It’s a pretty basic marketing technique: if you’ve got a good product, show off what it can do. Hardly the stuff of which internet memes are made. Unless, that is, the product is the Blendtec Total Blender, the guy demonstrating it is Blendtec founder Tom Dickson, and what he’s using to demonstrate it is stuff like rake handles and video cameras. ‘Cause if you have all that, you’ve got yourself Will It Blend, and then you’ve got yourself a cultural sensation.
With a nearly indestructible polycarbonate jug and stainless steel blades spinning at 330 mph, the Total Blender packs considerably more punch than your average margarita mixer. Dickson is equal parts Dad, Bill Nye, and merciless destructor, liquifying glow sticks and blowing up Bic lighters with a zeal that suggests he’d be a pretty fun guy to party with. Well, until you got on his bad side, of course. Things that piss him off — like Grand Theft Auto IV and Esky Awards — tend to end up, well, blended.
Every episode begins with Dickson saying, “Will it blend? That is the question,” and ends with “Yes, it blends!” splashed across the screen. Dickson is also fond of cautioning, “Don’t breathe this,” as the smoky dust of the just-blended object wafts out of the jug.
When Dickson says an object is being blended “by popular demand,” he isn’t kidding. Blendtec’s YouTube channel is the 36th most subscribed of all time. That’s partly because he never stops — no pun intended — mixing things up, sending his staff back to Best Buy with little more than video camera dust in Will It Return? But it’s also because he’s a marketing genius who’s mastered the art of cross-internet-phenomenon-pollination. By blending everything from an iPhone to Wii remotes to the Don’t Blend Me, Bro stun gun, Dickson keeps those geek hits coming in a way that no smoothie demonstration could ever do. He even takes Will It Blend on the road to trade shows, proving to doubters that “it” even blends live.
So what will not blend? According to Dickson, coins and crowbars…and Chuck Norris.
