India Social Case Challenge- edition 2

Category: Best Short-term campaign

Title: Maruti Suzuki Ritz – Live the moment

Share a little about your organisation/ brand

Maruti Suzuki Ritz is one of the hatchback car’s in India. It is targeted to young audiences who prefer a stylish car with excellent performance and sporty design. There were around 100,000 cars sold in the segment in October 2010.

Executive Summary 

The ‘Live the Moment’ social media campaign played a role in a full 360 degree communication across TV, Radio, On-ground and Digital. With its social tools, it successfully managed to amplify the ‘Live the Moment’ philosophy reaching users across the digital space. This was the promotion in which a car was actually given away as a prize through a social contest. A target of 25000 moments seemed challenging to start with but almost double the number was achieved.

Nature of the programme/ activity/ campaign

Business to Consumer

Duration of the said programme/ activity/ campaign. Start date end date

January 2011 – March 2011

Background

Maruti Suzuki Ritz sold over 100,000 cars in just over a year. To celebrate the achievement Maruti Suzuki Ritz wanted to create excitement and pride amongst Ritz owners as well as reach out to potential customers.

Objectives

The objective of the program was to use social media to let people share the moments of their lives. With the Ritz as the backdrop this was intended to get Ritz owners together on a social platform and build pride and excitement among the Ritz owners and their friends and family. The target was to collect 25,000 moments in 2 months.

Strategy and Planning

We launched a social media program to help users do precisely that. This was to complement the mass media campaign around ‘Live the Moment’ and build further buzz around the brand.

Stakeholders

The initiative was led by the marketing team at Maruti Suzuki Limited and sought to engage the existing Ritz owners to play up the feeling of pride in owning the car as well as their friends and family who could potentially be future customers.

Choice of channel/s

The strategy was implemented across all social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, auto blogs and forums and culminated in a microsite which helped collate all the moments from participants and viral them out to their friends and family.

Implementation

The ‘Live the Moment’ microsite allowed users to login to the site using their Facebook or Twitter account or by registering on the site. They could then submit any moment in their lives that was memorable to them. The best moments had a chance to win awesome prizes including a Maruti Suzuki Ritz car.

To win a person had to collect a minimum number of votes before the jury would look at his entry.

The website allowed the user to invite his friends on Facebook and Twitter to vote for him as well as a feature by which he could invite all his email contacts as well. Using APIs, a contact importer was built through which the user could fetch all the contacts form email.

All moments were shown as pixels on the moment’s wall, to view any moment one had to simply click at the pixel. The site featured a search by which one could locate moments using their moment number or the name of the participant. There was even a live stream built-in where the moments were displayed as soon as they were entered.

To create a full 360 degree impact, on ground promotion as also undertaken at Café Coffee Days and PVR Cinemas across the country. Promoters collected moments from users offline and the website provided them an import facility to add these moments to the Moments Wall.

Impact and Outcome

Maruti Suzuki Ritz generated thousands of moments and established the brand objectives.

• Close to 50,000 unique entries submitted by users
• More than 2.2 million users visited the microsite
• More than 2 lakh votes received by entrants
• More than 1 lakh fans added on the Maruti Suzuki Ritz Facebook page.

Learnings

The thing that worked for the campaign was the fact that people wanted to share their experiences specially with the car they love. While the program allowed people to enter any Moment, most of the entries revolved around what people did with the Ritz. By building social viral ability it was possible to reach a large audience and get participation from a large section of society with very small media budgets.

What next

Second social media campaign along the same lines has already been launched.

Testimonials

N/A

External Agencies: Any partners who helped you with strategy

The strategic planning and implementation of the campaign was handled by our Digital Media Agency Interface Business Solutions (I) Pvt. Ltd.

External Agencies: Any partners who helped you with implementation

The strategic planning and implementation of the campaign was handled by our Digital Media Agency Interface Business Solutions (I) Pvt. Ltd.

Suitable title

Maruti Suzuki Ritz – Live the moment

Fact Sheet

Name of Company: Maruti Suzuki Ritz

Category: Automotive

Case Study submitted by: Sabyasachi Mitter

Website:  http://www.marutisuzukiritz.com/