Tata Nano Hit 143 Million Impressions with #NanoBiddingWar Campaign

Objective

On 13^th January, 2014, Tata Motors Ltd. launched Nano Twist, the smart city car targeting the growing customer base of trendy, young urbanites. The new Nano Twist allows hassle–free and relaxed driving in city traffic with the new first-in-class Electric Power Assisted Steering (EPAS) system, designed for easy manoeuvering in tight driving and parking situations. A new signature Damson Purple colour, with chrome accents, new sporty interiors with new fabrics and stunning in-car features,  four-speaker AmphiStream™ music system with Bluetooth™, USB and auxiliary connectivity make the Nano Twist an exciting car to drive.

Tata Nano associates itself with smartness, creative and young, attributes that relate well with its youthful target audience. Using digital platforms is vital for the brand because it is able to engage with its core fan base which leads to immense recall value and purchase consideration. Hence it has been the brand’s endeavour to continuously engage with the target audience in a fun, unique and exciting way that is social by design.

Communication objective

• Increase Engagement with 18-24 yr olds: Measured as conversations and interactions on social media.
• Break away from the National Elections and the IPL to become the No. 1 topic of conversation online to increase the brand’s appeal.

Business Objective

• Increase brand preference for the new Tata Nano Twist while educating users about its features.
• Increase the salience of the upgraded steering system so as to remove apprehensions about safety and ease of driving
• Convey the availability of a wide range of colors, including the newly introduced Damson Purple

Strategic Idea

• Tata Nano’s target audience has a set of favourite influencers on Twitter who they fiercely support. The brand decided to take these influencers and pit them against each other and ask everybody on Twitter to bid for them via tweets.

• The ‘Nano Bidding War’ was born. The terms 'war’ and ‘bidding’ were strategically chosen due to the political and sports environment (IPL 2014 and National Elections 2014) that was sweeping the country at that time.

Strategic Execution

• Tata Nano picked 6 of twitter’s top influencers that suited its brand personality and had a significant influence amongst its target group.

• The influencers were pitted against each other in an attempt to win the Nano Twist car, however the only way they could win it was to garner support from their followers. Their followers had to bid for them through tweets and spread the word to support them.

• Their influence was on auction.

• The campaign ran for only three days where the brand engaged with the target audience, tremendously, via the 6 influencers. Each influencer was assigned an individual hash tag named after the 6 color variants of the car. The common hash tag to be used was #NanoBiddingWar.

• Once the campaign was in place, all the brand had to do was amplify the individual activities and conversations that the influencers were engaging in. Besides that, it posted scores regularly on who stood where as far as the number of ‘bids’ were concerned.

• All 6 influencers kept tweeting for three days to the target audience in an attempt to win the car. Their efforts were vigorous and evident, increasing the brand’s appeal.

• In the process, the top supporters would get miniature versions of the car that were signed by Bollywood movie stars. This provided a great boost and an incentive to all the users on Twitter.

Results

• The campaign’s reach was entirely organic with 143 million impressions, 240,000 mentions and over 13,000 retweets.
• #NanoBiddingWar was trending in India for the entire duration of the campaign and it also trended worldwide for 2 days.

• The #NanoBiddingWar as a trend beat all political and sports related trends including the Indian Prime Ministerial candidates standing for elections.
• On a budget of just INR 0.4 million the campaign generated earned media worth INR 9.5 million, the equivalent of 14.2% of Tata Nano’s annual digital marketing budget.