Solo Stove’s quick descent from viral fame following its buzzy campaign starring Snoop Dogg has left the marketing world questioning the value of celebrity endorsements and social notoriety.

The smokeless outdoor fire pit surged in popularity late last year when Snoop starred in a campaign created with The Martin Agency playing on the idea that the cannabis connoisseur had “decided to give up smoke.”

The campaign led to a boost in brand awareness for Solo Stove, driving 1.2 million brand mentions in social media posts and news articles, a Solo spokesperson told Ad Age last month.

But it appears that buzz did little in the way of driving sales. On Jan. 8, Solo Stove’s parent company, Solo Brands, announced its President, CEO and Director John Merris would “mutually separate from the company,” with interim Chief Financial Officer Andrea Tarbox noting in the same announcement that the recent campaign did not “lead to the sales lift” the company originally had planned.

This idea that the Snoop campaign was designed to drive sales rather than build brand awareness has resulted in a firestorm of debate within the marketing industry about what went wrong at Solo Brands. 

Underneath the uproar, there’s plenty that marketers can learn from the saga about how to best execute celebrity brand partnerships and how to communicate expectations for campaigns to the rest of the C-suite and board at large.

1. Define ROI for the stakeholders

When a marketer addresses company executives or the board about a planned campaign, it’s important that everyone has the same definition of what the return on investment for the effort would actually look like, said Grace Clarke, founder of growth marketing consultancy Grace Clarke Consulting. She has worked to capitalize on virality at direct-to-consumer clock brand Loftie as well as olive oil brand Graza, and has coordinated celebrity-led campaigns elsewhere.

“Build alignment in advance; make sure all stakeholders are aligned on what ROI means,” she said. In practice, that looks like speaking simply and concisely, without using jargon or vague language, per Clarke. “Leadership doesn’t need beautiful charts, long decks, or sugar-coated explanations; these things don’t really answer their questions around whether an effort meaningfully moved the needle.”

“I’ve heard the best CMOs I’ve worked with say things like, ‘that is not what this campaign was meant to do’ or ‘that’s not a realistic expectation,’” she added.

More: Snoop, Solo Stove and why creativity is under attack

It’s also important not to make any promises regarding sales, said Daniel Andersson, chief creative officer, North America at FutureBrand. He has coordinated partnerships between brands including Absolut Vodka and celebrities such as Spike Lee. 

“So far in my career, I have never walked into a board presentation and guaranteed something,” Andersson said.

Solo Stove’s communication on the executive change contained what appears to be contradictory language related to campaign goals.

While Tarbox partly blamed the effort for failing to deliver expected sales results, she also acknowledged that “there is a significant opportunity for us to build awareness and that these new campaigns will expand our reach and benefit our brands over the long term.” And in a later statement to Ad Age, the brand described the campaign as “extremely successful” saying it “inserted our Solo Stove brand into cultural conversations.”

When asked if the Snoop campaign led to Merris’ departure, a representative said no, but did not elaborate.

Martin Agency CEO Kristen Cavallo, in a LinkedIn post commenting on the matter, stated that “the job of an agency is first and foremost to breakthrough, in order to set a stage for everything that comes next.”

2. Push awareness efforts down the funnel

Many marketers believe that viral moments and celebrity-led campaigns can produce more than just increased awareness if the brand pulls the right levers. 

The goal should be to “create arbitrage to amplify that virality,” Clarke said. For example, Clarke pointed to the time when Glossier worked with Beyoncé to debut a Glossier product on the red carpet at the 2018 Grammys.

“That looked like one smart decision, but underneath it, Glossier had a checklist of things they had already done and would do as a result,” she said, adding that the team orchestrated a symphony of social posts, and made sure that they had creators, brand ambassadors and top customers confirmed to post about the product ahead of time to push different aspects of the message. Glossier does not make its sales public.

Continuing to hammer home the messaging using the brand founder and team’s personal social profiles works well too, Clarke said. For example, a founder with a strong personal brand could post a TikTok revealing what happened behind the scenes of a new celebrity-led campaign. 

Other ways to push brand awareness down the funnel include creating new product offerings based on viral moments to further reach across platforms, said Kendall Dickieson, author of “No Filter,” a newsletter that covers viral social media marketing tactics.

Deux, a better-for-you donut and cookie dough brand, recently partnered with influencer Emma Chamberlain’s company Chamberlain Coffee on a campaign. And rather than simply doing a collab post with Chamberlain or her coffee brand, Deux took the effort a few steps further to drive sales rather than just awareness.

“On top of the product being authentic, our marketing execution, The Donut Shoppe pop-up in Los Angeles, took it to the next level to create a space to celebrate the launch and create a space that perfectly represented the product,” Deux Founder and CEO Sabeena Ladha said in an email.

The brand said the effort increased retail sales and helped it expand distribution with retailers such as Foxtrot and GoPuff.

3. Choose the celebrities you partner with wisely

It should not only be very clear to the customer why the celebrity and the product make sense together, but the pairing should also feel more authentic than stunt-like.

“When you want to combine brand reputation growth with sales, I think that's where you really need to connect those dots” between the celebrity and the product, Andersson said.  “Otherwise, you won’t close that sale, because people will see it as fake or superficial,” he continued.

In his experience, Andersson said, when the brand has had a deeper connection with the celebrity it is partnering with, the campaign has led to increased sales. For example, when Absolut partnered with director Spike Lee, it created a limited-edition Absolut Brooklyn apple-ginger flavored vodka. Lee’s father was raised in Brooklyn, and Absolut even found the street where he grew up and designed the bottle around what it looked like. The apple flavor was a reference to New York City being nicknamed “the big apple,” and the ginger referenced the spice that Brooklyn brings to the five boroughs.

Ranjan Roy, VP of strategy at lingerie brand Adore Me, said that picking celebrities who don’t cost an arm and a leg to work with is key. When Adore Me partnered with singer Bebe Rexha on a collection in 2021, for example, it didn’t necessarily lead to a major sales bump. But because Adore Me’s spend on the partnership was still at the experimental level, expectations weren’t particularly high going into the effort. 

Roy suggested keeping celebrity partnership budgets low for this reason, and not relying on a celebrity-led campaign to boost a company’s stock price or something similar. The Adore Me team, Roy said, had been quoted prices to partner with other celebrities that would have been far more expensive than what made sense as “experimental” spend for the brand. 

Taking those deals would have basically been “betting our jobs and the company,” so Adore Me turned them down. That’s ultimately part of why Adore Me ended up partnering with Rexha, Roy said, because her price was “not outside the range of experiment” for the brand.