Case study: Samsung Mobile – Samsung Corby Color Wars

IndiaSocial Case Challenge – Edition 1

Category: Short-term Initiatives

Title-Samsung Corby Color Wars on Twitter

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At Samsung, we see every challenge as an opportunity and believe we are perfectly positioned as one of the world’s recognized leaders in the digital technology industry.

Our commitment to being the world’s best has won us the No.1 global market share for 13 of our products, including semiconductors, TFT-LCDs, monitors and CDMA mobile phones. Looking forward, we’re making historic advances in research and development of our overall semiconductor line, including flash memory and non-memory, custom semiconductors, DRAM and SRAM, as well as producing best-in-class LCDs, mobile phones, digital appliances, and more.

Executive Summary

Samsung Corby Colour Wars was an initiative by Samsung Mobile India during the launch of its touch-phone, Samsung Corby – an affordable and stylish touch phone, the first of its kind, for the Indian youth.

In India, the Corby brief was to connect the dots around three key words – Youth, social networking and colour.

Samsung Corby Colour Wars brought all aspects the brief together.

We chose Twitter as the main platform for connecting stakeholders (supported by Facebook, Slideshare, and blogs as other touch points); chose a viral format to make it attractive to youth and brought out Corby colours at, literally, every little step of the activity.

Though seemingly tactical in nature, the impact of the activity goes beyond just the obvious –the Corby was major launch for Samsung Mobile India, giving it a hold in the youth and touch segments. The buzz generated helped Corby take a position in this attractive segment. Given the importance, the team spent many weeks planning the initiative to ensure it marries back into the big picture for the brand.

This initial connect we established with a variety of stakeholders gave the brand an opportunity to continue the engagement. Over a course of time, we’ve engaged select participants for feedback and insights for other Corby products (extensions) as well.

The Digital Brand Index 2.0, jointly brought out by Edelman and Brandtology, earlier this year (shared in detail below) derives that there has been an exponential (123% ) increase in the number of brand mentions for Samsung during Oct-Dec (6,548 brand mentions) over the previous quarter, taking Samsung to #4 in the Index (against #7 in the previous quarter).

The Samsung Corby Colour Wars on Twitter as part of our Social Media campaign is likely to have contributed to this jump (given that the index also showcases Twitter as the buzziest social channel). Our own post-activity analyses show over 3000 mentions of Samsung Corby, amounting to nearly 6,15,000 exposures.

Importantly, other than winners getting money and Corby phones (both team leads and members), the team ensured that everyone who was touched by the activity feels that like a winner and that the experience is the reward. philosophy around the activity comes alive.

From a total of 3284 tweets with brand mentions in the 12 days, 2853 tweets were from the teams and other fans, leading to an overall exposure of around 6,15,750 exposures at the rate of 0.09 INR per exposure, our expense on the activity being a total of 58,000 INR.

Background

Samsung Mobile is the market leader globally for full-screen touch phones and has been focused on its touch phone strategy to grow its market share in India. In Sept 2009, the company launched Corby S3653, its first mobile handset designed to support the highly connected lifestyle of today.s younger mobile users, complimenting the Company.s existing touch screen strategy “touch for every lifestyle”. The Corby was a crucial launch for the brand given that it was the entry point for the company in the youth segment. The unique differentiators of the product were –

• Tailored to suit the youth of today – Stylish body design and colors; it came with bold color options such as Jamaican Yellow, Cupid Pink, Minimal White, and festival Orange so that users could choose their favorite color. The focus on cutting edge design also extended to the handsets user interface by providing Cartoon UI, a highly stylised graphical menu that altered according to handset functionality.
• Full support for a wide range of social networks that were integrated directly into the handsets user interface.
• Attractively priced at MRP Rs 9,600.

The task at hand was therefore to position Corby on three key planks – colour, social networking & youth. While globally, color was the key thematic for the Corby, in India the focus of the brand was more around social networking. As an important element of the product itself, social media had a significant role since the task was to create a unique experience for the customers on social networking platforms that would create awareness for Corby and build association in the product category.

Approach / Strategy

Objective

• Create buzz and generate conversations around Samsung Corby in the launch phase to help the brand take a strong position in the youth and touch phone segment. Choose a viral format that connects Youth, social networking and colour as three key concepts associated with Samsung Corby.

