KiKi Challenge: Dance Challenge or Genius Product Management
Kiki Challenge has gained huge momentum on the internet with people dancing to the tunes of #InMyFeeling, Toronto Rapper Drake’s newest original single, in every corner of the globe. It has become the coolest celebrity endorsed way to start off your day. With Caira, Will Smith, J Hope all taking part in the #KiKiChallenge in increasingly adventurous surroundings.
I was drawn to this challenge because of the sheer intelligence behind it. The challenge not only helped Drake generate around $2 million+ in streaming revenues alone for #InMyFeeling, it also made the it one of the most popular songs of the decade. In My Feelings trended at #1 in the Billboard Top 100 for almost a month. The album had a record-breaking first week on it’s release with all of Scorpion’s 25 songs debuting on Hot 100. Not only this, Drake even broke the Beatles record with seven simultaneous Top 10 songs.
On the surface, this might look like sheer luck, but I couldn’t stop wondering if some genius Product Manager was behind it the whole time who had carefully planned this whole gimmick to promote his client’s newest album Scorpion to maximise profits. So, here is a breakdown of what, how, and when #KiKiChallenge became an inseparable part of our beings.
How did it all start?
Well, that’s kind of a mystery or a very well disguised marketing strategy. It all started as Shaggy, Comedian and Instagram star, posting a clip of himself on Instagram grooving to the tunes of #InMyFeelings and it all just sort of spiralled up from there. Soon, every John and Jane Doe in every corner of the world was making a clip of themselves dancing to the music of Drake’s latest single and posting it on Instagram. It took, but a few days, for it go viral !
It was all light and fun in the beginning, till the time a moving car entered the scene and soon people were emulating this too. Many would jump out of a moving car to perform and it only got scarier from there as people started filming in increasingly adventurous surroundings. The challenge soon became a a safety nightmare. We had taken it too far!
Where does Product Management come in?
To answer this question, we need a deeper understanding of what was really at play here. Let’s break this down into smaller components to understand how and why this might just have been one of the top innovative Product Management stunts of the decade!
We have the product, i.e. Drake’s album ‘Scorpion’ in one hand and a genius Product Manager in the other. The Product Manager has many jobs to accomplish- designing the product, placing the product in the market, enhancing user experience, marketing the product and lastly, generating revenues.
A good product managers’ mission is not just to provide a user with a good product experience but to stealthily slip the product into the user’s everyday life so that it becomes an integral part of their existence. This ensures that the user keeps coming back to the product which in turn makes sure that the product has a steady stream of revenue. #KiKiChallenge achieved all this and much more. Not to mention, the user interface, the video was very catchy itself!
The dance challenge, very strategically placed the hit single #InMyFeelings and the Album Scorpion at the very centre of users life. To be able to perform the exact same steps, a user would need to practice. This can be achieved only if he keeps going back to the same video, watching and learning on repeat. Moreover, in order to stay at the top of their #KiKiChallenge game they would need to stay up to date as to what their friends, neighbors, community has been achieving out of it, how far did they go in the challenge, how viral did their content became. So, more of #InMyFeelings for them!
Having built a simple, yet catchy User Interface (UI) and exploiting it by designing a brilliant user experience (UX) helped generate a windfall profits.
An album, which I personally feel would have done just okay on the charts with any other usual marketing stunt, outperformed one of the most beloved and pure genius bands of all times (The Beatles)! This will remain with us as we grow old and become a part of our beings. We will keep going back to the the #KiKiChallenge videos, share it with generations to come and have a good laugh!
Kudos to this brilliant Product Manager! :)
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