When Super M briefed us, they were looking for the chance to engage with consumers in a year-long campaign that would do more than just promote the brand, it would show consumers that they knew their audience.
We’d used the characters of Baz & Stretch in previous animated Super M promotions online but never to their fullest potential. There was something to them that went beyond playing silent roles as wide-eyed fans in our earlier animations. We knew they were the key to driving interaction with consumers.
Most brands create these sorts of characters as mascots for the brand itself, but Baz & Stretch were designed to reflect the interests of the audience. They don’t just belong to Super M: they’re fans of the brand with their own exciting lives and a wide variety of interests. We’d already planned to use them in follow-up campaigns and this new campaign we were drafting needed to really touch base with consumers and get into their headspace. We called it M is for Me and that meant it had to be all about the consumer experience.
The thing about people is that, when they buy a brand, they invest more than just their money into the experience. It becomes a part of their lifestyle. Especially in the current marketplace, and dealing with today’s youth, you’re looking at people who buy everything from their sneakers to their smartphones in order to say something about themselves. In essence, the “M” in Super M already belonged to the consumer. We just needed to show them how in tune the brand was with their interests.
Once we had that core idea in place, we divided the campaign into some pretty clear-cut phases: M is for Music, M is for Money and… well, you’ll have to wait and see about the rest. An energetic, youthful audience like the one that purchases Super M needed a brand to approach them with something that resonated with them – the chance to win something big and exciting, and the chance to keep winning throughout the campaign. We offered consumers both those opportunities with a simple code located on the wrapper of every Super M they purchased. All they had to do was SMS that code to us and they immediately gained entry to win both weekly airtime bundles and a crazy grand prize of a trip for themselves and their friends to visit the world famous Ibiza Rocks Hotel for a four-night, all-expenses-paid trip. What’s more, we’re sending them to this insane party on Ibiza Rocks’ eighth birthday, which promises to be a one-of-a-kind experience.
It took only a few days for word to get out about the competition once stock hit the stands, with entries climbing from almost 1000 on the first day to peaks of over 3000 votes per day in just two weeks. By the time January came around we were receiving daily entries nearing 10,000 entries a day. By the end of the campaign we had received 284,966 entries. Ultimately, one lucky winner was selected from all those entrants and he’s planning his trip right now.
But that’s just the first phase of the campaign.
One of the most important factors in creating a campaign like this is making it simple for consumers to enter again and again. Especially when we now shift into the “M is for Money” phase of the campaign. Things shouldn’t get confusing in this transitional period, and so making use of the same USSD code and SMS entry system for the next phase of the campaign will make that transition as smooth as possible.
M is for Money has already kicked off and we look forward to seeing even better results in this leg of the campaign. And hey, we’re already warming up for next year’s version of the same thing!
[Originally Published at BizCommunity]
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