Concept

• Five active, vocal Indian users were invited to form a Corby Colour team each (based on the 5 colour options for Corby available in the Indian market).
• Corby Colour Wars team leaders approached friends and asked them to follow the team colour. To join / follow a team, all participants had to tweet the team’s hashtag ONCE (vote would be counted only once).
• Top three Corby team leaders, who reached a certain set target of followers over the activity duration of 12 days, could win a Corby. Team members / followers of all 5 teams combined also stood to win a minimum of two. Samsung Corby handsets, selected through a lucky draw.
• The Team Lead with the maximum number of members/ follower in the team would also win Rs. 10,000 in cash.
• Ensure that ‘experience is the reward’ and everyone feels like a winner at end of the activity.

Duration

• Planning: 20th Oct – 30 Oct
• Execution: 02 November – 13 November, 2009
• Evaluation: 14th November – 18th November

Resources allocated

• Five Corby phones for winners
• Rs 10,000 cash prize for the final winner

Budget

• Rs 58,000 (MRP of a Corby phone = Rs 9,600)

Stakeholders

Taking Youth and Social Networking as the foci for the initiative, it was aimed at socially networked, online savvy youth both influencers and potential customers for Corby. The choice of medium for the initiative – Twitter allowed engaging with the stakeholders extensively given its viral nature.

Enthused by the viral nature of the activity, several participants expressed interest in becoming team-leads, there were constant requests for the next edition of the Corby Colour Wars and extensive feedback received from the participants.

This initial connect we established with a variety of stakeholders gave the brand an opportunity to continue the engagement. The contest also helped generate queries from customers around Corby. Over a course of time, we.ve engaged select participants for feedback and insights for other Corby products (extensions) as well.

About the initiative

The internal discussion by the team was to make Corby Colour Wars like Big Boss with twists, turns, and soft controversies to generate talk and excite participants.
Identifying the five Corby team leaders:

One of the important steps in planning for the initiative was to identify the five leaders for the Corby Colour Wars (given the success of the initiative was driven to a great extend by the level of participation by the leaders). Based on certain parameters – young (target group for Corby), highly vocal (to ensure enthusiasm) and having a strong network (to ensure reach), the team identified 12 target team leaders and reached out to them for participation. The following five team leaders were finally selected after securing their approval.

Introducing interesting twists to drive conversations and build engagement:

• Twist in the tale # 1 – proposed team leads allow change of vote once – lots of back-forth-tweets emerged. Team leads didn’t agree.
• Twist in the tale #2 – brought down the number of followers to win, to 200 per team –renewed interest in the game at end of week 1.
• Offered continuous back-end suggestions & support to the teams on how to build supporter base.

Actively engaging to ensure the fun quotient was high:

• Predictions and prophecies – periodically shared the tally of the team leads always preceded by fun videos, songs, riddles.
• Undertaking exit polls to drive interest among participants and push supporters.
• Prophecy in the form of a song lyrics (100 miles by Catie Curtis) for a team leader (Dhempe) trailing by 100 followers.
• Prophecy in the form of a movie video, “Jahan Teri Yeh Nazar Hai”(Film – Kaalia), for team leader on top but accused of spam.
• Prophecy in the form of a movie video, “So Gaya, yeh jahan” (Film -Tezaab), for an inactive team leader (baxiabhishek) trailing in the game, his reaction showcasing the spirited play.

Amplifying the natural twists in the game

• E.g. A team leader wanting to quit – teasing, challenging and successfully getting him to jump back with renewed energy.
• Taking a strong stand against spam and engaging with participants having identified the bots.
• Facilitating the competitive build-up among players in a spirited manner.
• Team leaders luring supporters by offering prizes at own behalf ranging from movie tickets, lockerz invites and even declaration of contributing 10% to charity.
• Building hype for the grand finale.
• Periodic polls to evaluate the participants sentiment.
• Great excitement among the participants.

Touch points and channels used

Brand Samsung Mobile also utilized the thriving Corby community on Facebook as a channel of getting more participants over Twitter by sharing periodic updates, content.

The real highlight were the touch points and channels set-up by the participants that helped build greater visibility -

• Blog posts by team leaders & supporters.
• Facebook event page set up by leaders & supporters.
• Give-aways offered by team leaders on their own behalf to win supporters!
• Tracking mechanisms being put in place by the participants themselves.
• Tracking tools /mechanisms set up by team leaders/their supporters to track the Corby Colour Wars, a great example of the level of engagement that the activity was able to build with its participants.
• Facebook event pages set up by team leaders to garner support for their respective teams.
• Blogs by contestants and participants around the Samsung Corby Colour Wars.

Impact – Outcome

As elaborated earlier, Samsung Corby Colour Wars did successfully bring all aspects the brief together. In doing so, not only did we generate huge buzz across the platform and other Samsung Mobile touch points for Samsung Corby, but also seeded Samsung Corby as the youth phone in the touch-screen segment.

