Creating a difference – Stayfree's Social Media Campaign

Remember the time when, to start a movement, one had to raise a like-minded community and walk towards their goal - shouting slogans, manually creating posters and basically, spending a lot of energy creating noise around it? With the advent of the Social Media platforms, and even more with the increasing amount of awareness about it, creating a buzz around a campaign has taken a whole new perspective. The beauty of this media lies in the fact that it not only helps in promoting an event, cause or product to the masses on a large scale, but also helps in getting instant feedback and measuring the exact results of the same, thus giving you the opportunity to change your strategy on the fly,  if you needed to.

In a recent case, Stayfree’s “Time to Change” Social Media campaign was not only a ground-breaking concept, but also a terrific example for the brand managers who are yet to experiment with the untamed creativity that the internet has to offer.
So, what is it that the brand do to be considered a case study, you wonder? Well, read on to figure out a few pointers that the brand adhered to:

Building on what exists

The smart thing to do, in case you are a well known brand, is to build on what you already have. The brand identity always plays a huge role when it comes to conceptualizing a campaign. In Stayfree’s case, the brand built upon their tagline, “If it irritates you, change it”. Starting their campaign with a blog, Stayfree encouraged bloggers from all over the country to write about what they wanted to change around them, in the form of a contest. Calling it “Be the Voice of Change”, the brand not only motivated its audience to talk about issues that concerned them, but also gave them the incentive of portraying themselves as people who believed in change.

A well written blog can be a great way to drive traffic to your website, if the blogger has unique insights. Not only are blogs picked up directly by the search engines, the blogs can be noticed by other bloggers or on other major websites. The benefit that the brand received through this attempt is that it reached a myriad of people with similar thoughts through the real time engagement on these blogs and the various forums attached to it.

The perfect amalgamation 

Taking the blogging effort to another level, Stayfree also created a Facebook App called the “Wall of Irritation” which creatively put together the social issues which are a bane to the Indian society. They also added “Picbadge”- one had to choose the cause they wanted to support and add the picbadge to their profile display picture. This not only prompted the users to demonstrate their support, but also added value to the brand.

Integrating offline and online marketing ensures that the brand is not missing out on any potential customer. Though the most vital thing that the brand needs to keep in mind is the fact that both the marketing media should be in sync with each other. This is because matching the look and feel of the brand and quoting the same slogans creates an obvious relationship between offline and online media, thus eliminating the potential for confusion in the minds of the customers.

Playing on the Greed

Online giveaways is one thing that always attracts eyeballs. For the bloggers who wrote for the campaign, Stayfree gave out fourteen prizes, with the grand prize being an Apple ipad 2. This gave the bloggers another reason to associate themselves with the brand, thereby creating an active community, complete with discussions and debates around the motive of the brand. Stayfree also gave out free samples of their latest products to all their Facebook Fans who supported the cause online by using the app developed.

An obvious advantage in introducing such enticing offers is the long term relationship with the potential customer that the brand seems to form. For example, if the customer “Likes” the Facebook page because of a certain contest that is running on it, they are most likely to stick around to receive the many status updates that the brand may send out each week, ensuring that the fan is kept aware of the activities of the brand.

The Master Stroke

Tying the online activity with offline, Stayfree chose The International Women’s Day for the “I Can” half marathon in Mumbai, where the idea was to run a few miles to support their cause and then express the irritation by manually breaking the wall. The marathon inspired hundreds of women to participate, thus helping the brand to spread the word and make a difference.

Also, the brand made an effort to cover the entire event on Facebook, which guaranteed that the many thousands following their activity on that medium were well aware of the offline activity as well.

Conceptualizing a winning integrated campaign for a brand is the latest challenge that most brand owners face today. The key to success although, still is to strengthen your bond with your customer and be there whenever they look out for you. Thus, by keeping their ideology, brand image, and the need of the hour in a one-point perspective, the brand came out triumphant in the big, bad world of marketing.

Image Courtesy DNA India