How Wild Stone Engaged its Fans with Valentines Day Rule Book

Wild Stone, the famous deodorant brand from Mcnroe, has always been quite popular for the sensual string in its communication. To leverage on the buzz around Valentine’s Day, and get people talking about the brand, they had come up with a contest for the occasion. Quite contrary to the trend, the contest, called Valentine’s Day Rule Book, called fans and followers to create new rules this Valentine’s Day, against the typical celebrations that happen all the while, to mark this day. In around 30 hours, for which the contest was LIVE on twitter, from 13^th to 14^th of February, it caused a 30% increase in the number of followers for the brand and created 21+ million impressions.

Objective

The aim of the contest was to create engagement on the brand’s profile over twitter and make the brand go fresh in people’s memories, all of it as a prequel to the launch of another fragrance called RED. The design of the microsite that was a part the contest, also spoke volumes of RED.

Execution

The concept of the contest was simple, where people were asked to create new rules, to beat the typical celebrations that surround the Valentine’s Day, the tagline rightly being, “Band Karo Ye Pyar Ka Atyachar”.

The tweeps could either tweet in their rules with the hashtag #VDayRuleBook, or put it right away in the tweet box at the microsite. All the tweets were put up on the site for everyone to see, while a chosen few were put up in the V-day rule book.

The followers contributing with the most witty and original of tweets were chosen as the winners, to be gifted with 9 iPods and an iPad mini. The campaign commenced on Valentine ’s Day eve and went all through the next day.

Positives

The conduct of the campaign was its strength that made even a simple idea really interesting and made people to stick on for more than a day.

To clarify and explain the contest, and what is to be tweeted, instead of talking, brand took aid of examples. They began the contest, with setting up the context, by sharing a lot of new rules from their end. This made it succinct for the participants as to what the brand is looking at, and subsequently Wild Stone succeeded in generating some interesting user generated content.
Also, the microsite designed to showcase and record all the tweets was quite interesting and very well captured the essence of red, as well as mocked the typical elements of Valentine Day celebrations.
Further, with originality being the driving point of the contest, sustenance was a challenge which was very well taken care of by the conducting team, who kept on encouraging participants and also gave them customized templates, with their tweets put up, to enjoy that minute of fame. All this got the hashtag trending for a major part of the contest, across the nation.

Scope for improvement

Since Valentine’s Day is a busy day, apart from having an idea that’s different, some buzz creation was also required to make people aware of the contest and wait for it too. This was missing here, since they informed about the contest on their Facebook page, only earlier in the day.

Conclusion

The contest was a good change from the regular stuff that happens on Valentine’s Day every year, and worked well for the brand’s new variant’s launch.

Reportedly, around 7,500 original tweets were generated for the contest, and roughly 50,000 got re-tweeted.