• Exposure – the total exposures received from the activity were 6,15,750*(* Exposures – sum of all the tweets mentioning the relevant keyword, each multiplied by the number of followers of the person tweeting)
• Engagement with stakeholders – From a total of 3284 tweets with Samsung Corby mentions, 87% came from the participants.
• Three of Samsung Corby Colour Wars hashtags among the top 25 most trending topics in India*
• On Slideshare.com, the Corby Colour Wars Terms & Conditions document came into the “Hot on Twitter section” 8 times in the duration of the contest: The findings of Digital Brand Index, an independent survey conducted by Edelman in association with Brandtology for the period Oct-Dec 2009 validated the impact of the Samsung Corby Colour Wars on Samsung’s overall presence online.
• Samsung ranked #4 among the top 10 buzziest brands in India, jumping 3 positions from the previous quarter July-Sept.
• 123% increase in the no. of brand mentions for Samsung during Oct-Dec (6,548 brand mentions). It is noteworthy that the number of tweets (with Samsung Corby.s mention) were 2853 contributing 56% of overall brand mentions.
• Twitter was the top channel of buzz with 76 per cent of all mentions (118,150) found on the micro-blog platform.
• The activity was able to connect the brief with strategic objective of positioning the Samsung Corby as a youth touch phone.

Learnings

The activity re-affirmed for us that if the concept seeded is strong and resonates with the brand rationale as well as the target audience, it will enjoy a natural success.

While we got tremendous hype for the activity, we never made becoming a @Samsung_Mobiles fan mandatory for participation – the idea was use this buzz-oriented activity as an opportunity for engagement – one out of every two people we interacted followed us of their own accord.

Some of the challenges we faced due to the heavy volumes of conversation were:

1. Tracking – An elaborate process of filtering involved in tracking the activity to ensure accuracy of results:

• Multiple tweets from one account for one team were counted only as one submission. Therefore duplications had to be removed within and between teams.
• If a Twitter handle tweeted for more than one team, the team they tweeted for first was taken as their valid entry.
• People outside of India who tweeted a particular team’s hashtag were included in the count for purposes of selecting the winning team, but not in the draw for prizes (for themselves).
• Brand / Company Twitter accounts were not to be included in the count.
• Threat of spam – there were bots identified during the contest that were getting participants to share the team hash-tag. There was a strong stand taken against the same with team leaders being informed of a potential disqualification were they found to be involved o Bots were eliminated from the team members lists (accounts with 0 followers and only one tweet with one of the contest’s hash-tags). People who joined teams on manipulated by bots were included in the draw, but kept out of the count for selecting the winning team.

What Next

Samsung has created Social Footprints and the engagement is growing. The Social Media journey for Samsung Mobiles has been received with great acceptance and initial excitement, and we’ll be building on that in the future.

Reasoning

Our focus was clearly on strategy

• Even though the Samsung Corby Colour Wars may appear only a tactical initiative, it marries back into our bigger strategic objective vis-à-vis both Samsung Corby and the Touch segment.

Extremely high conversation factor

• From a total of 3284 tweets with brand mentions in the 12 days, 2853 tweets were from the teams and other fans, leading to an overall exposure of around 6,15,750 exposures at the rate of 0.09 INR per exposure (given our budget for the activity).

Credits Strategy

Blogworks – strategic social media solutions

Credits Execution

Blogworks, Starcom (Buying)

Testimonials

At the outset, thanks much for an opportunity to get involved in the fun. Fun, yes, coz for me the idea of engagement was fun. And the way the tweets from @Samsung_Mobiles motivated/teased/commented, everything came out as an entertaining and involving (very important) initiative rather than a hard lined marketing effort. Kudos to the team (and the individual managing the Twitter account)! It clearly showed the hard work put into the effort. – Abhishek Baxi, Team Leader, Corby Colour Wars

SamsungCorbyWars was fun! No matter who wins but it was a feeling which I could compare with the tug-of-war we did in high school. – Praval Singh, Team Leader, Corby Colour Wars

Shimauli the Chief Buzz Officer of Buzallong highlights the Social Media Marketing campaign by Samsung Corby” in a Blog post by Sorav Jain that compiles the Social Media Highlights of 2009

Factsheet

Name of the company: Samsung Electronics Private Limited

Number of Employees:5000+

Category: Brand

Case submitted by: Ankur Sharma, Digital Manager

Website: www.in.samsungmobile.com

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