IndiaSocial Case Challenge – edition 1

Category: Long-term Initiatives

Winner of Position #2

Title: Fastrack Fans

Share a little about your organisation

Fastrack is a brand of watches from the house of Titan Industries Ltd which is the market leader in the watches category in India.

Fastrack was launched in 1998 as a sub-brand of Titan. It was spun off as an independent brand of watches targeting the urban youth in 2005. Since then, it has infiltrated the lives of India’s youth with designs that were refreshingly different and affordable. During that time, Fastrack also jumped headlong into the sunglasses business and in the last 4 years has quickly notched up the title of being the largest sunglasses brand in the country.
Fastrack has now pushed past the horizons into newer areas – bags, belts, wallets and wrist bands – as part of its mission to offer the youth everything they need to be cool!

Executive Summary

Moving over from outsourcing our social media initiative to an in-house program has allowed us to engage and really connect with our audience in typical Fastrack fashion and style. Having college-interns run this Fastrack initiative has been a great step in being able to speak the language of our customers/fans. The essence of the brand being communicated in real-time and in a manner that is acceptable and easily understood by our customers is our constant thought as we go through daily customer queries, feedback, comments, suggestions & brand announcements. Our initiative is focused around the experience we deliver to the fans and both current and potential, driving them toward a better, and more personalized connection with the brand.

Background

Fastrack is essentially a youth brand, and what better way to get in touch with our target audience of 15-25 year-olds (SEC A,B) than having a presence on the very platforms that they use daily? Social networking is a big part of today’s youth and we have made it a big part of us, extending all our online initiatives to incorporate our social networks and communities.

With this step forward we worked on tapping the pulse of the youth by answering queries, getting feedback about the brand and our collections and campaigns, engagement, resolving complaints & doubts and interacting with ‘Fastrack Fans’ daily, 24/7.

Approach/ Strategy

Please share details about the initiative stating clearly the strategy, objectives, goals, the duration, resources and budgets allocated.

Fastrack was one of the first brands to use social media to engage with potential and existing consumers. We started with two communities on Facebook and a Twitter account in September 2007. We worked closely with Blogworks to create relevant content and monitor conversations. From April 2009, we decided to get all the work done in-house and worked with college interns to create relevant, engaging and more importantly, unique content – such as origins of the Fastrack logo, behind the scenes working of the brand coupled with innovative contests (myexbox) and campaign/collection updates. The presence of the brand on the digital sphere – both in terms of reach and budgets – has only been getting larger and given the relevance of this medium to our audience (15-25 year olds), we will continue on our way to engage with our audience in as fun, entertaining and rewarding way as we have done so far.

Stakeholders

Which stakeholders did you engage through this initiative and how? How was/ has this initiative been received by them so far?
Our entire social media initiative is geared toward our existing and potential customers. As one of the 1st Indian brands to take on social media in a big way, we have endeavoured to stay ahead in terms of what we do for our fans and the experience we give them. They whole-heartedly embrace this as organic conversations burst onto our communities, fans upload pictures with our products, share our celebrations & store launches and a host of other social media activities.

About the initiative

Share details about your activities, touch-points that you created/ channels you used to reach the stakeholders.

At the beginning we jumpstarted our initiative by linking all our existing properties to the new social media platforms we joined. Facebook, Flickr and Youtube were the first networks added to our consumer outreach. The great response we received pushed us to integrate even more and we created the URL re-direct http://www.fastrack.in/facebook to take fans directly to our fan page. Since its inception, this link has been used across our billboards, take-ones, contest forms, emailers and all offline forms.

A major component of success for this fan page was the use of Facebook social ads to create awareness of the brands presence on Facebook. In the larger picture we have led all our campaigns, both offline and online with social media links on our microsite and landing page, previews on our communities & applications dedicated to display our latest collections. We even create unique profile pictures and tabs on our Facebook fan page for every scheme and campaign.

