Social Media Campaign Review: Samsonite's Unflattering Globetrotter Contest

Introduction:

Samsonite, the brand that is synonymous with toughness comes up with an app that is (unfortunately) living up to its reputation of being ‘tough'. It would be a fun twist if the pun was really intended by the brand but that’s highly unlikely. Coming from the folks who gave us the 'Step out with Harsha' campaign... we expected something interesting, but all we got was a straightforward GK quiz.

Objective:

Frankly, I'm as clueless as you on this one. There is no eminent objective of this contest. No underlying message, no product promotion. During the contest they only ask you to travel more and be a globetrotter. I'm presuming they would want people to do that while carrying their Samsonite bags.

This app was probably made just to engage their audience. And what will you win for playing this contest? No prizes for guessing! No really, there’s a mention of ‘exciting prizes to be won’, but what they are remains a mystery. Unless your idea of an exciting prize is leading the 'charts'...

(led by the mysterious 'Don') I scrolled through the app multiple times. Even went through their facebook page, right down to the first teaser. But to no mention of the prizes.

Execution:

In order to get to the app you need to like the page first; a common practice. Once you do that and click on the app, it redirects you to a mini-site made especially for this contest.

Over there in order to begin the game, you need to login from one of your social profiles… which seems like an act of annoyance for one is taken outside of their social profile to log back in and give permission through the same profile (unless you choose twitter).

I'm pretty sure most people ignore the Terms & Conditions tab. But for some reason I had the urge to locate it and go through it. And to my surprise, I found a typo-error, which looked more like a copy & pasting error. But it appears to be an honest copy-pasting error, so I won’t be putting up a screen-grab.

Once you get in, the layout is pretty neat-looking. Content-wise, let's say that's open to speculation. As the name would suggest, the background of the game is that it would ask questions based on interesting facts on places around the world.

But that's the only fun part of the game. The idea. As far as the execution is concerned I found the questions too difficult for a layman or even an above-average intelligent human looking to chill out on his social profile. What’s the point of a trivia contest where you never find out the answers?

Positives:

With the time-limit on, you feel a bit of a rush to give the right answers. That adds a bit of excitement to the proceedings.

Other than that I really struggled to find what could be the major pull of this contest.

Scope for improvement:

You'll need a microscope to spot its microscopic scope. Okay, jokes apart, the app isn't user-friendly. It makes you switch windows, re-login and re-authorize till it gets on your nerves, not to forget the posts on your timeline after every level.

They could’ve enhanced the experience by telling us which answer we got right and wrong. I don’t see people coming back to play this contest again.They could’ve made it more competitive by adding a ‘challenge friend’ feature.

As on 23rd February, 2014 this game was played 189 times, out of which I probably played it like, 8 times. (Yes, this is my highest score in 8 attempts.) And out of 245k followers on facebook and over3k followers on twitter, these are abysmal figures.

The teasers meant for buzz-generation, seemed amateurish.

 And on twitter the promotion just gets slightly irrelevant.

Conclusion:

I couldn't help but go through the other content on their page during this review. I noticed that some of the posts they’ve put up have really good design cues on them

But as far as creativity and user-connection are concerned, the brand is lagging behind big-time. They quite regularly put up interesting visual content, but fail to engage audiences. And even with the Samsonite Globetrotter contest, they’ve not managed to find a solution for this problem.