Why Red Bull Hired Students Instead of Marketers.
By Creatives Takeover Editorial Team · October 21, 2026
How Red Bull Got Its Customers to Sell to Their Own Friends.
Red Bull has a job aimed at university students, and the main requirement is a good reputation on campus. The work is to introduce the product to friends, find the people whose opinions matter, help local shops stock it and, before graduating, recruit a replacement.
The role is called Student Brand Manager, and listings for it have appeared at universities from Leeds to Iowa, with Red Bull recruiting for it in Ireland, Sweden and Hong Kong as well. It is one of the more unusual marketing ideas of recent decades, because Red Bull was never really hiring marketers. It was hiring trust.
A Drink Nobody Knew How to Judge
When Red Bull launched in Austria in 1987, it was selling something new in two ways. The product itself was unfamiliar: a new kind of drink with a purpose people were not used to. And the idea behind it, that you might reach for a drink to feel more awake, did not yet exist as a habit. One creative history of the brand says early focus groups concluded there was no market for it. That account comes from a blog, so treat it with care, but it fits the problem every unfamiliar product faces.
A new category cannot explain itself through advertising. An ad can say a drink gives you energy, but a stranger's claim carries little weight when you have never tried the product. What carries weight is a friend saying "try this before your exam." Nielsen's 2021 trust study, which covered 56 countries, found that 88 percent of people trust recommendations from people they know more than any other form of advertising. Only 71 percent trusted influencers. The same study found that trust in advertising tends to be higher in Latin America, Africa and the Middle East than in North America and Europe, which helps explain why a peer to peer idea travels well across borders.
Red Bull's challenge, then, was to place its product in the hands of people other people already believed.
What a Student Brand Manager Actually Does
Red Bull's own job listings describe the role in some detail. A Student Brand Manager, often called an SBM, is a current student who represents the brand on campus. The stated goals are to reach new students, excite them, increase sales and manage the Red Bull brand at their university.
The daily work is practical. SBMs are asked to complete product focused activity every day, built around three moments when a student might want a can: studying, staying fit and playing sport. One listing says the aim is to make the can "king" on campus. They support or organize student events, build relationships with campus media and share Red Bull content on social networks. They look for shops, cafes and other outlets near campus that could stock the product and pass those leads to the local sales team. They also spot trends and the opinion leaders on campus, and they identify future SBMs to recruit and train.
The structure around the role is what makes it more than a job. In the United States in 2009, the program had close to 300 students. Students were paid, received a Red Bull fridge for their dorm room, and took online classes in what the company called Red Bull University. In Sweden, a listing shows a team manager recruiting, training and managing about 20 SBMs, and prefers candidates who have previously been SBMs themselves. The program trains its own managers from within. The same model runs in many countries with local teams, which is part of its appeal: the idea is global, but each student works in a world of friends and routines that they know better than any head office could.
To picture a typical day, imagine a student during exam week. This is an illustration based on the job descriptions, not a real diary. She brings a few cans to the library group she studies with, mentions the product to a friend who trains with the university football team, and stops by a campus cafe to ask whether the owner would try stocking it. That evening she helps set up a small sports event. None of it looks like marketing to the people involved, and every step is something her job description asks her to do.
Why Students
It would have been easy to hire professional promoters. Red Bull chose students, and the choice rests on four practical reasons.
The first is that student communities are tight. A campus is a small world where people share classes, flats, sports teams and group chats, so a recommendation spreads quickly and credibly. The second is that students have frequent, obvious moments of need: late nights, exams, training sessions. A product that fits a clear moment is easier to sell than one that fits vaguely. The third is habit. Red Bull's listings talk about ensuring long term loyalty starting with the college experience, which treats a student as a lifelong customer rather than a one time sale.
The fourth, and the most important, is voice. A student explaining Red Bull to a friend sounds like a friend, not like a brand. Nobody mistakes it for an advertisement, even though a company is behind it.
Seeding, Not Selling
The method is closer to planting than to selling. One listing describes "one on one seeding in an undercover way," a phrase that shows how deliberate the approach is. The idea is that a product spreads best when it is introduced quietly to the right people at the right moment, rather than announced loudly to everyone.
