Global brands connecting virtually with consumers

I’d like to turn back a bit and refer to the Beijing Olympics as a wonderful example of how brands use the power of social media to reach vast audiences and increase brand exposure.

It is to a brand’s interest to piggyback on a mega global event as the Olympics to create the ideal buzz and word-of-mouth effect all brands aspire without the need to invest exceeding amounts of time or effort.

Let’s give tribute to those advertisers who stood out from the rest and knew exactly how to grasp this opportunity by diffusing their creative branding campaigns through social weblogs and social networking sites.

Let’s take for instance, Coca-Cola whose campaign ‘Design the World a Coke’ invited Coke lovers to create, share and connect their very own bottle designs of the famous product package through this website. Consumers were able to enjoy this campaign up until last week where they were virtually boundless to customize Coke bottles, submit them to the site and connect with other members for the possibility to mashup designs with somebody else’s or just scope additional bottle designs from around the world.

McDonald’s and ‘The Lost Ring’ campaign also created tons of buzz on the internet due to their reality game whose quest was for its players to recover the lost mystery of the Olympics. In the end, the game generated a Google mashup of Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube posts, plus players from all over the world connected on forums, wikis, and blogs where they shared photos, clues, theories, translations, and videos.

Next on the list is Panasonic, whose photo contest allowed for consumers to upload Olympic-related pictures and also vote on other contestant’s pictures on the website.

Pepsi didn’t stay behind on this massive social effort during the Olympics. Its website featured the ‘Everyone can be on the can for China’ activity where consumers we able to upload pictures, poems, articles about their ‘love’ for China on local websites like 5a.com, Xiaonei.com, Taoao.com, amongst other.

Whether it is defined as viral marketing, media buzz, word of mouth, what’s clear is that brands are grasping massive events such as the past Olympics to boost brand salience and loyalty as they give consumers the greatest power of all: brand interaction- and the sense of belonging.

In result, social marketing brings greater exposure to brands which leads to higher brand recall, which leads to greater possibility of purchase.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 7th, 2008 at 6:21 pm and is filed under Social Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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