Share a little about your organisation/ brand

Maruti Suzuki Ritz is one of the hatchback cars in India. It is targeted to young audiences who prefer a stylish car with excellent performance and sporty design. There were around 100,000 cars sold in the segment in October 2010.

Executive Summary
The Live the Moment social media campaign played a role in a full 360 degree communication across TV, Radio, On-ground and Digital. With its social tools, it successfully managed to amplify the Live the Moment philosophy reaching users across the digital space. This was the promotion in which a car was actually given away as a prize through a social contest. A target of 25000 moments seemed challenging to start with but almost double the number was achieved.

Nature of the programme/ activity/ campaign

Business to Consumer

Duration of the said programme/ activity/ campaign. Start date end date
January 2011 March 2011

Background
Maruti Suzuki Ritz sold over 100,000 cars in just over a year. To celebrate the achievement Maruti Suzuki Ritz wanted to create excitement and pride amongst Ritz owners as well as reach out to potential customers.

Objectives
The objective of the program was to use social media to let people share the moments of their lives. With the Ritz as the backdrop this was intended to get Ritz owners together on a social platform and build pride and excitement among the Ritz owners and their friends and family. The target was to collect 25,000 moments in 2 months.

Strategy and Planning

We launched a social media program to help users do precisely that. This was to complement the mass media campaign around Live the Moment and build further buzz around the brand.

Stakeholders
The initiative was led by the marketing team at Maruti Suzuki Limited and sought to engage the existing Ritz owners to play up the feeling of pride in owning the car as well as their friends and family who could potentially be future customers.

Choice of channel/s
The strategy was implemented across all social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, auto blogs and forums and culminated in a microsite which helped collate all the moments from participants and viral them out to their friends and family.

Implementation
The Live the Moment microsite allowed users to login to the site using their Facebook or Twitter account or by registering on the site. They could then submit any moment in their lives that was memorable to them. The best moments had a chance to win awesome prizes including a Maruti Suzuki Ritz car. To win a person had to collect a minimum number of votes before the jury would look at his entry. The website allowed the user to invite his friends on Facebook and Twitter to vote for him as well as a feature by which he could invite all his email contacts as well. Using APIs, a contact importer was built through which the user could fetch all the contacts form email. All moments were shown as pixels on the moments wall, to view any moment one had to simply click at the pixel. The site featured a search by which one could locate moments using their moment number or the name of the participant. There was even a live stream built-in where the moments were displayed as soon as they were entered. To create a full 360 degree impact, on ground promotion as also undertaken at Caf Coffee Days and PVR Cinemas across the country. Promoters collected moments from users offline and the website provided them an import facility to add these moments to the Moments Wall.

Impact and Outcome

Maruti Suzuki Ritz generated thousands of moments and established the brand objectives.

Close to 50,000 unique entries submitted by users More than 2.2 million users visited the microsite More than 2 lakh votes received by entrants More than 1 lakh fans added on the Maruti Suzuki Ritz Facebook page.

Learnings
The thing that worked for the campaign was the fact that people wanted to share their experiences specially with the car they love. While the program allowed people to enter any Moment, most of the entries revolved around what people did with the Ritz. By building social viral ability it was possible to reach a large audience and get participation from a large section of society with very small media budgets.

What next
Second social media campaign along the same lines has already been launched.

Testimonials
N/A

External Agencies: Any partners who helped you with strategy

The strategic planning and implementation of the campaign was handled by our Digital Media Agency Interface Business Solutions (I) Pvt. Ltd.

KOLKATA: Automakers like General Motors, Maruti, Hyundai Motor to Tata Motors are trying to drive sales by exploring diverse offbeat marketing initiatives in a fiercely competitive turf. From teaming with retailers to hosting rock concerts to using the digital media or even social networking sites, these companies are embracing myriad out-of-the-box strategies to promote their machines. While General Motors is teaming up with retail biggies or organising rock concerts to market its products, Maruti, Hyundai Motor and Tata Motors are using the digital media and social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter to shore up sales. These initiatives, which are largely targeted at people under 35 years, are yielding decent volumes. General Motors, for instance, has teamed up with Levis to create a buzz around its newly launched, Chevy Beat. A few Chevy Beats will be on display at Levis retail outlets so that customers can get a feel of the car. Rock concerts are also a decent marketing tool for promoting a car. Weve used this tool once and may do so in future, said Mr P. Balendran, VP, GM India. Incidentally, GM has recently undertaken pub activities to promote music in select cities which eventually culminated into a rock concert featuring Bollywood actor Saif Ali Khan and the countrys premier rock band Parikrama in Bangalore. This was a huge draw, he added. A closer look at GMs sales figures confirms that these initiatives have been well received by customers. If you look at first quarter 2010 figures, we have sold 31,862 units registering a growth of 130% over the corresponding period of previous year, said the GM India VP. Tata

Motors and GM have used social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and Orkut to gauge product popularity. Tata Nano is very active on Facebook and Twitter. Weve also used a virtual marketing tool for promoting the Tata Indigo Manza and Indica Vista range. The online reputation management through social networking sites is the immediate barometer of effectiveness in the communications strategy. We get real-time reactions from the target group which gives us an understanding of an emerging trend. This also influences customer decisions which eventually gets translated into sales, said a Tata Motors spokesman. Maruti Suzuki and Hyundai Motor are using digital media in a big way to market their products. Hyundai started its digital initiative in 2009. Arvind Saxena, director (marketing & sales) at Hyundai Motor India, said the company plans to launch an i20 fan club for i20 customers. This is being kicked off to bond our existing i20 customers with Hyundai and also make them loyal to Hyundai so that when they want to upgrade they consider Hyundai as their first choice. We are also looking at rural marketing to ge closer to tier 2 and tier 3 town customers to expand our reach and sales, said Mr Saxena. Maruti will leverage new age platforms like Affle SMS 2.0, mobile marketing through SMS, IVRS (interactive voice response system), digital video screens like OOH, LiveMedia, SocialMedia along with a consistent presence on key search platforms like Google, Yahoo! et all. We are pleased with the response. For instance, in the A-Star launch on SMS 2.0, we had a CTR (click through response) of 5% and in a recent campaign, which we ran for Eeco and K-series engine centred around the IPL on mobile platform, we had a huge CTR of 11%, said Shashank Srivastava, chief general manager (marketing ) at Maruti Suzuki. The new marketing initiatives have been successful in the metros and in northern and western regions of the country. Brand strategist Harish Bijoor feels the auto marketing in the country is on morph mode in India. Auto companies do realise that driving footfalls into their dealerships is a difficult exercise. There are just too many options and variants around. A great way to go-to-market is to piggy back on other brands, other retail formats and walk-ins that result into them. This is especially relevant to auto marketers when their offerings are packing visual appetite appeal. Such cross-branding , cross-display and cross-advertising work will deliver for sure. There is plenty of innovation possibility here, and we are just witnessing the tip of the iceberg of off-shoot marketing and branding work in this space, added Mr Bijoor.