Social Media Campaign: Wills Lifestyle Leads The Way In The Fashion Industry Using RFID Technology in Social Media

Introduction

I truly believe that a social media campaign should speak for itself. But it didn’t really speak to me considering this was aimed at the fashion conscious. From the conscious efforts I made to understand the campaign I gathered that the Wills Fashion Real Time campaign was set in motion to coincide with the Wills Lifestyle India Fashion Week AW’14 scheduled from March 26-30, 2014 in New Delhi.

Objective

Engaging with those attending the WIFW to get amplified visibility online, via the visitor’s social media presence.

Execution

Though it isn’t the first time this has been adopted in India, it is the first of its kind to be executed in the fashion industry. All visitors are provided a complimentary RFID wristband through which they can automatically share the event in real-time with family and friends on Facebook and Twitter.

RFID also allows automatic tagging of all the photos taken at the WIFW. All the events of the fashion show are actively present on five digital and social marketing platforms— Facebook, Twitter, Google Hangouts, RFID zones on location, and their website. The execution on these platforms seems quite seamless.

In addition to all platforms, sharing one common hash tag—#WIFW, we have also integrated all their campaigns to link into each other, which is good for maintaining uniformity.

Positives

This is a great idea for an event that is highly attended by the fashion conscious, the press and celebrities, to take the fashion event to online enthusiasts who aren’t able to attend the shows.

The company boasts of a dedicated team to study posts make using the RFID tags, the number of people who viewed them, engaged with them and interacted on their Facebook page, twitter account and website.

The company plans to measure the ROI in terms of PR value rather than using the advertising perspective, since all the content would be created by individuals attending the event and not the brand itself.

Apart from the introduction of RFID tags to increase the volume of the campaign for WIFW, the brand has included Neha Dhupia to be their twitter face. With over 90k followers, this is a good choice and serves the purpose, since she is also considered as someone with a good sense of fashion herself.

The twitter contest on #WillsRockTheRamp was quite a hit with the twitter followers. Four lucky fashionistas got a chance to walk the ramp to the Wills Lifestyle India Fashion Week Autumn Winter 2014 in Delhi. The campaign that concluded on March 23, 2014 witnessed an overwhelming response from across the country.

The winners were selected basis their tweet on why they would want to walk the ramp at the Wills Lifestyle India Fashion Week with a picture in their most stylish avatar! A connect with the target audience always ensure additional fan following and therefore additional visibility.

Areas for improvement

Frankly if I were them, I would develop an Android and iOS app which allows people to log on to several multiple platforms and share their presence at the same time. But I guess from the kind of visitors that are at the WIFW, they would find the RFID way cooler to wear and use – looks and feels like cutting edge technology.

Since the event has so many visual elements, they could have also integrated Instagram and Pinterest into the fray, either by including them in the RFID shares or as separate campaigns. #WillsRockTheRamp and other event selfie contests could have translated on these more visual platforms – garnering more visibility and even probably some trending hashtags across platforms.

The company says that the fashion shows were streamed live across Wills Lifestyle Stores, there isn’t a dedicated Youtube channel especially for WIFW AW2014 from the company for the fashion conscious viewer online.

Several videos are uploaded by news agencies but a branded Youtube channel would have been ideal. As always a more structured presence on Youtube could garners WIFW additional eyeballs, and brand visibility. The importance of the video medium comes a close second to still photographs and this area needs to be explored probably for WIFW 2015

Conclusion

As mentioned earlier the concept of involving visitors to participate in promoting the event is always a great idea, especially for a fashion event which has high visual content. Things could have been taken a notch higher by using visual based platforms like Instagram, Pinterest and Youtube a lot more in a more structured fashion.