Summary
This downloadable PDF lesson plan for English teachers uses the Stanley Cup craze to explore viral marketing. This ESL class material is perfect for discussing modern trends, business, and consumer psychology using a real-world case study. Based on a short video about how the Stanley Cup tumbler went viral, this lesson helps students understand modern marketing strategies. Activities include a vocabulary matching exercise with key business terms, video comprehension questions, and a fill-in-the-gap task with useful phrases for discussing trends. The lesson culminates in a group speaking activity where students create their own marketing pitch for an everyday product, applying the concepts and language learned throughout the class.
Activities
- Students start by discussing viral products and trendy items, activating their prior knowledge on the topic before diving into the specific case of the Stanley Cup tumbler.
- A vocabulary matching exercise introduces essential marketing terms like 'brand affinity,' 'leverage,' and 'scarcity,' preparing students for the language they will hear in the video.
- After watching a video about the brand's success, students answer comprehension questions to check their understanding of the marketing strategies that led to its popularity.
- The lesson includes a grammar focus on the passive voice in a business context, with clear examples and a practice exercise where students rewrite sentences to sound more professional.
- The final speaking task challenges students to work in groups and create a marketing pitch for a 'boring' product, using the vocabulary and grammar from the lesson to make it go viral.
Imagine going back to 1994 and asking people what a hot product would look like in 2024. Chances are it wouldn't resemble a Stanley Cup.
Yet here we are, the reusable water bottles are one of the most sought-after forms of beverage containment, largely thanks to TikTok.
Stanley's revenue jumped from $74 million in 2019 to $750 million in 2023.
But look behind the massive sales, and there's a deeper case study in effective product marketing and leveraging cultural momentum.
I think with the Stanley Cup brand, you're not really buying into Stanley, you're buying into the community of all the other girls who have one in their hand.
And it's very similar, in my opinion, to Jolie, the showerhead company that's gotten pretty popular through customers who post about it.
On one hand, it's something to brag about, right? You have this amazing piece of hardware in your home.
It's that with the Stanley Cups as well, but it's also this sense of community, like everybody's got their Stanley Cup, everybody's staying hydrated.
It's something that signals only good things.
Stanley Cup's marketing has been successful in the diversity by which it's gone to market.
Stanley Cup is a 110-year-old company, right? And the products aren't terribly novel since its conception 110 years ago.
The only new product it's had, as far as a new actual product, was I think in 2016, 2017, the Quencher Tumbler.
They have different colorways since, but the product has been by and large very much the same.
But the marketing savviness of Stanley Cup is its ability to not only do the traditional marketing means, but also leverage other vehicles by which the message is not only reaching new people but done in new contexts.
This diversity of communication derivative works provides new opportunities to bring new people into the brand, into the idea.
So they've partnered with content creators throughout TikTok that have taken the brand, taking its products and reworked it through their own cultural frames for people who self-identify or subscribe to a similar culture as that creator.
The success of Stanley's marketing is mainly credited to its company's president, Terrence Riley.
This is the same man who made Crocs cool during his five-year stint as the footwear company's Chief Marketing Officer.
After Riley saw the now-famous TikTok of a woman's Stanley Cup surviving a car fire and still containing ice, he said it showed the product is "built for life" and offered the woman free Stanley and a new car.
When I saw that he was at the helm of all this, you go, "Oh, of course," because it is a very similar playbook, not in its executions but in its ethos.
In that, brands are not owned by the company; they are stewarded by the company, but they are co-created.
Their meanings are co-created by the people, and if you invite people in to co-create, to co-author the narrative, you share the pen with these people to be a part of the mythology and the folklore.
They'll do things that you could never do, they'll take you in places that you can never be, they'll provide a level of media that you can never buy because people trust people more than any form of marketing communications.
Stanley, the top all-steel Thermos bottle that's completely defendable.
Stanley has always been kind of a blue-collar, utilitarian, masculine product, right? It had an efficacy, it had a utility.
And not unlike what Yeti has done with coolers and probably their own tumblers and a portfolio of things, they've really found a way to expand appeal, to invite new users in, to capture a higher margin by redefining the brand for a new generation and new audiences.
But it's all rooted in the product quality.
We see the absolute power of scarcity, the absolute appeal of limited editions, and importantly, what we also see is desire and demand on full display.
Social commerce hasn't just catalyzed this, it's created community around it, which is yet another thing we see here, which is the power of community and ultimately identity.
Naturally, Stanley's warp-speed rise in popularity has not been obstacle-free.
There were the uncivilized situations at Target, the woman who was arrested for allegedly stealing $2,500 worth of cups, and customer concerns over potential lead content.
The company responded to the concern, saying it does use lead-containing sealing material during the manufacturing process, but that the lead-containing parts are covered with stainless steel, making the cup safe.
That prompted competitors like Hydro Flask and Owala to take shots at Stanley in social media posts and promote the safety of their own products.
But none of this appears to be slowing Stanley down.
They have a much better grasp on who their customer is and who's buying and why they're buying than probably most of the players in their category that sell through retail.
If you look at Stanley as a company, it's not a company that was venture-backed and forced to grow over a couple years after launch.
It's a brand that took its time to grow and mature and build brand affinity.
And I think that's a great lesson because a lot of people who start a brand today, they want it to blow up tomorrow, and they want millions of fans who are die-hard fans of their brand to be really excited about what they're doing.
But that takes a lot of time and consistency and continuity over the years.
The other one I think is figuring out how you turn your brand or your marketing engine into, instead of a megaphone, more sort of a peer marketing engine.
It's interesting because Yeti, Hydro Flask, these folks were sort of mainstays in the category.
And again, I've never seen an ad for Hydro Flask; I've only seen content for Yeti, particularly around the coolers on online, but never seen an ad for it.
But it's the cultural contagion of Stanley that has created such a gravitational pull, and I haven't seen the other brands been able to leverage its power in this way.
Which, to me, there's probably a lot of folks looking at this case study, their competitors, saying, "How do we, if not do our version of this, but how do we, in a more savvy way of looking at it, how do we ignite our own version of cultural contagion in ways that are very unique to us and the people who know us and love us?"
There's no question this isn't just net positive, it's net incredibly positive.
And mayhem at Target, which is what we saw when they released a limited edition color, right?
First of all, people are going to be people, and that's not Stanley's fault, that's not Target's fault, right? Idiots are going to be idiots.
But again, what it does is it shows demand, it illustrates desire, it puts it on full display.
We are all desperate to connect, to belong, to express who we are, to have a means of identification that is culturally relevant.
And that's just humans being humans. We were the same way in the caves. The architecture of our brains is unchanged.
And I don't think it's that bad to have what is a relatively affordable "luxury" and accessible aspirational vehicle.
If it makes you happy, do it, as long as it doesn't hurt anyone else.
Vocabulary focus
This lesson focuses on key business and marketing vocabulary. Students will learn and practice terms such as 'sought-after,' 'leverage,' 'brand affinity,' 'utilitarian,' 'steward,' 'scarcity,' 'cultural momentum,' and 'cultural contagion' to discuss modern marketing strategies and trends.
Grammar focus
The grammar section concentrates on the use of the passive voice in a business and marketing context. Students learn why it is used to sound more formal and objective by focusing on the action rather than the agent. The lesson provides clear examples and a practical transformation exercise.
The Stanley cup craze: How a tumbler went viral
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