stepping up to the plate to help fix the mess created by the state.

Hopefully, the new city council that emerges after next month’s elections will tell Red Bull “no bloody way” next year. Joburg’s residents deserve better.

In advance of this race, Red Bull flagged a promo – “Everything you need to know before the carts hit Sandton Drive” – on its website.

Everything you needed to know was listed from A to Z.

Take, for example, M: “Mzansi. South Africa is still the only African nation to have hosted Red Bull Box Cart Race, and this is our eighth edition. Proudly local. Proudly ridiculous.”

What was ridiculous was Red Bull’s lack of foresight regarding the mayhem and inconvenience it caused for Johannesburg motorists – and the tainting of its brand in the process. DM

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