We then jumped right into Twitter allowing us to connect with fans on a more individual basis, answering queries directly, solving customer issues, giving out store addresses and the like. On the flip side we have also taken offline activities and brought them into the word of social media with a fine example being our Twitter Contest where we asked fans tweet pictures of our billboard signs announcing the launch of our latest Accessories segment.

Impact – Outcome

What was the impact achieved vis-à-vis goals set? How did you measure the impact/ results?

Our main objective was to reach out to all the existing Fastrack customers/fans and allow them a closer interaction with the brand.

• In less than a year we have grown from approximately 2,100 fans on Facebook in April ’09 to over 47,500 fans as of Feb ’10 – that’s a 2262% growth in 10 months!
• Not only has our fan count increased but so have the interactions, going up from about 10-20 a week to almost 700-800. Comments on our posts have touched the 150 mark at times.

Most of our pre and post-analysis is measured through online tools such as the built-in ‘Insights’ for Facebook pages, tweetreach.com and twitteranalyzer.com for our Twitter account. From Insights we can discern the numbers of fans we add per day, the interactions per week, the number of views for pictures (on Facebook & Flickr) and videos. For Twitter we get details such as number of followers online at a time so we can maximise how many people we reach with our messages, and the growth of our follower-base to coincide with campaigns/collections.

Learnings

What were the key learnings? Positive and things to do better; share any challenges you might have faced.
One of the major learnings we got after moving into social media is the requirement for an in-house team member to handle the field. It’s essential that the person in charge of social media for a company is in touch with both the brand and the people it is trying to communicate to. They need to be someone who understands the essence of the brand, yet speaks the language of the fans/followers. Having a portal for answering customer queries, reporting the launch of new stores/collections and even giving previews for the brand is a great way to connect with your fans and this is what we strive to do daily.

Another important learning has been it is good to have a central hub from which most of your activities and updates are localised so as to have a better reach, focus and maximise participation. This is what we have with Facebook being our main platform and centring our communications with the fans on it. On the same Facebook note, it was a good idea to move from Facebook Groups to Facebook Pages where we have a lot more tools to analyse data about fan interactions and additions.

One of the initiatives we need to quickly close is Ecommerce which would be a great avenue for us to delve into, working out linking direct customer queries to sales and closing the loop in terms of connecting online interactions with retail transactions. This would take the social media exposure of Fastrack to reach new levels once we introduce an online retail experience to our fans & followers

What Next

Where is the programme/ initiative now? Where will it go from here?

Currently we’re on Facebook with 5,97,659 fans , Twitter with 2,200+ followers, Mobile community (via SMS GupShup) with 19803+ members and Youtube and Flickr. What we are aiming at is not just the numbers, but engaging better with our fans, be it through Ecommerce, more engaging, insightful content or even linking online interactions to an offline format.

Reasoning

What in your opinion makes your programme/ initiative/ activity a case-study/ best practice case.

What we’ve done best is turn the social media marketing on its head, so that instead of out-sourcing the work, adding another level of direct communication with the brand, we have shed that layer so that we can deal with our fans on a much more personal and real-time basis. To do this we have taken on college interns who walk in the shoes of our TG and talk their lingo. This allows for two things. One, the essence of the brand is better communicated from an in-house person and second, we are able to talk with our customers from the same level as them rather than as a big company. The sheer growth of our communities, the numbers of interactions with the brand and appreciation we have received for our timely responses to queries and updates/previews stands in testimony of this.

Another sizeable chunk of our time goes into gearing our campaigns around our social media communities, whether it be by releasing ads a few days in advance on Youtube/Facebook or putting up an exclusive behind-the-scenes look at our Bikers photo shoot, putting up sketches of our watches before they launch or linking back contests to our communities as done with myEXbox. Working our campaigns this way has allowed us to expose not only ourselves, but our current fans/followers to the other like-minded Fastrack-loving youth out there.

Strategy and Execution

Blogworks – Oct 2007 – Apr 2009

Factsheet

Name of the company: Fastrack

Number of Employees:1001-5000

Category: Brand

Case submitted by: Anshul Nanda, Assistant Brand Manager

Website: www.fastrack.in