Social Media Case Study: How Sahara Star Promotes it's Festive Activity Without Any Giveaways or Contests

Brand Name

Sahara Star, the flagship hotel of Sahara India Pariwar.

Agency Name

Brandlogist

The Challenge

Their challenge was to involve people in the spirit of Christmas without focusing on giveaways or contests which most brand pages have become synonymous with during the festive season. At the same time they wanted to connect the festive activity at Sahara star, making sure the user stays engaged all this while.

The Insights and the Idea:

The concept of Santa Claus has always been linked with being NAUGHTY OR NICE- “So have you been Naughty or Nice this year” with the internet filled with videos,cards,blogs& even memes on it.But what was missing seemed to be a tool which could fairly evaluate whether one was ‘Nice or Naughty this year’.

So they decided to bring it to life taking the help of a user’s Facebook newsfeed, their own ‘Naughty-Nice dictionary’ &an amazing application powered by Santa’s elves.

Execution

They designed an app which analyses a person’s news-feed over the year & matches the words a user has used across all his posts in the year to their dictionary of good & bad words.

The idea being that at the end of the day they are typically what they think and share.The app adds points for good words used and deducts them for bad words.

An animated screen that depicts good words being filtered from your newsfeed and dropping into the bag ,powered via santas helpers.

In the end Santa gives you a personal message with your score, telling you whether you were nice, good or naughty. They made sure that the app was quick enough to scan through a year’s news-feed with speed, enough not to let a user get bored.

Extending the campaign on Twitter

On twitter they implemented the same concept in a mechanism more suited to the platform . They invited participants to tweet a good deed they did in 2013, and Santa would present them with invites for the grand Christmas Feast at Sahara Star. The one with best tweets (most interesting) with #StarChristmas was announced as the winner.

Something tangible for the audience to take away:

Besides this, the application took the whole experience a step further by providing the users with something tangible, a personalized certificate from Santa himself! With the click of a button one could download it as a cover picture or share with friends as a picture.

Thus, through a user's profile the brand lived on and kept spreading even after the one-time experience.

A participant who put up their certificate from Santa as twitter header

A participant using the certificate as a cover pic

This did wonders, as people started putting up new cover pics with delight.

The Results:

• The Application had a total reach of 2,35,168 generating more than 15,000 published stories on facebook timelines during the course of the campaign. (One week)

A personalized message from Santa that appears in a participant’s newsfeed

•  On twitter the campaign managed to get more than 540 mentions, within a span of 2 days. It also registered a maximum reach of 7,300 at a point.
•  Above all, they received heartwarming responses like this one :