The program had a louder side too. Red Bull's Wings Team, a group of people driving branded Mini Coopers topped with an oversized can, handed out free samples around towns and campuses. According to one account of the program's earlier years, the Wings Team and the SBMs split the work: the Wings Team provided visibility and sampling, while the SBMs built the events and networks. Together they matched the company's wider early strategy of seeding cans in bars, clubs, gyms and trendy shops, where the product could be seen in the hands of people who made it look desirable.
From Buzz to Sales
The program has changed as the brand has grown. A recent account describes how, around 2009, the program was a looser operation, with SBMs doing the events and the networking while the Wings Team did the driving and sampling. Red Bull has since merged the roles into one, called the Student Marketeer. The expectation has also shifted from creating buzz toward moving product. If a campus cafe does not stock Red Bull, the student is expected to help the sales team win it. According to that account, Red Bull also uses an assessment tool called Wingfinder to map candidates across four areas: creativity, thinking, drive and connections.
This is a useful pattern for any brand. In the early days, the program built familiarity and goodwill, because nobody yet knew what the product was. As the brand became established, the job turned into a support system for distribution. Community comes first, and sales follow once the community exists.
What Red Bull Controls and What It Lets Go
A program like this only works if the brand finds the right balance between control and freedom. Red Bull's listings show both sides. On one side, students are asked to live and breathe the brand's personality traits and company values, and to deliver a positive, credible image. On the other, the same listings describe students as empowered, ask for entrepreneurial and creative thinking in applying the marketing mix on campus, and encourage daring initiatives. The brand sets the character. The students decide the scenes.
That balance also explains the long game. One listing describes the aim of making Red Bull part of student life, a lifestyle choice that continues after university. Red Bull is not only selling a drink to a student. It is hoping the habit, and the story, will follow that student into working life.
The Honesty Question
It would be incomplete to tell this story without the uncomfortable part. A program built on friends recommending a product raises a fair question: do the people being persuaded know a company is paying the person doing the persuading? The phrase "undercover" in the job listing suggests the answer was not always obvious. Many countries now require paid promoters to disclose commercial relationships, and attitudes toward hidden marketing have hardened since these programs began.
There is also the question of what is being promoted. Energy drinks contain caffeine, and critics have long asked whether a stimulant should be marketed to young people through their peers. Red Bull's job listings stress being professional and credible, but the tension is real, and any brand borrowing this model should expect those questions. A recent account of the program also notes that as it has become more data driven and focused on sales targets, the risk is that it loses the human, accidental feel that made it work in the first place.
Why "They Just Gave Away Free Cans" Is the Wrong Lesson
The easy explanation is that Red Bull handed out samples and students liked free stuff. That misses what the company actually built. Free samples alone are cheap and everywhere, and most sampling programs disappear without a trace.
What made this one work is a set of design choices. Selection mattered: only students with a good standing on campus qualified. Training mattered: Red Bull University taught the brand's values and the product's facts. Autonomy mattered: students were encouraged to invent their own ideas. And accountability mattered: the work connected to real outcomes, like new outlets stocking the product. The cans were the smallest part of the system. The real asset was a network of credible people who understood the brand well enough to speak for it in their own words.
Borrowing the Idea Without the Budget
You do not need Red Bull's resources to use the principle. Here is how a small brand could start.
- Find the people your customers already trust. Skip celebrities. Look for the local connectors: the person in a gym, a co-working space, a student society or a neighborhood group whose opinion people ask for.
- Give them a role, not a script. Red Bull gave students goals and training, then let them decide how to reach their friends. People repeat what they believe, and they believe what they helped shape.
- Reward them properly. Red Bull paid students and gave them real experience in brand work. A discount code is not a relationship.
- Tell people the truth about the arrangement. Openness protects the trust you are borrowing.
- Connect the activity to results. Track which introductions turn into customers, and let the best performers grow into bigger roles.
A hypothetical example: a new coffee roaster could recruit a few people who already host running clubs or study groups, give them product and a small budget for events, and ask them to introduce the coffee to the people who show up. It is slow, but each introduction comes from someone the buyer already trusts.
Every Student Brand Manager is asked to do one more thing before they leave: find the next one. The program is built to outlast any single student, which may be its cleverest feature. Each graduating SBM takes a little of the brand into the working world and leaves a successor behind.